A facilitated session to map your current onboarding process, define success, and design a scalable future state supported by Humanforce.
Overview
The Onboarding Finalisation Workshop is a collaborative, facilitator-led session that helps your team step back from day-to-day onboarding activity and align on a clear, repeatable onboarding experience.
Together, we will:
Understand how onboarding works today (in practice, not just on paper)
Identify what’s working well and where friction or risk exists
Agree on what “good” looks like for your organisation
Design a future onboarding journey that is scalable and supported by Humanforce
Confirm the practical next steps required to move forward (forms, configuration, ownership)
Who should attend
To get the best outcomes, we recommend inviting a cross-functional group, such as:
HR / People team representatives
Hiring managers or people leaders
Payroll and/or IT stakeholders (where relevant)
A project sponsor or decision-maker (to help confirm priorities and make decisions)
Recommended group size (6–8 participants):
To keep the session focused and productive, we recommend a maximum of 6–8 attendees. If you’re inviting participants outside of your HR/People team (e.g., Payroll, IT, hiring leaders), please ensure each attendee is a strong representative for their function—someone who understands the current process and can speak to requirements and decisions on behalf of that area.
Duration and format
Recommended duration: 2 hours
Format: typically remote, using a collaborative whiteboard for journey mapping and activities.
A typical session runs as follows:
Welcome & context (5 mins)
Design thinking & lifecycle context (10 mins)
Journey mapping — current state (25 mins)
Rose, Buds & Thorns reflection (20 mins)
Defining success (15 mins)
Journey mapping — future state (30 mins)
Next steps & close (15 mins)
What you’ll walk away with
By the end of the workshop, you will have:
A current-state onboarding journey map
A clear set of “Roses, Buds and Thorns”:
Roses: what’s working well today
Thorns: pain points, inefficiencies, risks
Buds: opportunities for improvement
Agreed success criteria for onboarding (what outcomes matter most)
A future-state onboarding journey map aligned to those success criteria
A practical next-steps list, including:
Forms that need to be created
Other setup/configuration tasks
Owners, timelines, and dependencies
Why this workshop matters
Onboarding is one of the most important investment phases in the employee lifecycle. If onboarding is unclear or overly manual, it can:
Increase administrative workload
Introduce compliance risk
Delay time to productivity
Impact engagement and retention
A well-designed onboarding process reduces manual effort, improves employee experience, and scales as your organisation grows. This workshop creates shared understanding and alignment before configuration or build work begins—so decisions are clear and implementation is smoother.
How to prepare
To make the session as effective as possible, we recommend the following preparation:
Optional pre-work (recommended)
Ahead of the session, you may be asked to complete a short questionnaire covering:
How onboarding currently works
Known pain points or bottlenecks
Variations by role, location, or employment type
This helps your facilitator tailor the workshop but is not mandatory.
What to bring to the workshop
If available, it helps to have:
Any onboarding documentation or checklists currently in use
Examples of role/location variations (if onboarding differs across teams)
A view of who is involved in onboarding today (HR, managers, payroll, IT)
A sense of what outcomes matter most (speed, compliance, experience, retention)
What happens during the workshop
Your facilitator will guide the session using a lightweight design-thinking approach focused on clarity and alignment.
1) Map the current onboarding journey
We’ll document what onboarding looks like today across key roles (e.g., employee, manager, HR, payroll, IT), including manual steps, workarounds, and where things slow down.
2) Identify Roses, Buds and Thorns
We’ll reflect on the journey to clearly separate:
What’s working
What’s painful or risky
Where the best opportunities for improvement are
3) Define success
Before designing the future state, we’ll align on success criteria such as:
When a new employee is considered “fully onboarded”
Which outcomes matter most (speed, compliance, engagement, retention)
What the organisation would most value improving
4) Design the future onboarding journey
Using your success criteria as a guide, we’ll design a realistic, scalable future state—focusing on consistency where it matters, and flexibility where needed.
5) Confirm next steps and ownership
We’ll finish by agreeing:
Immediate next steps
Owners and timelines
Key dependencies, approvals, and risks
After the workshop
Following the session, you’ll receive a summary capturing:
The finalised current-state and future-state journey maps
Your agreed success criteria
A list of forms to be created and key setup/configuration tasks
Confirmed owners, next steps, and indicative timelines