Drinking from a Fire Hose
Have you ever pictured the first day, at your company, from the new employee’s side of the desk?
They’re brand new. They know no one. Yet somehow they’re expected to absorb hours of information, navigate a benefits portal, review a code of conduct, learn the names of forty+ coworkers (they’ll likely forget by lunch), and tour a building they couldn’t find their way out of in an emergency! We hand them all of it on day one and call it onboarding.
It isn’t onboarding. It’s drinking from a fire hose. And worse, it feels like a test…one they’re bound to fail!
Most companies treat onboarding as an information-transfer problem. Follow the checklist, get the documents signed, the laptop provisioned, the policies acknowledged, and the training modules completed. Check the boxes and the employee is considered 'onboarded.' As a result, organizations optimize for speed and completeness. How quickly can we make someone productive? How fast can we cross everything off the list?
But ask anyone you respect about their first week at a new company and they won’t tell you about the benefits portal. They’ll tell you whether anyone ate lunch with them. Whether they had to ask three times where the restroom was. Whether their manager remembered they were starting or whether they sat at a desk for an hour while someone scrambled to find their login credentials.
People remember how it felt to be new. More often than not, they remember feeling alone in a crowd while holding a binder nobody had time to explain.
We think about onboarding much the way we think about welcoming a new member into a family. When someone is at their most vulnerable, brand new, uncertain, and trying to find their footing, that’s precisely the moment to offer a little extra attention, not a thicker binder.
The first ninety days are not primarily about transferring information. They’re about creating a sense of belonging. Does this employee come to believe they made the right choice? Do they begin to feel these are their people? That question is often answered in the first two weeks, and it’s answered through hundreds of small moments that never appear on an onboarding checklist.
Here’s what’s at stake when a company gets it wrong. The decision to leave a company is often made long before the decision to start looking for another job. An employee who spends week one feeling like an inconvenience rarely quits during week one. Instead, they file the experience away. They become a little less willing to give discretionary effort. They keep one foot closer to the door.
Then, eight months later, when they leave 'out of nowhere,' it wasn’t out of nowhere at all. It started on the first day, when the company unintentionally taught them that they were largely on their own.
You don’t fix this problem by renaming the program. We’ve seen companies give onboarding a warm, creative title while changing nothing underneath. A rose remains a rose regardless of what you call it. The experience doesn’t improve because the label did.
What changes the experience is slowing the fire hose down to a cup of water someone can actually drink. Spread information across weeks rather than drowning employees with it on day one, two, and three. Assign a real human being, not a portal, to answer the questions they’re hesitant to ask. Make sure the manager clears the morning, not just the calendar invitation. Ensure someone shares lunch with them.
None of these things are expensive. They simply require a decision that the first ninety days deserve care and attention.
Get that right and you don’t just improve retention. You help employees believe they made the right decision by joining your organization, and that may be the most productive thing a new employee can believe.
Get it wrong and no amount of information crammed into day one will overcome the lesson they learned instead: they were on their own from the start.