On- and offboarding team members

Having clear onboarding processes ensure that group members are off to a good start in the lab. Offboarding processes ensure that everything is taken care off when lab members leave for a future step. The on- and offboarding checklists below provide some pointers on how to set up the on/off boarding checklists of your group, that can be a part of your Team Manual.

Onboarding Checklist¶

• Review relevant documents provided in a main resource such the Team Manual. Information may include:
  • List of team members, their roles and projects
  • Institutional policies as well as participation guidelines of the research group, institute, funder or country.
  • Code of Conduct and reporting mechanism.
  • Point of contacts for IT, HR, data protection, legal, communications or other teams who you might need to connect for different purposes.
  • Authorship and contributorship guidelines.
• Check whether the team has a Data Management Plan or whether you need to set this up yourself
  • Review your storage options and access to software and tools such as Electronic Lab Notebooks.
  • Especially when working with sensitive data it is important to familiarise new team members with the recommended practices.
  • Consider options for long term storage and data sharing
• Set up documentation for your workflows (lab notes, project repository, README files) based on the recommendations provided by your team (ideally outlined in the Team Manual or Data management Plan).
  • Check whether there are existing templates that can be reused.
• Ensure access to all needed facilities (lab pass, keys, folders, storage locations).
• If any of this information is not clear, provide feedback on the onboarding process to improve it for future lab members!

Offboarding Checklist¶

• Research objects are publicly shared via an appropriate data repository
• Research objects that are not publicly shared are stored internally and responsibilities have been transferred, including access to documentation (READme files or labnotes) and ethical approvals.
• Research objects that are dispensable are cleaned up to avoid unnecessary storage clutter and confusion.
• The content of the Data Management Plan has been transferred, so that data can be found and reused within the research team.
• It is clear which physical reagents are relevant and where they are stored - irrelevant reagents have been cleaned up.
• Contact details for the future are provided - other personal data is removed
• Have an exit meeting with supervisor/department head or HR.
• Return any borrowed property (keys, passes, equipment).
• The leaving lab member can be provided with a statement that describes their contributions during their employment, instead of having to rely on future reference letters.

Examples¶

• example offboarding checklist

More information¶

• Harvard on and offboarding lists
• Research Data
  • Research Data Exit Checklist
  • Project Close-Out Checklist for Research Data
  • Data Departure checklist
• It takes a laboratory to avoid data loss