Onboarding new employees: day 1, week 1, month 1

Some new employees are sitting in a meeting room one morning. On the screen, a walkthrough of the organisation is running. They are told how the organisation or the company is structured, who reports to whom, and what to do if they lose their access card. Afterwards they are to watch e-learning on core values and IT security — but luckily they do not know that yet.

None of them is thinking about the organisation chart. They are thinking about who they will sit with at lunch, so they do not have to sit alone in the canteen. They are thinking about how to avoid asking their mentor for the hundred and seventeenth time about something trivial — which they simply do not know.

There is rarely anything wrong with the content. The problem is that it answers a question nobody has asked yet. I call it learning theatre: activities that look like learning but create no learning, behaviour or value. An induction day with endless PowerPoints is one of the most common examples I know.

Lars has been new many times

My friend Lars is an IT architect. He has changed jobs several times in large companies and has therefore been onboarded again and again with the classic e-learning packages: Code of Conduct, IT security, anti-corruption, whistleblower, quality, health and safety.

In his current job he got 4.5 hours of e-learning plus documents he had to read and sign off on. Somewhere else it took almost a whole week to get through the material.

The Code of Conduct told him that the company is against child labour and in favour of the climate. That is hard to disagree with. The real dilemmas, such as the balance between safety, deadlines and money, were never addressed. And those are the ones he actually faces.

After the first day he asked his colleagues how they managed to do their jobs with all that e-learning. They laughed and said: »We just click through it.«

So he did the same.

When he ignores the reminder emails, a manager turns up and asks him to complete the course, because it is something the department is measured on. Completion, not behaviour.

It is easy to think that Lars just does not take it seriously enough. But we are all Lars on other people’s courses. What you yourself find important and necessary, others experience as yet another long course they click their way through.

The material exists. It is the order that is missing

Most organisations have the material. The staff handbook exists, the policies are written, and the induction day is in the calendar. Even so, the same questions come into HR three months later, and managers spend time explaining what has already been explained.

That is rarely down to the content. It is down to the order and the volume. New employees are told everything in the first week, when what they mostly need is to work out who to ask and where to sit. The rules on parental leave only become interesting six months later, and by then they are forgotten.

Onboarding starts with information, but is about behaviour

Onboarding is a field where we break slightly with the usual logic. Normally we start by asking what people should do differently, and design our way towards that. When a new employee starts, we begin somewhere else. We begin with information.

Even so, it ends up being about the same thing as all other learning: that people can do the right thing in practice, and that they feel part of the place at the same time.

The information has two sides, and one is harder than the other.

One is the practical: pay, working hours, sickness absence, parental leave. Most people get on top of that quickly, because it is concrete and can be looked up.

The other is the culture and the feelings: feeling welcome, sensing the community, and understanding what it means to work exactly here. That part cannot be looked up.

And this is where the friction sits. Far too often, new employees are met by an overstuffed staff handbook or a bombardment of slides. The order is sender-oriented, the volume overwhelms, and culture and values drown in rules.

Why three days do not make a block candle

Learning can be compared to making a candle. You dip a wick in hot wax, and a layer settles. Then you lift it out, and the layer cools. Then you dip again.

If you hold the wick in the hot wax for too long, the layers melt off again. What you had just built up disappears.

Many organisations do exactly that with onboarding. They hire an employee, send off three days of training or hours of e-learning in the first week, and expect a finished candle after three days. The wick has not had time to cool. Most of it melts away before it has a chance to set.

And there is one more thing about the image. What sticks depends not so much on what you dip into, as on who you dip. A person with experience from the field gets a thicker layer than one who meets the material for the first time. It is the same onboarding, but it is not the same learning.

So dosage is not a detail. It is the whole point.

The question is not what a new employee ought to know in total. The question is: what must they be able to do on day 1? What must they be able to do in the first week? And what do they only need to be able to do after a month, when they have landed enough for it to make sense?

Small layers, drop by drop, close to the situation where they will be used. That beats one big broadcast that drowns in noise.

Push and pull

In How People Learn, Nick Shackleton-Jones distinguishes between push and pull.

Push is when we start from what we want to say: policies, systems, rules. Pull arises when we start from what people themselves experience as important, and give them something to draw on when they need it.

Push is the sender’s agenda. Pull is the receiver’s felt need.

That does not mean we should never push. The rules do have to be said, and some of them have to be said early. But when we push, it works far better if we start in the receiver’s world. What is the new joiner thinking about in the first week? What feels awkward or unsafe? Often it is a question of order: start with what people themselves experience as relevant, and weave the requirements and formalities in afterwards.

