Getting a new person working on their first morning takes a lot more than an email address, and most of it can be done before they walk in if we know about it early.
Between 19 August 2025 and 18 August 2026, 14 businesses sent us 20 new starter requests. With follow-up replies, that’s 40 tickets and 15.6 hours of work. The count is deliberately narrow, catching only titles with clear new starter wording, so the real number is higher.
What a new starter request involves
The requests in the year covered a new Microsoft 365 account and licence, an email address that fits the business’s naming pattern, and a computer to set up, including whether the person should have administrator rights on it. Depending on the role, shared mailboxes, shared files, business software and phones come into it too.
The larger ones took two hours or more. One request for several new staff at a travel agency took two and a quarter hours.
Where the time goes
The hours rarely go on creating the account. That takes minutes. They go on the questions around it.
Which licence? Which shared mailboxes should they see? Do they need the accounts software, and does that need its own login from the vendor? Is there a laptop, and if not, has one been ordered? One laptop and account setup in the year ran to five follow-up emails over nine days.
Two requests at one business arrived marked urgent in the subject line. Urgent is workable when someone is starting tomorrow and everything is already in the building. It gets hard when a laptop still has to be ordered, because nobody can hurry a courier.
What goes wrong when it’s the day before
When the request lands the afternoon before a start, a few things tend to slip:
- The laptop isn’t there, so the person starts on a spare or a borrowed machine.
- The licence has to be bought first, which can hold up the account.
- Nobody has said which shared mailboxes or folders they need, so they get the basics and the rest follows over the first week.
- Multi-factor sign-in needs the person’s phone, so it can’t be finished until they arrive.
None of that is a disaster. It just means the first morning is spent waiting instead of working.
A checklist to send us
Send this as soon as the start date is set. The more notice we have, the more is done before they arrive.
- Full name and preferred email address.
- Start date and start time.
- Role and who they report to.
- Device: a new laptop or desktop, or an existing one (tell us whose).
- Shared mailboxes, shared folders and team sites they need.
- Business software they’ll use, and whether a vendor account is needed.
- Phone: an extension, the mobile app, or neither.
- Printers they’ll use.
- Anything they should not have access to.
Put that list into your own onboarding steps so it goes out with the offer letter, not the day before.
If you’d like us to look over your onboarding steps, get in touch.