Onboarding Is a Program, Not a Checklist

In the last couple of years, I have talked with people who took new jobs and had a lousy onboarding experience. This happened at both small start-ups and huge corporations.

The start-ups’ excuse for poor onboarding was that they were too busy, things were changing too quickly, and figuring things out was part of the role. The large corporations had an onboarding process, but it was often hopelessly out of date and typically covered only what HR and corporate governance required, rather than helping people get their jobs done.

I believe providing good onboarding is absolutely critical and one of the best investments you can make. It transfers your culture early. It enables new employees to get up to speed quickly and feel productive, which leads to better retention. And because new hires see the organization with fresh eyes, their questions and stumbles show you where everyday practice has drifted from the culture you intend, so you can reinforce what’s working and stop what isn’t.

Make It a Program

Establishing effective onboarding isn’t a one-and-done project, and it isn’t a process that just runs. Effective onboarding should be a program that delivers long-term strategic value. The distinction matters:

A project is something we do once.
A process is how we do things repeatedly.
A program is a coordinated set of projects that together achieve a bigger goal.

Applied to onboarding: writing the welcome email or automating developer setup are projects. The first-week checklist is a process. The program is the ongoing ownership, feedback, and review that keep those pieces current and aligned with your culture.

Culture

An organization’s culture, the identity of the team, is incredibly powerful. Smart organizations explicitly define their culture and build regular practices (habits) into the life of the company to reinforce the desired culture. A common aphorism along these lines:

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, operations for lunch, and technology for dinner.

The best companies I have worked for had an intentional culture. They identified core values and principles and then thought through how to manifest them in day-to-day work. A good example is Tellme Networks, which stopped being a stand-alone company 20 years ago. I regularly hear from former colleagues who say, “It was the best place I ever worked.” These are people who have also worked at well-regarded companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, NVIDIA, Netflix, and Amazon.

Tellme’s leadership thought about company culture as it was being formed. New employees were introduced to the key cultural pillars in their first days. On a regular basis, the culture team (which included a range of people, from executives to individual contributors) would meet to reflect on the company’s culture and examine current practices, asking: “Are we building a good culture? Are we living into our culture? Are there things we need to re-examine or change?”

Onboarding is where an intentional culture first becomes real for a new hire. Their first few weeks show them which values the team actually lives and which ones only exist on a slide. If onboarding doesn’t teach your culture on purpose, new hires will learn it from whatever they happen to observe.

Roles

Effective onboarding should come from the top, but it can be built from the bottom up. I have seen effective onboarding programs started by newly hired individual contributors who didn’t want the next new hire to have as difficult a time as they did. They helped onboard the next hire, and things grew from there.

Executive Sponsor

The best onboarding programs have executive sponsorship that goes beyond the “people” team. It’s best when senior leadership understands how important effective onboarding is and makes it part of the company culture.

If you work somewhere the executives don’t get it… that’s not OK, but you can still smooth out people’s onboarding experience and get a program started.

The executive sponsor should meet regularly with the team running the onboarding program to discuss its progress, victories, and struggles. I also recommend that the sponsor meet with people who have recently completed onboarding, especially those who had a particularly good or bad experience, to get a sense of the “ground truth.”

Orchestrator

There should be one person who is responsible for the onboarding program. In most companies this isn’t a full-time position; it’s one of several roles the orchestrator plays. In my experience, it’s best for the orchestrator to be respected, savvy, and considered “senior” by their coworkers. It’s a great role for developing people into effective leaders. It’s also very important for the orchestrator to have good access to the organization’s leadership, so the program they build reflects the company’s culture.

Guide

Putting a human face on the onboarding process is critical. The guide is a non-judgmental person a new employee can go to with whatever questions they have. The guide doesn’t have to be particularly senior; they just need to know the company well enough to answer questions or to know who can.

Besides guiding the new employee, the guide is responsible for capturing gaps in the onboarding material. They are generally responsible to fix the material. When they feel the are unable to make the update themselves, or get someone else to quickly update the material, they inform the orchestrator and executive sponsor with a request to have someone assigned to the improvement.

In smaller organizations, the most recently onboarded person can be an effective guide. They will have empathy for the new employee, will likely anticipate what might be difficult, and hopefully are far enough along to represent the culture accurately and to know who can answer the questions they can’t.

Hiring Manager

The manager is accountable for each new hire’s success. They make sure day one is ready, hold the first one-on-one, set clear 30/60/90-day goals, and check in often enough to catch problems early. The orchestrator owns the program; the manager owns the experience of the person in front of them.

Keep Material Current

It’s very common for onboarding material to get out of date, so I encourage continuous improvement. The best onboarding material isn’t only used when someone new joins the company; it becomes a repository of useful information that people refer to regularly.

I encourage keeping the onboarding material in some sort of version-controlled system that anyone can update. I think it works best when anyone can make a change the moment they discover something, with the orchestrator (and perhaps the guides) empowered to roll back changes that are wrong. Think of it as a wiki-like social contract: the focus is on keeping the material useful and capturing important information as it’s discovered or needed, without waiting.

