How to Design Employee Onboarding That Scales
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We've all seen the click-bait posts about bad onboarding, like: "80% of new hires who receive poor onboarding plan to quit — especially if they're remote workers".
Or my personal favorite, "These stats about on-boarding will make you gouge your eyes out with a rusty spike".
Yes, those are real.
It makes sense why they grab our attention. Workplace research shows structured onboarding is meaningfully linked to higher retention. And companies invest heavily in talent acquisition, so they want to prioritize retention.
It's no surprise that "onboarding" is often the scapegoat for attrition, and sometimes rightfully so.
Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes or shortcuts to remedying a poor onboarding experience, especially if you don't have dedicated resources for it.
Onboarding is a complex system, requiring coordination across corporate functions and stakeholders. That's why I'm going to walk you through how to design an onboarding program that scales, whether you're at a startup where there's no formal onboarding or an enterprise adapting to evolving organizational demands.
The 4 phases of onboarding
I like to think about onboarding as a new hire's journey with the company, from when they formally accept their offer to when they're performing at the level expected of them in their role.
That definition is intentionally broad, and subjective. My onboarding at a new company might be shorter than a peer's at the same company. That's to be expected.
So instead of breaking down onboarding into a fixed timeline, I want you to think about four phases: preboarding, orientation, role integration, and ongoing development.
If you're reading this and thinking, surely I'm not expected to be responsible for all of this, that's precisely the point. Onboarding is a complex system, so you have to figure out how to better orchestrate it. That starts with a needs analysis.
Evaluate your onboarding
Before you do anything else, map out the onboarding experience at your company. Specifically:
- What's actually happening?
- How do you know that? Is feedback being collected, and if so, where and can you get access to it?
- Who is responsible for what? Are there variations by region, role, or remote/hybrid status?
Note: if you don't have a formal onboarding program, there's still some version of preboarding, orientation, role integration, and ongoing development happening in your org. New hires are somehow getting paperwork, a laptop, and the access they need to get started. That's the system, even if it's undocumented.
Inputs to collect
As part of this mapping exercise, look for data across four categories:
- Feedback from new hires: new hire surveys, engagement surveys filtered by tenure, onboarding session feedback, or third-party platforms like Glassdoor or Blind
- Feedback from managers: manager surveys, focus groups, performance reviews, or via HR Business Partners
- Learning data: completion and engagement data from an LMS or Learning Record Store
- Business outcomes: early attrition rates, time-to-productivity, or performance goal data
An LLM, especially one integrated into your company's tech stack, can help you surface and synthesize these inputs into patterns. Prompt it to segment the data by role, region, manager, or cohort, then categorize common themes like access, manager support, workflow clarity, and learning delivery.
Your goal is to separate what you can control from what you can't. That way you can prioritize your actions and have productive conversations with other stakeholders who share ownership for onboarding.
Define shared ownership
Even if you set up your portion of onboarding well, the new hire experience hinges on the overall experience. So once you've mapped things out and have data, you need to align with the other people who are responsible.
Separate onboarding into three layers, each with its own owners:
- Operational setup: accounts and device access, HRIS setup, payroll and benefits, compliance training
- Shared enablement: company context, operating cadence, where knowledge lives, tooling norms, and the policies that show up in day-to-day work
- Role readiness: role outcomes, coaching and feedback, stakeholder maps
Use an accountability framework of your choosing to assign owners across these layers, and determine where there's friction. Typically that's in the handoffs: moving a new hire from Talent Acquisition to People Ops and IT, or from People Ops and IT to the hiring manager.
Your job is to surface the problems with data so the people responsible can get to work on it.
Set an orientation cadence
At this point, you have a prioritized list of concerns to address and you've separated out the tasks you're responsible for. Now you're ready to (re)design an onboarding program. And the first step is perhaps the most controversial: determining an orientation cadence, whether that's weekly, biweekly, or monthly.
Orientation is a non-negotiable part of onboarding, whether your employees are field or office workers, and yes, that includes in-person, remote, and hybrid. But before you can craft a meaningful orientation experience, you need to get everyone to agree on a schedule.
Easier said than done.
You'll need to position your recommendation to Talent, IT, and HR/People leaders (plus your own leadership). An orientation schedule makes the program more sustainable for everyone. IT can order the correct number of laptops and have them provisioned in advance, HR can ensure new hires are set up in the HRIS so they have access to benefits enrollment and payroll. And an orientation schedule ensures that every new hire has a consistent and equitable experience regardless of where they join or who their manager is.
Anticipate pushback by clarifying what's changing and why. Also, be sure to note how exceptional cases will be handled. Inevitably, there will be a compelling business case or personal constraints necessitating an off-cycle start. Be prepared with a plan for what happens in those circumstances.
Note: the proposed schedule should account for regional holidays and differences in workweeks across countries.
