Onboarding: A first look at the company culture

Your first day at a new company isn’t just about starting work. You’ll meet new people, learn new names, develop new habits, and discover new approaches to your job. A new job means entering a new world and adapting to it as quickly as possible.

There’s a word that describes this process: onboarding. It’s about ensuring the newcomer understands how things work and finds their way without feeling out of place in the work environment.

While this process might seem limited to a few people signing a document, getting a computer and company phone line, and taking a short tour of the company, onboarding is much more than that.

Onboarding is a great time to understand the company’s communication style, the value placed on employees, and the company’s work culture.

What is onboarding and what isn’t?

Onboarding is more than just giving a new employee a tour of the facility or handing over the equipment they will use for work. It’s also a suitable way to explain how the company operates, how it manages its workflow, what the written and unwritten rules are, and the company culture.

While company information flows to the employee, during onboarding they learn what is expected of them, how to communicate with their team, and what role they will have within the corporate structure. In short, it’s about explaining to the new employee how things work there in a practical and unhurried way.

Therefore, onboarding is more than just a brief introduction on the first day of work and usually covers the first 90 days of a new job. While job-related information is conveyed to the new employee by an assigned mentor/facilitator, the aim is not to overwhelm the person with information, but to reduce the uncertainty they experience.

A well-planned onboarding program allows new employees to better understand the company without feeling like outsiders, while also helping them determine whether they can stay and be a permanent fixture.

Onboarding vs. Orientation

There’s another process often confused with onboarding: orientation.

While they’re generally thought to be the same, orientation focuses on how we’ll work together; it involves signing contracts, handing over the tools to be used for the job and explaining the rules and system. Orientation deals with the formal and technical aspects of the job, and information is quickly conveyed at this stage.

On the other hand, onboarding answers more subjective questions like how we’ll feel and how we’ll work together. It’s accurate to define orientation as the transfer of information, while onboarding is a process of getting used to and building relationships.

In one, you learn the job; in the other, you become part of it.

Planning a good onboarding strategy

Companies proudly talk about concepts like innovation, teamwork, and transparency; we even see social media posts, PR campaigns, and embellished LinkedIn posts about them.

Onboarding immediately lets the new employee know if these pronouncements have real-world relevance. Despite thousands of pages of slides or hundreds of pages of books, the best way to understand company culture is to observe daily behavior within the company.

When starting a new job, you pay attention to who greets you on your first day, how they answer your questions, what happens when you make a mistake, and who you can easily reach if needed. These seemingly small but crucial first impressions in the modern business world are the first clues to company culture.

A good onboarding strategy doesn’t begin the moment the employee walks through the door. The first details I can mention are ensuring that the employee has the appropriate equipment, access, and essential tools for their job description on their first day, and that a clear schedule is established showing them what to expect on their first day. These details give the person the feeling that their visit was planned and eliminate any potential uncertainties from the outset.

Turning a bad onboarding experience into a good

Onboarding isn’t just a set of actions designed to help a new employee adjust to the work environment; it also serves as a mirror for the company to present itself to the employee.

A well-planned onboarding process makes the company’s corporate culture visible, reinforces a sense of belonging, and plays a significant role in building mutual trust. Therefore, the employee understands the nature of the company’s structure better and in a shorter time.

I’ve talked about the positive aspects as if every company manages a great onboarding process, but I don’t want to finish without mentioning poorly managed onboarding.

Poor onboarding is full of uncertainty and accelerates talent loss, causes motivation to disappear at the very beginning and the first and most obvious thought that comes to the employee’s mind is that the job won’t last long.

The reason for poorly managed onboarding usually can’t be attributed to a single thing; small oversights and uncertainties accumulate to create a huge mountain.

For a newcomer, learning over time doesn’t seem like a very positive approach. I wouldn’t want to encounter something like this.

Giving this kind of response to a new employee means putting them in the background from day one. Acknowledging the problem of neglect and addressing it individually is the starting point for improvement.

There’s an important detail that employers often overlook: everything is new for a new employee. New office, new people, new rules…

Therefore, instead of saying I told you so, it’s more appropriate to ask a new employee, Was what I said truly understood?

Holding short feedback meetings with the new employee helps understand where the onboarding went wrong. Listening is the quickest way to get feedback at this stage and offers great insights to fix things.

The most obvious characteristic of bad onboarding is, in crude terms, leaving the new employee stranded.

To eliminate this problem, a mentor / facilitator from within the company is assigned to the new employee, and fundamental job concepts are conveyed through them; this is an important detail that strengthens the integration process. The goal here isn’t to teach everything at once, but to make the new employee feel they aren’t alone and to help them adjust to their new job.

Onboarding should be seen not just as an HR process, but as a strategic investment directly related to company culture. As with interpersonal relationships, the first impression of a company is the hardest one to change.

Whose responsibility is onboarding?

A common misconception about onboarding is that the process is solely the responsibility of HR. However, the success of a good onboarding process depends on the participation of the team the employee will be working with and the leaders who manage that team.

HR’s role in this process is perhaps only to establish the structure of the work, prepare the basic documentation, and minimize the possibility of the employee encountering uncertainties on their first day. This structure alone is not enough; since onboarding is not just about paperwork and procedures, HR must find ways to transform it into a consistent and sustainable experience for the company.

From the team’s perspective, onboarding is more than simply saying welcome to the new employee.

Creating an environment where the newcomer can comfortably ask questions, demonstrating the workflow through practices, including them in meetings, assigning small tasks, allowing room for error, and explaining unwritten company rules in a natural flow are all part of the team’s job.

These will make it easier for the new employee to see themselves as part of the team.

Referances and further read…

Main photo: Maja Segota, Unsplash

Other photos are created by Imagen4.