After more than a decade in the food service industry, my sister-in-law Jessica knows a thing or two about onboarding from both sides of the table.
“Onboarding typically means bringing a new employee up to speed and training them on the work they’ll do,” Jessica shared with me. “But that can make someone feel like a pawn in a process, not a valued new contributor. When I train someone, I try to make them feel welcome, comfortable, and appreciated—not just employed.”
She has a point. Looking back on my own experiences where managers onboarded me or I onboarded others, I realize that most processes were designed to benefit the employer far more than the employee, squandering early opportunities to make new hires feel supported, invite their contributions, and develop their strengths.
The dilemma with onboarding processes
While interns were often invited to provide constructive feedback, new full-time employees rarely were. After their HR orientations and obligatory “fly-on-the-wall” shadowing experiences, they were handed laptops and ID cards and put straight to work. If hiring is now truly talent acquisition, hiring managers should reflect that mindset by actively encouraging, promoting, and empowering the talented people they’ve worked so hard to find.
“People join companies to make an impact and grow,” Monica Federico, a London-based leadership career coach, told me. “But onboarding that feels obligatory can quickly diminish their motivation.”
The connection between onboarding and motivation is well-documented
According to the Society for Human Resource Management, employees who feel they had a supportive onboarding experience are 69 percent more likely to remain with the company for at least three years. Another study by BambooHR found that employees who feel they had an effective onboarding experience are 18 times more likely to feel committed to the organization.
So, how do we shift onboarding from passive shadowing and information dumps to a more meaningful process? Here are four ways to make new hires feel appreciated, not assimilated.
1. Allow new hires to tell their stories.
Go beyond quick introductions at a new hire’s first meeting. Invite them to share their career journeys, lessons learned, projects they’re proud of, the kind of work that energizes them, and what drew them to your organization. Hearing interesting work-related details about a new hire fosters strong connections with the team. It also reminds everyone that every new hire brings unique value.
“One of the biggest mistakes an employer could make when hiring someone new is to treat the whole onboarding process as some purely transactional exercise,” said Lucas Botzen, founder of the HR platform Rivermate, in an interview with Business.com. “[Onboarding] includes not just integrating the employee into the company culture but making them feel valuable from day one.”
If a new employee brings unique insights or standout skills, invite them to share in a meeting. This degree of participation accelerates their integration and reinforces their value to the team, which is highly motivating.
2. Don’t just check in, ask how they can contribute.
If you schedule shadowing meetings for a new hire, don’t just hand them a schedule and call it a day. Also, avoid only asking meeting leaders for their impressions of new hires without also hearing from new hires themselves.
Schedule brief check-ins after each session. Use this time to answer questions and explore what resonated with them. Also, discuss how their skills might contribute to current or future work. This extra step reinforces the connection between their skills and purpose, validating the hire and signaling that their contributions matter.
3. Customize the process.
Too often, onboarding follows a generic formula: Meet X people, attend Y meetings, complete Z paperwork. However, that approach rarely reflects your new hires’ unique skills, ambitions, and talents.
“A common pitfall is ‘one-size-fits-all’ thinking, such as using the same onboarding template for a trainee and a senior director, even though their needs, expectations, and capabilities are vastly different,” Federico explained. “A new hire’s unique insights and capabilities can get overlooked by managers too focused on making the process efficient or steering it to meet their own needs.”
Does your new account executive have a design background? Connect them with the creative team. Does your HR hire love writing? Introduce them to someone in communications. Onboarding isn’t just orientation; it’s a chance to activate each hire’s unique potential.
“Customize onboarding experiences to reflect not only the role but the individual,” said Amit Doshi, founder and CEO of MyTurn, a cybersecurity talent acquisition platform, in a Business.com interview. “These personal touches can transform a new hire into a long-term, loyal employee.”
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Most onboarding processes were designed to benefit the employer far more than the employee.