Design your orientation
Once everyone is aligned on how often orientation will be offered, you can start to design and develop the learning experience using the data you gathered from your needs analysis.
Here are six best practices I recommend when crafting your orientation:
- Figure out the "sweet spot" for orientation length. At some companies, you'd be lucky to squeeze in an hour on Day 1, at others you might have the luxury of a week. Know your audience.
- Maximize the time. Onboarding is most successful when it combines formal and on-the-job learning, and orientation may be one of the few times when you'll have a captive audience for formal learning.
- Design for inclusivity. If you have a distributed workforce, you'll want to make sure orientation is accessible to everyone, whether they're in person on Day 1 or attending virtually.
- Enable hiring managers. Loop them into onboarding by sharing what their new hire will experience in orientation, and providing them with structured guidance and tools like a 30-60-90 day template.
- Formalize a buddy program. Many hiring managers pair up a new hire with someone else on their team for support, so create some lightweight guidance with recommendations to ensure it's a successful experience.
- Pilot before you commit. Whether you want to try out a new workshop or experiment with a variation of the day's agenda, you'll benefit from collecting feedback before committing.
Note: I often hear from teams that they're pressed to reduce live delivery time during orientation, whether to reduce costs or prioritize other activities. Video training can support these goals, but it should be used judiciously. Some things, like benefits and IT trainings, can be better in video format, as they allow new hires to review them at their discretion (just build in calendar placeholders for those activities).
If you're curious, here's an example of a software training. You can also find other use cases for onboarding videos here.
Support role integration and ongoing development
After you've designed your orientation, you can pivot to supporting role integration and ongoing development. In these phases, you're often more of a resource than a director. That's because most integration and ongoing development happens on the job, so you'll want to determine if and how you can deliver learning in the flow of daily work.
This is highly dependent on the number of employees you support and the resources you have available. I recommend starting with my guide to new employee training (feel free to reach out on LinkedIn with any questions).
Measure your onboarding program
While you were gathering information for your needs analysis, you hopefully mapped out current data sources that will help you measure your onboarding program moving forward.
You'll likely need to revise any measurement tools to reflect the orientation and ongoing development experiences you've designed. These should also be tailored to capture any changes you've made to improve the experience based on previous patterns.
For instance, if new hires flagged in a Week 1 pulse survey that their managers were often unprepared for their arrival, and you responded by developing a manager onboarding toolkit, you'd want to add a question that directly measures whether that intervention worked, like: "My manager was prepared and available during my first week." (For more pulse survey questions, see this guide.)
Pulse surveys are especially helpful for catching issues before they become bigger problems (handoffs are a good example: they often surface in pulse data before anyone escalates them formally). Just be sure to include open-ended questions so you can capture more nuance.
A brief pulse survey will give you snapshots of how things are going, but they'll need to be coupled with impact measurement for you to demonstrate training ROI. Most importantly, be sure to capture the employee metrics the business cares about, like retention, engagement, and performance against KPIs.
Amy Vidor, PhD is a Learning & Development Evangelist at Synthesia, where she researches learning trends and helps organizations apply AI at scale. With 15 years of experience, she has advised companies, governments, and universities on skills.
Frequently asked questions
What is the onboarding process for a new employee?
The onboarding process is the structured journey a new hire takes from offer acceptance to full competency in their role. It typically covers four phases: preboarding, orientation, role integration, and ongoing development.
Each phase has different goals, owners, and activities, and the process works best when accountability is shared across HR, IT, managers, and enablement teams.
What are the four phases of onboarding?
Most practitioners break onboarding into four phases. Preboarding covers everything from offer acceptance to Day 1. Orientation spans Day 1 through the first few weeks and is typically a consistent experience across roles.
Role integration covers roughly the first 90 days, when a new hire begins contributing to business goals. Ongoing development picks up from there, bridging the gap between first contribution and full competency in the role.
Onboarding can last up to a year, though it varies by role.
What is a needs analysis in onboarding?
A needs analysis is the process of mapping what's actually happening in your onboarding program before you redesign it. It involves collecting feedback from new hires and managers, reviewing learning and business outcome data, and identifying patterns across roles, regions, and cohorts.
The goal is to separate what you can control from what you can't, and prioritize accordingly.
How do you measure whether onboarding was successful?
Start with pulse surveys at Week 1 and Day 30 to capture how new hires are experiencing the program. Pair those with business outcome data like early attrition rates and time-to-productivity.
The most useful measurement approach ties survey questions directly to the outcomes you're trying to improve, so you can demonstrate whether specific interventions are working.
How can I use video training in onboarding?
Video works best for onboarding content that needs to be consistent across locations and roles, and that new hires benefit from being able to revisit at their own pace. Good candidates include compliance training, tool walkthroughs, benefits overviews, and manager guidance.
It's less suited to moments that require connection and discussion, so use it to free up live time for those interactions. For examples and practical guidance, see our guide to onboarding videos.
