The quality of a company’s onboarding process can make a break a new employee’s time at the company. A good onboarding process allows the new employee to get up to speed and to dive right in to his new work environment. A bad onboarding process can install bugs in a new employee’s system that will be hard to identify and expunge before his time at the company is up – which may be sooner than later, in the case of a poorly onboarded worker. We asked employees to answer the question, “Did you have a positive onboarding experience when you were hired at your current company?” and the results imply that most companies now understand the importance of that initial onboarding.
This information comes from the latest reading of an ongoing study by Comparably. Over 10,000 employees responded to the question.
Three-quarters of all employees say that their onboarding experience at their current company was positive. Male and female responses only showed a slight one percentage point difference.
Responses by ethnicity showed that there is no disparity in quality of onboarding when it comes to workers of color. African-American responses were only marginally lower than the average response for all employees.
Responses by age groups vary wildly within an admittedly small range. Gen Z respondents (age 18-25) agreed that their onboarding for their current job was solid, in keeping with the overall employee responses. That number dips closer to 72% positive for workers aged 26-30, and remains at about that level through the 51-55 group, save a quick drop of a few points for workers aged 41.45. The workplace climate is changing in the U.S., and people have more resources than ever before when it comes to deciding if their company culture is true blue. Young people, especially, may be more keyed in to modern onboarding expectations than workers who have been in the workplace for a decade or more.
Executives and HR, who have something to say about onboarding processes at their respective companies, are the most appreciate of the onboarding at their company. C-suite responses were a full 10% more positive than the average for all workers. Coming in lower than the average for all workers are the Communication and Design departments. Most departments align with the overall average for all employees on this question.
When departmental responses are broken up by gender, there doesn’t seem to be much of a disparity when it comes to gender – as evidenced by the overall averages. The biggest gulf is in the HR departments, where females were 7% more likely to espouse approval of their company’s onboarding process.
Employees based in Minneapolis and Denver were especially high in terms of “yes” responses to the onboarding question. To a slightly lesser extent, the same is true of workers in San Francisco, Phoenix, Dallas, Boston, and Washington D.C. On the other end the spectrum are workers from Chicago, Atlanta, and Seattle, where responses did not quite meet the nationwide average. 
Latest reading as of Nov 16.
