The art of onboarding
A bad onboarding is invisible, but expensive.
Few companies have put real thought into their onboarding. If you have, congratulations. I, and everyone you’ve ever onboarded, thank you for your services. The rest of you, please take note.
Being a consultant means getting to know new companies often. Their people, their processes, their internal logic that somehow makes sense to everyone who’s been there for more than a year. For new hires, usually less so. Nothing highlights this more than the onboarding process. I’ve lost track of how many I’ve done. I’ve seen the good, the bad, the this-was-clearly-an-afterthought. Mostly the last.
If you’re new, you’re not likely to complain about not understanding. Especially if you’re in a junior role: you will think you are the problem. By the time you’re up to speed, you’ve forgotten the beginner’s struggle, and the work at hand takes all your attention. This is one reason many companies, regardless of size, keep having mediocre onboardings. It’s costing them time and money, yet nobody seems to notice.
Except for the consultant who does them on a regular basis. Like me.
When it’s a mess
Once, I joined an agency as interim support. Things were turbulent, with mergers and people either en route to, or recovering from, burnout. The onboarding was a lot of meetings and documentation scattered across Slack channels and Confluence pages. It took me two months to discover there was a shared drive with client folders. Well, actually, there were two drives. And nobody seemed to agree which one should be used. I have never spent so much time on administration, neither before nor since.
This is not about personal frustration (although there was plenty of that). It’s a financial question. If your new hires use half of their work day to figure out where to find information for the first month, and you hire ten new people in one year, we’re talking almost a thousand hours. Suddenly taking a week to get your documentation in order does not sound so expensive, does it?
When it’s done right
The fastest I’ve gotten up to speed was at an agency a few years ago. On the first day I got a detailed plan spanning three weeks, structured as a checklist of things to complete. Ah, it warmed my cold project management heart. A well-developed process is my love language.
Meetings were booked, but I also had scheduled time for reading documentation. Some introductions were pre-recorded, saving time for the people who had to onboard others frequently, while letting me go back and review things I’d missed or rewatch a tool walkthrough at my own pace.
The CEO complimented me on how fast I got up to speed. I can take some of the credit, but honestly, I owe a lot to the onboarding process.
Later, when I was onboarding others at the same company, I did the same — created video introductions so new hires could learn at their own speed and have references to go back to. But I also had meetings specifically for Q&A. This meant people could prepare questions that were more impactful than where do I find this document, and we could actually get to know each other. Which I would argue is the cornerstone of every team, and is better built through conversation than an info dump that turns your brain into mush.
Information is not (necessarily) context
I know, it’s trendy to hate meetings, but I love them.
When they actually serve a purpose, that is.
In poor onboarding processes, meetings are often used as a lazy alternative to documentation. But as information transfer, they’re terrible. You walk out with a lot of time spent, uncertainty about what was actually important, and not enough space to connect as people.
Meetings are great for something else entirely: building relationships and sharing context. Not just information — context. Who makes decisions, what’s been tried before, what the unwritten rules are. These things rarely get documented. But they come up naturally when you get to know your colleagues.
So invest in both. Document the information and use meetings for the human side of things. But don’t use one as a shortcut for the other, resulting in a half-ass process you lose time and money on.
A symptom, not the disease
The quality of onboarding is a direct reflection of how organised a company actually is. A messy onboarding is a symptom. And I know management teams everywhere think AI will magically sort this out. But AI is only as good as the information and context you feed it, which brings us back to the same problem.
Sort out your onboarding. Your new hires, your consultants, and your bottom line will thank you for it.
Some housekeeping: I’m relaunching this newsletter as a monthly column. One piece at the end of each month on workflows, processes, and making work actually work. If you’re curious about what I do beyond this newsletter, read more about it here. And if your onboarding process (or anything else) needs help, I’m always happy to chat!
Have any onboarding horror stories to share? Or, even better, some successful ones for the rest of us to be inspired by? Do share, I genuinely would love to hear all about it!