Designing Employee Onboarding

Why invest in employee onboarding?

It’s crucial for morale – a warm welcome is a universal desire. Onboarding should inform new hires why they’re here and show them they fit in. A poorly run onboarding program can also hurt the morale of existing employees if you’re overburdening them with hand-holding new hires who are taking too long to be able to do their work independently thanks to limited educational resources. 

It improves time to efficiency – nobody wants to be artificially held back in their progress by a lack of resources. Effective onboarding shepherds new hires to comfort and confidence, it goes beyond the first week to ramp up employees faster and more comprehensively.

The first 90-days are crucial for retention – hiring is an investment and employees are no longer waiting a year to leave if they’re lost. Nailing the first 90-days will help your retention. We’re in the Great Resignation and you can lose people quickly with a poor onboarding process that doesn’t provide a positive cultural experience. Nobody wants to feel like they’re out on the outside looking in, any longer than is necessary.

Who is typically involved in building out employee onboarding? 

For company-wide onboarding processes: 

Most company-wide onboarding processes are assigned to HR and People Ops – in a typical company with HR/People Ops functions, these handle the design and execution of onboarding processes that all hires will have to complete (e.g. HR compliance, general company operating procedures).

In a startup, thoughtful hiring managers take on onboarding (or no one does) – startups might not have an HR function, in which case, the hiring manager with the instincts and desire to mentor and train can design onboarding. Many times, they’ll have to corral and centralize what started as a piecemeal and scattered process. The earlier you can centralize the common elements of onboarding, the more you’ll be set for success as you scale and grow.

For function-specific onboarding: 

A committed buddy or manager should lead function/job-specific onboarding – the knowledge related to the position’s day-to-day can be taught best by the team members and the managers that know the requirements and can build out an education plan.

What are common mistakes companies make with employee onboarding?

Not giving onboarding the weight that it should be given – many organizations treat onboarding as a nice-to-have that can be shrugged off for activities more immediate to the function of your business. This approach isn’t viable in the long run and can lead to larger issues from low morale/high turnover to lower employee efficiency. 

Stopping onboarding after ‘check-the-box’ tasks – you’re not done when the new hire has a computer, their payroll set up, and account access. You’re just getting started. The new hire needs these boxes checked to do their job, but they need much more knowledge to succeed.

Unclear accountability for maintaining the quality of the onboarding process – if it’s not an official part of someone’s job to maintain the knowledge repository, then it’s going to fall off the radar. If no one is accountable to their buddy for the first couple weeks, you’ll end up with a lost new hire.

What are the different “categories” of knowledge that you need to transmit during onboarding?

Company-level – some knowledge needs to be a universal part of your onboarding process, no matter what job or function you’re hiring for. It includes:  

• Compliance modules 
• Tax forms 
• General cultural principles
• Standard operating procedures 
• General workplace concepts and terms

Function specific – this is the knowledge that your new hire needs to know about their specific position and function. It includes: 

• Team concepts and terms 
• Team workflow
• Individual team members and titles 
• Skills and tools
• Standard operating procedures 

Industry knowledge – this is the knowledge that is important to get your hire comfortable in your industry context. Some of this is relevant company-wide and some is function-specific—your marketing team will have different questions about your industry than your engineering team. It includes: 

• Specific expertise in porting existing skills into your industry context
• Team-specific industry tips 
• Your biggest competitors
• An industry document that someone with three years at a competitor could come in and read and immediately understand and confirm

What are the steps for building out the knowledge base(s) that fuel employee onboarding?

Company-wide knowledge: 

• Fill out general workplace language, concepts, and procedures  – this should be a centralized responsibility that typically falls on the shoulders of HR if you’re big enough, if not, then you can get someone who is equipped on your small team to do it.
• Create an end-to-end guide about the operation of the business – give the new hire something to orient themselves within the scope of your organization. 

Function-specific knowledge: 

• Teams should fill out their area-specific onboarding content independently – it can be tempting to throw this responsibility on the hiring manager, but oftentimes they’re already swamped and/or aren’t the best or most knowledgeable person for the responsibility. 
• Look for gurus on team-specific knowledge – this is typically someone who has been around for a long time and isn’t the leader but has a wealth of knowledge. You want to take what makes their ‘bus factor’ and write it down. The ‘bus factor’ is when a single employee has a lot of crucial and specific knowledge—so if they got hit by a bus, the company would be in bad shape. 

