Working Theory - How do you scale your new hire onboarding?
What would a good onboarding survey look like?
A couple of days ago a founder I admire, Wes Winler, posted a series of tips on things to look out for to help quickly assess hiring efficacy1. One of these tips was to use onboarding surveys, and wow. Despite having spent dozens of hours building Success in Role docs and Onboarding Plans for each new hire on my team at Daybreak I hadn’t put any thought at all into how I would determine whether these plans were working or not. Oops…
So… what would I want in an onboarding survey?
What do I want feedback on?
As a hiring manager I would want signal on whether the employee’s expectations are being met and whether I’m doing a good job onboarding them or not.
As a manager of hiring managers I want to know whether onboarding as a whole is working at our company and whether new hires are being setup for success or not.
As an employee I don’t really want to do this and if I have to do it I want to spend as little time as possible on it.
I’ve distilled this down into the following core things I want signal on from my onboarding survey:
Operational Excellence - Did the initial logistics go smoothly?
Foundation Setting - Did the initial logistics set the new hire up for success?
Feedback Loops - Is the manager setup to assess the candidate over the next thirty, sixty and ninety days for fit and performance?
Feedback Loops - Is the employee setup to build a relationship with their manager?
Amusingly, these things also say a lot about what I think good onboarding is. Let’s flesh that out a bit more though.
The initial logistics of hiring someone are all about earning trust by demonstrating competence through using their time wisely. This work includes, the legal paperwork, necessary physical tools (aka laptops), credentials to any digital tools, confirmation of access to those digital tools, and access to any supporting infrastructure. By my eye this should take no more than an hour of the employee’s time on day one.
Setting the new hire up for success is much harder, in my mind the new hire will need:
Scheduled training for each bespoke tool or process.
Weekly recurring Manager Tools style 1:1s scheduled and a brief explanation from the manager on the process since it might be unusual.
Thirty, sixty and ninety day expectations in an actionable checklist (building this is beyond the scope of this post)
Intro’s scheduled for each person they depend on and each person who depends on them.
Without these things it’ll be very difficult to evaluate the new hire’s performance in these critical first days. Put another way, the risk of losing the team’s trust by retaining a bad hire for longer than necessary goes way up if you don’t have these things.
Speaking of evaluating performance, we need some feedback loops here. I believe the most critical at this stage are end of week “Onboarding Progress” business meetings with their manager where the manager has come prepared to talk about what is and isn’t going well. Doing these well can be hard, but the core of it is probably about an hour of prep for the manager.
With this strawman, what should my onboarding survey look like?
Gathering Feedback from the New Hire
While the science of surveying is very much outside the scope of this post, we need to keep in mind that this survey fundamentally asks a new employee to judge their boss. That’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable and so we need to navigate around this challenge. To overcome this I prefer to use what I think of as “lateral questions”.
Below are the questions I would put in the onboarding survey, a bit about why I chose those questions, and how I would evaluate answers. Here’s the survey itself.
Operational Excellence
Question 1: Is there anything we could’ve done to speed up getting you everything you needed to start work? → open text field
Why this question and format?
I want signal on whether or not the manager mismanaged the initial provisioning of the employee. I’m opting for an open text field because I don’t want to lead the new hire down a certain path. I opted for words and phrases like “anything”, “speed up”, “everything” and “start work” because I wanted to anchor the question as a positive and collaborative one with the new hire.
Answers that imply the manager did well:
e.g. Nope, I got my laptop the day before and my company email had invites to every service waiting for me when I logged in.
e.g. Went great! No notes!
Answers that imply the manager did poorly:
e.g. My laptop showed up late, but everything went well after.
e.g. I can’t get into slack… plz send halp.
Question 2: How long did it take for you to get everything you needed to start work? → pick one minutes to hours, hours, days
Why this question and format?
I want a concrete signal on how long it took to get setup that I can then cross reference with the manager’s input.
By placing this question after the more abstract I get a calibration point on what the employee considers to be acceptable. If they give a positive answer in Question 1 but answer Hours here I know that they have low expectations for this portion of the work and can weight the response accordingly.
Answers that imply the manager did well:
e.g. Minutes to Hours
Answers that imply the manager did poorly:
e.g. Hours
e.g. Days
Foundation Setting
Question 1: When do you expect to have completed your training on our tools and processes? → open text field
Why this question and format?
I want signal on whether or not the manager scheduled the training they should’ve. I’m opting for an open text field because I don’t want to lead the candidate to the correct answer and I want to capture lack of understanding if that’s the case. I opted for this phrasing around completion because it makes the question difficult to answer if the training was not scheduled but very trivial to answer if it was scheduled.
Answers that imply the manager did well:
e.g. My last training day is August 22nd.
e.g. I’ve got a bunch of scheduled training meetings, so whenever those are done?
Answers that imply the manager did poorly:
e.g. I don’t know
e.g. There’s training?
Question 2: How many meetings do you expect to have with just your manager during your onboarding period? → text field
Why this question and format?
I want signal on whether or not the manager scheduled both the 1:1s and the onboarding progress meetings. I opted for this phrasing because it’s explicit in what it’s asking while not leading the new employee too much. I opted for a text field because google forms doesn’t have a number field and I don’t want to prime the new employee too much.
Answers that imply the manager did well:
e.g. 20 to 30 (90 days, 12 weeks, 2 meetings/week)
Answers that imply the manager did poorly:
e.g. <20
e.g. >30
Question 3: Who do you expect your work to enable the most? → open text field
Why this question and format?
