Employee Experience: Onboarding Questions

These statistics clearly show the importance of a solid onboarding experience. In practice, there are definite onboarding gaps across organizations of all sizes. In fact, Gallup found that only 12% of employees feel their organization has a good onboarding process. This HR Scoop focuses on how to gather information to improve the onboarding experience.

 

Onboarding Experience Components

Onboarding encompasses getting an employee acquainted and acclimated with several moving parts:

• Organization – culture, cooperative structure, authority structure
• Job – job duties, resources available and expectations
• Customers/Members – names, needs and service standards
• Compliance –required training and practices
• Team Dynamics – team norms, performance standards, and manager/team member personalities

While some of these components will be the same for each of your new hires across the organization, there are other components that must be customized to individual teams and unique jobs.

 

Long story short – organizations that have strong onboarding programs utilize a standard approach for common elements of onboarding. They also give leaders the information and resources to customize the onboarding experience beyond the standard onboarding schedule to meet the needs of each new hire.

 

How do you know if your onboarding is effective? Ask questions.

 

Onboarding Experience Questions

 

To get started on examining your onboarding experience, we have separated onboarding experience questions into general onboarding questions that can come from Human Resources and then questions that might be best asked by the manager.

 

General Onboarding Process Questions

Ask recent new hires these questions to generate knowledge about the process and information shared.

• How easy was it to apply for the job with us?
• What was good about the application process / where could we improve on the application process?
• Did you receive an accurate understanding of the job during the interview process?
• Was there anything in the interview process that helped you make the decision to join our organization?
• Did you have the information needed for your first day of work? What was missing? What did we do well?
• What do you wish you knew on your first day/week/month that you know now?
• How did your department-specific onboarding go?
• What aspects of the onboarding process went well?
• What aspects of the onboarding process do you suggest we change?

 

Onboarding Questions for Managers to Ask

The questions above are meant to obtain specific information about the effectiveness of the onboarding process. In contrast, the questions below are designed to create opportunities for employees and managers to have interactive conversations and keep lines of communication open. These questions can identify where gaps exist and managers can work to fill those knowledge gaps during the first six months of employment.

 

First Few Weeks

• On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with your onboarding experience? (ask what’s going well and where they are struggling)
• Tell me what you feel is the purpose of your role. What questions do you have so far that I can help answer?
• What questions do you have for me about the organization?
• Do you know who to go to with questions about your job?
• How can I (and our team) better support you in your learning experience?
• What would you tell your friend about working here?

Two Months

• What’s the biggest difference between what you thought the job would be and what it is really like?
• Do you have any questions about your role?
• How welcomed did you feel by the team?
• How could our team change our onboarding and training process to be more effective moving forward?

Six Months

• Six months in, how does the job/culture/responsibilities compare to what you expected when you were hired?
• Do you have the tools and resources needed to do your job?
• Do you have a clear understanding of your role and how it impacts our organizational success?

Implementing Onboarding Questions

 

Any of these questions could be part of an in-person conversation, focus groups, and/or online survey.

The method used to collect the information will influence the information received.

• Organizations or teams with high trust could have managers or HR ask their employees these questions and expect to receive truthful answers.
• Organizations or teams with low trust may want to utilize a third-party to capture accurate information about new employee experiences.

Effective onboarding takes planning, preparation, training and follow-up to ensure new hires have the right information at the right time to be successful in the organization. Asking questions is the first step to understanding how to best onboard your new employees moving forward.