Easy Teams onboarding by welcoming new members automatically

You are added to a new team and look around. While some teams are familiar from the click one, there are some that would require a bit of more knowledge. What is the team’s purpose, what are those channels, are there some agreed team practices?

Instead of having to ask around for these the team could automatically welcome you and provide the essence of that information in that welcome messages. And of course this works for onboarding like a charm. When a new employee is added to a specific team the team automatically posts a message that both tells new member essential ropes and also encourages existing team members to welcome the newcomer.

The happy moment: no new notifications!

Build a welcoming Flow with Power Automate

This is fairly easy to do, since it is done with Power Automate. No special licensing is needed for this one. The drawback is that it needs to be built for each team. However, for it is usually a team or project lead who does this. For smaller projects this may not be that fruitful but when you have a large project with tens of channels you might want to give newcomers a hand. And while doing that existing team members get a more visual cue that there is fresh blood in the team. Perhaps welcome message asks new member to introduce themselves and share some information about their skills?

Steps are easy

1. Create a Flow in Power Automate
2. Triggered by “When a new team member is added”
3. Get user information
4. Post the message

In step one you choose the team (or use team id via custom value). Get user profile requires you to click open adding the dynamic value and choosing UserID from the step 1.

In Post a message you can format message quite freely. I used code view to add some paragraphs to make lists easier to create and to cleanup some html.

The end result looks nice and feels good for a fresh member:

Note

Atmentions are not supported by out of the box actions. However, you can use the Flow Bot to send user the welcome message into a chat or use Graph API to reply to that message with a atmention body. Using Graph API call requires Premium licensing.