I want signal on whether or not the intro meetings with those that depend on them have been scheduled. I opted to frame this with “expect”, “enable” and “most” because I want them to internalize that these are the people they’re helping and expect those words to signal that without explicitly prompting them that these are the people they have downstream dependent intros with. I opted for an open text field because I don’t want to have to keep a list of employees in the survey tool and in smaller orgs I don’t want to lead them with the names.
Answers that imply the manager did well:
e.g. thirty or forty percent of the names of the people they’ve got as dependencies.
e.g. The velocity team and the badger monkey team.
Answers that imply the manager did poorly:
e.g. I don’t know
e.g. Florence? (<30% of dependencies)
e.g. The San Francisco Giants
Question 4: Who do you expect for your strongest stakeholders to be? → open text field
Why this question and format?
I want signal on whether or not the intro meetings with those they depend on have been scheduled. I opted to frame this with “expect”, “strongest stakeholders” to avoid prompting them that these are the people that they depend on to do their job.
Answers that imply the manager did well:
e.g. thirty or forty percent of the names of the people they depend on.
e.g. The customer onboarding team and the engineering team.
Answers that imply the manager did poorly:
e.g. I don’t know
e.g. Jonathan? (<30% of dependencies)
e.g. The San Francisco Giants
Question 5: How are you evaluating your performance in this new role? → open text field
Why this question and format?
I want signal on whether or not the employee has understood how the onboarding plan is going to be used. I opted for this phrasing because I associate completing the plan with “good performance” and hope they will too. I opted for open text field because I don’t want to prompt the employee directly.
Answers that imply the manager did well:
e.g. Whether I’m on or off track from my onboarding plan
e.g. Whether I finish the plan or not
e.g. Whether my manager tells me I’m doing well or not.
Answers that imply the manager did poorly:
e.g. I don’t know
e.g. If you fire me or not
e.g. Whether my coworkers tell me or not
Feedback Loops
Question 1: If things aren’t going well, when and where would you expect your new manager to provide that input? → text field
Why this question and format?
I want signal on whether or not the manager’s onboarding progress meetings purpose was communicated effectively. I want this because I’m wary that employees might not understand the difference between 1:1s and onboarding progress meetings. I opted for the negative tone of “aren’t going well” because I want to see if they associate the onboarding progress meetings as feedback meetings.
Answers that imply the manager did well:
e.g. the end of week meetings
e.g. the onboarding progress meetings
Answers that imply the manager did poorly:
e.g. my 1:1s with my manager
e.g. I don’t know
e.g. standups
Question 2: What input, if any, have you received from your manager this week? → text field
Why this question and format?
I want signal on whether or not the manager has scheduled and run at least one onboarding progress meeting.
I want signal on whether or not the employee has understood how the onboarding plan is going to be used. I opted for this phrasing because I associate completing the plan with “good performance” and hope they will too. I chose to include “if any” because I wanted to imply that “None” is a perfectly valid answer. I opted for open text field because I don’t want to prompt the employee directly.
Answers that imply the manager did well:
e.g. My manager said I’m doing well.
e.g. My manager said I’m meeting expectations but I took longer than expected to attach the widget to the flabberjam
e.g. My onboarding progress meeting hasn’t happened yet, but it’s scheduled for end of day.
Answers that imply the manager did poorly:
e.g. None
e.g. I don’t think they’ve said anything?
Gathering Feedback from the Hiring Manager
Below are the questions I would put in the hiring manager’s onboarding survey, a bit about why I chose those questions, and how I would evaluate answers.
Operational Excellence
Question 1: Is there anything we could’ve done to speed up getting your new hire everything they needed to start work?
Why this question and format?
I want signal on whether or not the new hire provisioning process is breaking down. I opted for a positive framing because I want to encourage the manager to ask for help.
Answers that imply the system is working:
e.g. None, all went swimmingly
e.g. Nope, finished in forty five minutes
Answers that imply the system isn’t working:
e.g. IT delivered the laptop late, Xuan was tooling around on her phone for the whole day!
e.g. We couldn’t get Jeff’s account setup until end of day because the email wasn’t in their inbox like usual.
Question 2: How long did it take for you to get the new hire setup? → pick one minutes to hours, hours, days
Why this question and format?
I want a concrete signal on how long it took to get setup that I can then cross reference with the new hire’s input.
Answers that imply the manager did well:
e.g. Minutes to Hours
Answers that imply the manager did poorly:
e.g. Hours
e.g. Days
Getting Value out of our Onboarding Survey
To get value out of these surveys I want the following to happen:
The employee has ample time to experience the onboarding process prior to being prompted to weigh in on it.
The hiring manager’s manager is notified when there is work for them to do, either in interpreting the survey’s results or in nudging the employee to complete the survey.
To accomplish this I would do the following:
Use my HRITS to send the new hire survey via email to new hires Tuesday morning on week two of their employment with the subject
[Action Required] - New Hire Onboarding SurveyUse my HRITS to send the new hire onboarding survey to the hiring manager on Tuesday morning on week two of the new hire’s employment with the subject
[Action Required] - New Hire Manager Onboarding SurveyHave each survey notify the Hiring Manager’s manager via email when a new result has been received for a new hire in their org.
Have the HRITS notify the Hiring Manager’s manager via email when a new hire in their org, or their manager, hasn’t yet completed the survey.
Have the results display in a spreadsheet only accessible to the hiring manager’s manager and those above.
Ideally have employees start on a Monday.
This system would empower the hiring manager’s manager to follow up when need be and understand how their directs are doing on the first stages of the onboarding process with a quick look at a single email.
Like the rigor? Running a startup or business of your own? Want input on how to tackle your problems? I’ve opened a few advisory and consulting slots and can bring this kind of rigor to your challenges → luke[at]lukemercado.com.
Author’s Note: LinkedIn has an interesting reputation when it comes to “social media”.