If you’re tired of chasing down paperwork, sending the same welcome emails, or wrangling spreadsheets every time someone joins your company or signs up as a customer—you’re not alone. Onboarding is usually a mess of manual steps, and it’s a time suck for everyone involved.
This guide is for ops folks, managers, or anyone who’s tasked with onboarding new hires or customers and wants to actually automate the busywork. We’ll walk through how to use Dock to set up onboarding workflows that save your team hours (without making things so complicated no one wants to use them).
What is Dock (and Why Use It for Onboarding)?
Dock is a client onboarding and collaboration platform. You can use it to build out onboarding guides, centralize resources, assign tasks, and track progress—all in one place. It’s built for both employee onboarding and customer onboarding (think: SaaS, agencies, B2B services).
Why bother with Dock instead of just using Google Docs or Notion? Here’s where Dock actually helps:
- Everything in one place: Documents, tasks, timelines, and communication are all together.
- Automation: You can trigger workflows instead of sending 15 “just checking in” emails.
- Visibility: Know exactly where someone is in their onboarding, without bugging them (or your team).
But let’s be clear: Dock isn’t magic. It won’t magically fix a broken onboarding process, and it can’t automate messy human relationships. What it does well is make repeatable steps easy and transparent.
Step 1: Map Out Your Onboarding Workflow First
Don’t jump into Dock and start clicking around. You’ll just end up recreating the chaos you already have, but now with more tabs. Instead:
- List every step in your current onboarding, start to finish. For employees, this might be: send welcome email, collect paperwork, set up accounts, share training materials, schedule check-ins. For customers: contract signed, kickoff call, shared resources, first deliverable, check-in.
- Highlight what’s repetitive and what’s unique. Automation only helps with the stuff you do over and over.
- Decide what should be automated and what needs a human touch. For example, account creation = automate. First week check-in? Probably worth doing yourself.
Pro tip: Keep it simple! The best onboarding automations are the ones you’ll actually maintain.
Step 2: Set Up an Onboarding Workspace Template in Dock
Now you’re ready to use Dock. Here’s how to build a workspace template that’ll save you clicks every time you onboard someone new.
Creating Your Template
- Go to Dock and create a new workspace.
- Add sections for each phase of onboarding.
- Use Dock’s “sections” to break things up—like Welcome, Paperwork, Training, Milestones.
- Add docs, videos, links, or tasks to each section.
- Assign tasks with clear owners and deadlines.
- You can assign tasks to your team or your new hire/client.
- Set due dates so nothing slips through the cracks.
- Drop in reusable content.
- Welcome messages, training docs, FAQ, how-to videos—put them all in the template.
- Avoid the urge to over-explain everything. If you’re not sure someone will read it, they probably won’t.
What Works Well
- Checklists: People love ticking boxes. Assign tasks so new hires or clients know what’s next.
- Embedded calendars or links: Make it dead simple to book meetings or access tools.
- Progress tracking: Dock updates the progress bar automatically as tasks get checked off.
What to Skip
- Don’t try to automate “relationship-building.” You can’t template sincerity.
- Avoid stuffing every possible resource in the workspace. Too much info is as bad as too little.
Step 3: Automate the Repeatable Steps
Now for the time-saving part: automations. Dock has built-in automation options, but also works with Zapier for more advanced stuff.
Automate Workspace Creation
- Set up triggers: When a new employee is added to your HRIS, or a deal closes in your CRM, Dock can auto-create a new onboarding workspace using your template.
- Auto-invite your new hire/client: Dock can send an email invite with a link to their workspace, so you don’t have to remember.
Automate Task Assignments
- When the workspace is created, tasks can be auto-assigned to the right people.
- Example: IT gets notified to set up accounts, HR gets a prompt to send the welcome package, the new hire is assigned paperwork.
Automate Notifications and Reminders
- Dock can send reminders if tasks go unfinished.
- You can configure Dock (or use Zapier) to ping in Slack, send an email, or update your project board.
Integration with Other Tools
Dock has native integrations with a handful of tools (Slack, Google Workspace, HubSpot, etc.), but for anything else, Zapier is your friend. Here’s what’s actually worth automating:
- Workspace creation from your CRM or HRIS.
- Auto-uploading signed documents to Google Drive.
- Syncing task completion to your project management tool.
Honestly, don’t go wild here. The more moving parts, the more things will break. Start simple, automate the high-friction stuff first.
Step 4: Make It Easy for People to Use
The biggest onboarding fail? People ignoring what you’ve built. Here’s how to make sure your automations actually get used:
- Keep instructions short and clear. No one reads walls of text.
- Use visuals and checklists. Dock makes it easy to embed images, videos, and bite-size lists.
- Test it yourself. Run through the process as if you’re a new hire or customer. Where do you get stuck? Simplify those steps.
- Ask for feedback. After a week or two, check in and tweak the workflow as needed.
Pro tip: If you’re getting lots of “Where do I find X?” questions, your workspace probably needs to be reorganized.
Step 5: Track Progress and Iterate
Automation isn’t “set it and forget it.” Here’s how to keep your onboarding workflow working:
- Monitor completion rates: Dock shows who’s done what. If people are stalling, dig in and fix bottlenecks.
- Regularly update templates: Laws change, teams change, your onboarding should too.
- Don’t be afraid to remove steps: If something’s not adding value, cut it.
What to Ignore
- Overly fancy automations that take longer to debug than to just do the task manually.
- Any workflow that only you understand—your process should be obvious to a new team member, not just to you.
Real-World Tips and Common Pitfalls
- Don’t try to automate empathy or culture. Coffee chats and real check-ins matter more than another automated email.
- Start with the basics. You only need to automate the steps that are genuinely painful or repetitive.
- Expect some manual work. There’s always an exception, so make sure your workflow is flexible.
- Document your process. If you leave, someone else should be able to run onboarding without calling you every day.
Wrap-Up: Keep It Simple, Iterate Often
Automating onboarding in Dock saves real time—if you keep your process clear and don’t overcomplicate things. Start with the stuff that’s always the same, automate it, and leave the human parts to humans. The goal isn’t to make onboarding impersonal, just less of a grind.
If you can set up a simple, reliable workflow in Dock, you’ll have more time to actually welcome your new hires or clients—and less time lost to busywork. Don’t worry about building the perfect system. Ship something simple, see what breaks, and improve from there. That’s how real-world automation gets done.