Make sure there is accountability for compiling knowledge – if it’s not part of anyone’s job to build up the knowledge base, then it will fall by the wayside. Assign the high-level content to one or two people with bandwidth. If HR doesn’t exist or is too busy, it can be anyone who’s been around for a year or two at least and is relatively engaged with the organization. 

Compiling it for the first time is a lot more difficult than maintaining it – you’ll be compiling different best practices from different teams and functions and rarely are they consistent, it might take a few weeks. From there, maintaining it is a lot easier.

A good body of knowledge is not just a list, but is navigable – new hires need to be able to find what they’re looking for quickly. It needs to be accessible or nobody will use it.

How should you structure onboarding? 

Make a plan for the time between the first week and the first year – it’s crucial to create an onboarding process that fills in the gap between the first week of paperwork, introductions, etc. with resources that foster learning in new hires. 

First weeks:

Filling out paperwork and forms – this should be standardized across the organization. These are typically time sensitive and unavoidable—if you don’t get them done, the employee can’t be paid.

Guided immersion – have new hires listen in on meetings and shadow someone. It’s okay if they can’t follow 60-70% of what’s going on in their first meetings – they can always take notes and ask questions of their teammates afterward. They’re absorbing the culture, picking up on acronyms, and finding ‘puzzle piece’ moments—these are individual moments where a new hire picks up on something that connects the collage of knowledge they’ll be exposed to early on. 

Pair new hires with a buddy – connect them with a team member in their function who can answer their questions or direct them to answers. It needs to be someone with bandwidth – which you can clear the way for, as a leader – because there is a lot of handholding early on. 

Make introductions – the hiring manager and/or the buddy can help socialize the new hire with introductions and personal connections. These will start relationships that will help them do their job, and make new hires feel welcome. 

Have more regular check-ins than 30-60-90 – you don’t have to get rid of this model, but it’s not necessarily critical to imagine onboarding this way. In the first couple weeks, there should be pretty regular check-ins with this person, so very little is a surprise when they share their experience and challenges at those bigger milestone checkpoints. 

Beyond:

Maintain the buddy program – the new hire should start to become more independent, but the buddy should still be a resource should the new employee need it. The buddy might start to do more directing them to resources rather than walking through topics. 

Maintain a constant drip of knowledge from a well-maintained repository – it’s like dropping someone into a new city but you’ve given them a smartphone—it will still take time to navigate, but they’ve got a really helpful resource to guide them and quickly answer questions or fill small knowledge gaps in the moment.

What are the steps for setting up onboarding for an individual new hire? What does HR do, and what does the hiring manager do?

Setting up onboarding goes beyond creating a list of to-dos – whoever sets up onboarding needs to not only create a path for the new hire, but they need to actively shepherd them to the resources they need at every turn. 

The hiring manager should do as much as they can before the first day – anything you can knock out before the new hire arrives will make the first-day experience more personal and less transactional. 

HR should spearhead completing company-wide onboarding tasks – they should facilitate the things that everyone needs to check off: forms, payroll, compliance, etc. They need to make these available, give due dates, shepherd new hires to completion, then process it. 

Knowledge sharing is a joint effort – HR will likely handle the company-wide knowledge and the functional team will handle their area expertise. If there are specific needs like hardware or business cards or IT, these responsibilities can be shared by a buddy and the hiring manager. 

The best onboarding experiences have a committed buddy – this is someone the new hire can lean on when they have questions and who can guide the new hire through the onboarding process. Ideally, the buddy has been on the new hire’s team for at least a year, but in faster-moving environments, this can obviously be shorter as needed.

Make sure whoever you pair them with on the team has bandwidth – this can make your onboarding fail or thrive. A buddy has to do a fair amount of hand-holding in the first couple weeks. When bandwidth is stretched thin, not everybody is willing to support new team members. 

How should you check for understanding and ensure employees are absorbing information during onboarding? 

Lay the groundwork early that no question is too simple – create comfort and confidence. This requires an atmosphere where asking questions is encouraged. Make it clear through words and actions that no question is dumb. Most new hires are coming in on the basis of general attitude, background, and/or education rather than knowing exactly how to do their new job, and it can be worthwhile to remind them (and yourself) of this.

Employee progress should be evident in their performance – by 90-days, new hires should be pretty self-sufficient. They can still rely on their buddy for new terrain, but you’re expected to be a contributing member of a sports team or classroom in 90 days, so why not in the workplace?