Alternatively, anyone can submit changes, which are then approved or rejected by the orchestrator and whomever they designate (likely the guides and members of the culture team, if one exists). If updates require an approver, the approver needs to respond quickly; rapid feedback and low friction are important. I have seen onboarding material grow stale when the orchestrator is the only one making changes.

One of the best ways to keep the material fresh is a simple rule: the most recent hire owns the onboarding material, supervised by the orchestrator, until the next person joins. Tell each new hire this on day one. It gives them every reason to push the current owner to fix the gaps they hit, because anything still wrong when their onboarding ends becomes theirs to fix. It also pairs naturally with the guide role, since the most recent hire is often the best guide for the next one.

The executive sponsor and the orchestrator should review the onboarding material quarterly, paying close attention to feedback from people who have been onboarded recently.

Measure It

A program should deliver strategic value, so decide how you’ll know whether it does. A few simple signals are enough:

Time to first meaningful contribution (for engineers, time to their first production change)
A short survey at 30 and 90 days asking new hires how ready they feel and what was missing
Retention through the first year
The manager’s view of how quickly the new hire became effective

Look at these alongside the material in the quarterly review.

A Common Sequence

Here is a sequence that has worked well for me. Adapt the details to your organization, but give every step a named owner so nothing depends on someone remembering.

Before Day One

Reach out to the new employee to find out whether they have any special IT needs.
Make sure their laptop, accounts, badge, and access to key tools are ready and tested before they arrive, and get paperwork done ahead of time so day one isn’t spent on forms.
Have team members welcome them and say they’re looking forward to working together.
Send detailed first-day instructions: location, access, etc.
Share a roadmap of what their first week will look like.
Assign their guide (see Roles). For a senior or specialized hire, also pair them with a senior peer who will spend time with them in the first few weeks and check in periodically through the first quarter.
Bonus points: give them access to a portal where they can learn more about the company, their coworkers, etc.
Have a real, well-scoped first assignment ready, so they can contribute something meaningful in their first week or two.

Welcome Message

The first email in their inbox should be a welcome message that serves as a “getting started” touchpoint. It should include:

Links and instructions for getting to the most important collaboration tools
A list of regular meetings, ideally already on their calendar
A link to the team’s “Culture” document

First Meeting with the Manager

Establishing good rapport between a new employee and their manager is critical. Ideally, this meeting happens within the new employee’s first few hours.

Sometimes the manager can’t get significant time with the new employee because of company-wide orientation or training sessions. In that case, the manager should at least find time to welcome the new team member personally; lunch often works well.

The “full” welcome meeting should cover the following topics:

Expectations for 1:1s
Schedule ongoing 1:1s
Discuss effective, timely communication: what works best for the new hire?
Share how you like to work, and ask how they prefer to give and receive feedback
Explain any specific training that applies to their role
Discuss sending a welcome email to the company, division, or team, depending on the company’s communication norms, and talk with the new hire about what the message should highlight
Provide a list of the people the new hire will work closely with and the leaders they should get to know, and arrange personal introductions

Orientation Meeting

This could be part of the first meeting with the manager, but it will likely need to be a separate meeting to avoid overloading the new employee.

Explain the department’s working hours and expectations
Give an overview of the company’s structure
Review company priorities (OKRs and KPIs) and how their role fits in

Role-Specific Orientation

Every role needs an orientation to its own tools and practices, whether that’s the sales pipeline, the support queue, or the design system. For someone joining a software development team, that means a technical orientation covering:

An overview of the technical architecture, so they understand at a high level how everything fits together. I have found this incredibly important!!
Developer experience: how to set up a development environment (ideally highly automated)
CI/CD infrastructure and practices
How code review, on-call, and incident response work
A small, real change they ship to production in their first week, to exercise the whole path from laptop to production

Second Week

Review the job description together and refine it based on what you have both learned in the first week
Set 30/60/90-day goals (general work assignments and expectations)

First 90 Days

Check in against the 30/60/90-day goals at each milestone, not only at the end
Have the guide check in weekly for the first month, then every few weeks
At the end of the first quarter, hold a short retrospective: what helped, what was missing, and what was wrong. Feed the answers straight into the onboarding material.
Mark the end of onboarding explicitly, including handing ownership of the material to this person

Remote and Hybrid Hires

Everything above gets harder when the new hire isn’t in the room. They can’t overhear conversations or turn to a neighbor with a quick question, so make the informal parts explicit: schedule short video introductions with key colleagues, have the guide check in daily during the first week, write down the norms that in-office staff absorb without noticing, and if you can, bring them together with the team in person early on.

Start With the Next Hire

You don’t need a full program to begin. Pick an orchestrator, write down what the next new hire needs in their first week, assign them a guide, and afterward ask them what was missing. Do that a few times and you have the start of a program, and a culture new people can see from their first day.