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We use Checklistomania to help new and existing employees keep track of tasks that need to be completed. It’s open source and in the public domain: fork it, adapt it, use it — and let us know how we can make it better

Over the past few months, we’ve released several products — including checklists, a handbook, and classes — to help new hires orient themselves to 18F. By far the most successful onboarding item we’ve released is a Slack bot that sends scheduled messages to new hires so that they don’t experience information overload during their first week.

Our coworkers are very, very good at documenting the things they learn in Slack, our chat program, because it’s part of their daily workflow. So I tried an experiment: I asked my 18F coworkers to tag messages that every new 18F employee should know with the emoji.

Over the past three months, we’ve released several products that help new hires acclimate to our organization. In this blog post, we’ll detail what we did and why it works really well.

As our team expands to meet federal digital needs, we've learned to appreciate documentation for its ability to turn new hires into self-sufficient contributors quickly, with minimal disruption to the organization.