What do you need to do to refresh the knowledge of existing employees?

Onboarding is a perpetual learning and information management journey – it never ends. Refreshes for existing employees should be approached with the same structure and resources that you approach onboarding with. Despite some cultural norms, this should also be applied to contractors and consultants—whether temporary or permanent, everyone is working to support the same business and mission.

Some administrative and HR items require mandatory refreshes – for example, certain compliance modules need to be repeated at intervals and employees need to be kept aware of open enrollment. 

For company and functional knowledge, you need a cadence of mandatory and voluntary refreshes – does every tenured employee know about the latest product updates? The latest trends in the market? Do they know your marquee clients? You can give compulsory refreshes on these, or preferably, everyone knows where they can go to access this information. Establish a cadence of providing either mandatory training or sending an email reminding everyone of the resources on offer.

How does onboarding vary if you’re in a remote vs. in-person workplace?

It’s easier to deprioritize onboarding of new hires when you’re remote – it’s very easy to let a Slack message or email sit for a day or more without realizing you need to get back to your buddy. They can guarantee a response If they can tap you on the shoulder.

Remote setups need to be intentional about instilling comfort and confidence – in-person setups allow for team lunches, happy hours, and interactions that build rapport. These interactions are crucial to new hire comfort and confidence and are more difficult in a remote setup. They need to intentionally create a hospitable welcome and friendly interactions. 

In either setup, you need a centralized information repository – just because onboarding is in-person doesn’t mean you don’t need an accessible digital repository of information.

How does the onboarding experience vary if you are making early career hires? 

Their lack of baseline knowledge amplifies the need for effective knowledge management – they’ll have more basic questions than a mid-career hire will (although not coming from another employer does provide a cleaner slate). You need to account for that in your repository. For example, you might not just have to explain your PTO policy to them—you might have to explain what PTO is. 

Make them feel welcome – this is their first workforce experience and they’ll likely be a little bit cowed by it all. Create a welcoming environment and pair them with people who will be a friendly support system, and/or ensure new hires are connected to each other and able to share their learnings and insights.

How often (and how) should you update the info in your onboarding materials?

Most information doesn’t change that often – luckily, you probably won’t have to rewrite your entire knowledge base during every reset. 

Set a specific cadence (maybe every six months) where you refresh – set reminders for updates so that if an employee contributed 35 really valuable pieces of content, they’ll get messages every six months or so to refresh their contributions. That employee is likely to be a subject matter expert on that content, so an update should not be that difficult or time-consuming.

Refresh your content during offboarding – when an employee is leaving your company, you want to gather and synthesize what they know so you’re not left with a big gap in your institutional knowledge. If someone is a subject matter expert, their expertise should be archived. Preserving their knowledge in a shared system is much more valuable than simply passing it on to another individual.

What types of tools can help you design and manage onboarding? 

You need repositories for three kinds of content and knowledge repositories: you can use one tool for all of them or use purpose-built tools for each:

• What to do – a tool to help you get all of the onboarding paperwork and administrative tasks finished on time. You can get this from your HR or ERP systems, but those are typically expensive.
• Who to know – a directory of the individuals within the organization, who they are, their responsibilities, and how you can effectively engage them. You can get tooling to help with the visualization of your org chart. 
• What to know – a tool to gather and maintain key organizational and function-specific knowledge. Most orgs can get by without a fancy tool – if you’re sufficiently motivated you can handle everything within Google Docs/Sheets.

A startup doesn’t need an expensive tool from an HR or ERP system – Welcomary is less expensive and does it all. Or, if you’re sufficiently motivated, you can handle everything within the Google suite. 

What are the most important pieces to get right?

Create an accessible home for onboarding knowledge – it should be accurate, comprehensive, centralized, and accessible knowledge that will guide all new hires through onboarding.

Give new hires a warm welcome – communicate through your organization’s words and actions that the new hire is wanted and welcome at your organization. This is as much an attitude as it is a set of practices. Try to prioritize giving them answers, and if you don’t have the answers, direct them to who does.

What are common pitfalls?

Pairing new hires with buddies that don’t have the bandwidth – this will sink an onboarding program. You’re communicating to everyone that onboarding is nice to have, but other tasks should take priority. 

Not maintaining your knowledge base – for a new hire just learning your company (or your industry), having outdated and inaccurate knowledge can often be more detrimental than having no shared knowledge at all—but minor investments in upkeep can benefit everyone significantly.