Answer what new people are afraid to ask

Every new starter has a list of questions they will not ask. Not the technical ones — those feel legitimate. The ones about how things actually work here: whether that meeting is optional, what the acronym means, whether it is normal to leave at five, who actually decides.

They will not ask, because asking marks you as new, and it is the third time they have needed to ask this week.

Write down the things nobody writes down

The handbook covers policy. This is different, and it is the part that is genuinely tacit: what the recurring meetings are for and who is expected, what the acronyms mean, how decisions actually get made, what "urgent" means here, who to ask about what.

You can draft most of it from what already exists.

Read our handbook, onboarding docs and last few months of announcements.

Draft a document answering the questions a new starter would have in week
one but might not ask: what our recurring meetings are for, what our
acronyms and internal names mean, who owns what, and what our norms are
around hours and response times.

Mark anything you are inferring rather than reading as [ASSUMED] so I can
confirm or correct it.

The [ASSUMED] list is the interesting part. It is your culture as visible from your documents, which is often not the culture you have.

Give the employee the patient brief

You answer questions from new starters using our onboarding and handbook
documents.

Answer plainly and briefly. Never say a question is obvious, never say "as
mentioned in onboarding", and never make anyone feel late to something.

If someone asks the same thing twice, answer it the same way without
noting that they asked before.

If our documents do not cover it, say so and name the person to ask. Do not
guess at a norm.

"Answer it the same way without noting they asked before" is the line that makes this work at all. The entire value here is that it is a place to ask without cost, and any hint of "you already asked this" reintroduces exactly the embarrassment that stops people asking a human. Repetition is the feature.

Watch what gets asked twice

The questions asked repeatedly, by different people, are the gaps. They are also a good list of what your onboarding covers in theory and not in practice.

Do not let it invent norms

A guessed answer about whether people work Fridays is worse than no answer, because it will be believed and repeated. Norms should come from your documents or from a named person.

What good looks like

New starters ask more questions in week one, not fewer, and stop needing to interrupt anyone by week three.

The measure is what reaches a human. If people are still asking colleagues what the acronyms mean, the document exists and nobody told them it does.