Onboarding, planned — not left to chance
A great new hire can still drift in their first three months. Often it isn’t the person — a first quarter with no plan is a common culprit: access that wasn’t ready, expectations nobody wrote down, and a first review that arrives too late to fix anything.
The 30-60-90 Onboarding Plan Workbook turns onboarding into a plan you and every new starter can see. It’s a manager’s tool — written for the person doing the onboarding, not for the new hire to fill in about themselves — and it works in Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice, delivered as one .xlsx plus a one-click native Google Sheets copy.
What is a 30-60-90 plan?
A 30-60-90 plan splits a new hire’s first three months into three phases, each with a clear focus:
- Days 1–30 — Learn & set up. Accounts and equipment ready, the team and key stakeholders met, and a written, agreed picture of what the role is for.
- Days 31–60 — Contribute & connect. Own a first real project, get fluent in the tools, build the working relationships the role depends on, and exchange honest feedback both ways.
- Days 61–90 — Own & grow. Delivering at the level the role needs, owning an area without close supervision, a development plan, and a 90-day review that confirms fit.
Every milestone gets an owner, a definition of done, and a target date — so onboarding is a plan you can check, not a folder of tasks that quietly stalls.
A working system, not a static checklist
The workbook is six connected tabs:
- Onboarding Tracker — the board for all your new hires at once. People down the side, fifteen headline milestones across the top grouped by phase, a status symbol in every cell from a dropdown. Each row shows a completion percentage; the rows below count progress per milestone.
- Dashboard — the progress view. One row per hire: which phase they’re in, how far through each phase, an overall percentage, and an On track / Behind / Blocked flag worked out from their start date. Because it uses today’s date, it updates itself.
- 30-60-90 Plan — the detailed plan for one hire, pre-filled with a worked example. Duplicate the tab for each new starter.
- Milestone Library — ready-made onboarding milestones by phase and category, each with a definition of done and a suggested owner. Never start from a blank page.
- Check-ins Log — a dated record of every week-1, 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-in: what’s going well, what’s blocked, and what you agreed.
- Read Me — how the tabs fit together, and the input-vs-calculated guidance so nothing gets overwritten by accident.
Plus four PDF guides: a Start Here guide, the 30-60-90 method and how to write a milestone worth tracking, a guide to running check-ins and reading the dashboard, and printable plan, check-in, and first-week-checklist sheets.
Own the file — don’t rent a platform
A blank spreadsheet is free, but you build the whole thing yourself. A per-seat onboarding or HR platform is overkill for a small team — and a monthly fee that holds your people data behind a login. This sits in between: a structured plan you own outright, edited offline, reused for the next hire, and shared however your policy allows. Buy once; it’s yours.
Try the free version first
New to 30-60-90 planning? The free single-hire 30-60-90 starter plan lets you try the method on one new starter before you roll it out to the whole team — no email, no signup.
Onboarding starts where hiring ends
Track the pipeline that feeds it with the Job Applicant Tracker — take a role from applicants all the way to the new hire you onboard here.
Honest about what it is
The example hires, plans, and progress are fictional and illustrative — you overwrite them with your own. This is a planning and record-keeping template, not HR, legal, or employment advice, and not a performance-management or probation instrument on its own. What a role requires, how you assess it, and any employment decision that follows are yours to make under your own policies and local law. Keep your team’s data the way your own privacy policy requires.