That takes courage, because it usually means we have to communicate less. Many organisations believe that more information is always the answer, and end up with long courses and thick manuals that nobody asked for.

Think about what you do yourself when the router at home stops working. You google it. You scroll straight down to the answer. If it is a video, you skip ahead to the point where the solution is shown. You overcome quite a lot of effort to get to the answer, because you want it yourself.

Now imagine that in that situation you were not allowed to skip ahead. That you had to watch a director say at the start that it was important that you watched the video. That you had to watch the whole video through in an order someone else had decided, before you were allowed to solve the problem. It would feel completely wrong. (And if you got a silly quiz at the end, then … well … sometimes I get a little tired.)

When motivation comes from within, it makes its own energy. When it has to be pushed from outside, we have to design something that lights a spark.

The art of onboarding is therefore to turn push into pull: to start with the questions the employees themselves have, and from there attach the formal requirements.

Herning: start with what they are most curious about

At Herning Municipality we built the onboarding so that culture and practical information were combined in an order that made sense to new employees. The municipality has more than 7,700 employees across more than 150 workplaces, so there was no alternative to each person being able to find their own way around.

We made small films in which employees themselves talked about a good day at work, and about how they handled it when something was difficult. That made the culture alive and credible. At the same time we made short, animated information videos on the practical subjects everyone would quickly need to know about: holiday, a child’s first sick day, sickness absence, parental leave.

We started with what the employees were most curious about, and used that as a hook to convey the necessary but less popular things as well. All the way through we pointed to where more could be found, so the information stayed short and could be dived into as needed.

Jane Bitsch Kehlet from Herning Municipality put it like this:

»We wanted to give a nuanced picture of the many different tasks we handle as a municipal workplace, and at the same time signal that with a job in Herning Municipality you are not just employed at a single workplace. You are also part of something bigger. At the same time it was important to us to show that through concrete examples, and not by presenting the new employee with large organisation charts.«

Jane Bitsch Kehlet, Herning Municipality

OK Plus: colleagues as the sender

At OK Plus we faced a different version of the same task. Young employees had to be onboarded into a very practical job. It was about things as concrete as turning up on time, looking presentable and being dressed for the work. But we also knew it could quickly come to feel like a pile of tedious information if it was delivered the wrong way.

So we asked ourselves: who will the young people experience as a credible sender of these messages? The answer was their own colleagues.

We travelled the whole country, from North Zealand to Nakskov, from North Jutland to Funen, and involved employees locally. They got a list of questions and filmed each other in small teams. The videos were shot in portrait format, so they could be watched straight on the phone.

When a colleague your own age says »Turn up on time, so the next person can go home«, it becomes credible. Far more than if it had come from a manager or an animated character.

It became one of the onboarding courses we have had the very best feedback on. Concrete, honest and at eye level.

The sender matters more than you think

The two examples have the same thing in common: the message has more legitimacy when it comes from close by. From the nearest manager, the local professional, the colleague with credibility.

That is worth remembering in large organisations. An employee at a school or in home care does not necessarily think of working »for the municipality«. They work at their school or their care home. An email from the town hall can easily feel distant if it is not placed in a local frame.

And then there are the small things. We remember what feels meaningful or slightly unexpected. A handwritten welcome note to a new employee can sink in deeper than 40 slides of HR rules. A short, honest video from a colleague can be stronger than a whole series of modules. Authenticity beats graphics.

That also says something about the choice of format. Video is strong when it has to convey tone, people and legitimacy. It is rarely good as a replacement for a reference work. If you need to find the rule on a child’s second sick day a year and a half after you started, a short, searchable text is better than a film.

What is worth measuring

Most onboarding courses are measured on completion. That number says that people have been there, not that anything has become easier.

More interesting questions: do the new joiners find the answer on the day they need it? Do managers get fewer of the same questions three months in? Are the films watched again after the first week, or only in the first week? And if you ask them after a month, do they feel part of the place?

You do not need an evaluation design to get started. A quick count says more than a hundred smileys. The only wrong measurement is no measurement.

In short

Onboarding rarely succeeds by telling everything on day one. It succeeds by giving the right thing at the right time, from a sender people believe.

Three things that usually move the most:

Start with their questions, not with your structure. What is a new joiner thinking about in the first week? Start there, and weave the rules in afterwards.

Dose in layers. Day 1, week 1, month 1. What is not needed in the first week should not take up space in the first week. It just has to be findable on the day it becomes relevant.

Let people tell the human part. The culture cannot be written in a policy. It can be shown by someone who works there.

And if the induction day is too long, it is rarely the programme that needs tightening. It is usually because half of what is on it belongs three weeks from now.