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- Issue 42
Issue 42
Onboarding: An Organizational Performance Lever
Chris Hagood
June 19, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
In partnership with
Table of Contents
Opening Salvo
Most companies treat onboarding as a checklist. Fill out forms, attend a few sessions, meet your manager = done.
When onboarding is rushed or superficial, the damage is long-lasting. Engagement dips. Productivity slows. Turnover creeps in quietly. Worse, poor onboarding can set the tone for a culture of confusion and detachment.
Onboarding is not a one-week orientation. It’s a multi-phase integration process. It shapes how quickly someone ramps up, how they interpret the culture, and whether they see a future in your organization. When you underinvest, you pay for it through attrition, diminished engagement, and lost productivity, costs that rarely get traced back to week one. Unless you get "lucky" and an introspective departer calls it out in their exit interview.
Practical Personas (with a tinge of hyperbole)
The Firehose Onboarder: They overload new hires with information, leaving them overwhelmed and unsure what matters. No prioritization. No context. Just content.
The Passive Onboarder: They assume shadowing and time will do the work. There’s no structured plan, just thoughts, prayers, and a Slack channel.
The Integrative Leader: They pace the experience, tie tasks to purpose, and actively shape how new hires connect with culture and colleagues.
Watch for These Signs of Weak Onboarding:
New hires ask the same foundational questions weeks in.
They avoid speaking up in meetings due to cultural uncertainty.
Performance expectations are unclear or inconsistently enforced.
Early engagement drops sharply after 30 days.
If your onboarding isn’t deliberately paced and relationally grounded, you’re not onboarding, you’re hoping. It's as obnoxious as it is true: hope is not a strategy.
The updated Opening Salvo + Personas format is |
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Talent Management 101 (TM101)
The Hidden Costs of Poor Onboarding
Effective onboarding is an organizational performance lever. Done well, it improves retention, accelerates productivity, and strengthens culture. Done poorly, it creates misalignment that can take months (or years) to correct.
What Poor Onboarding Costs You:
Time: New hires take longer to ramp up and require more manager involvement.
Engagement: Unclear expectations and weak cultural signals erode early motivation.
Reputation: Word spreads, internally and externally, about chaotic onboarding.
Retention: The highest risk of voluntary turnover is in the first 90 days.
How to Improve It Immediately:
Create a 90-day roadmap: Go beyond week one and provide clear, role-specific milestones.
Assign onboarding buddies: Peer connections increase confidence and reduce ramp time.
Build cultural fluency: Don’t just explain policies, teach how decisions get made and who holds influence.
Check in early and often: Address confusion before it calcifies into disengagement.
Onboarding is your first real promise-keeping moment. If you get it wrong, you're not just missing out, you’re starting behind.
The Plug
This newsletter is brought to you by AstutEdge, a consultancy dedicated to developing and deploying a people-first talent management culture. We solve both obvious and hidden challenges by optimizing performance, engagement, and development across the entire HR, People, and Talent spectrum.
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