Insight Onboarding, integration and retention
You can already integrate someone who is not here yet
The first day can begin several weeks before the physical arrival.
THE USUAL OBJECTION
“We'll deal with that once she's here.”
The objection sounds reasonable. What is the point of explaining a job the person cannot yet see, a plant they have never set foot in, a team they do not know? Better to wait until everyone is together, in the real context.
The reasoning holds for the technical work. It holds far less for everything else, and everything else fills most of the first few weeks. Understanding what is expected of you, knowing who to turn to, working out whether it is acceptable to interrupt someone, learning that here you flag a delay rather than quietly making it up: none of that requires being on site.
What has to be experienced on site is rarer than people think.
WHAT DISTANCE MAKES POSSIBLE
It offers something day one never does: time.
Day one is a poor time to learn. The person is tired, often jet-lagged, surrounded by strangers, and busy making a good impression. They receive an amount of information they will not be able to retain, and they will not ask the questions that come to mind, because this is not the moment to look lost.
A session held three weeks earlier, remotely, takes place under the opposite conditions. The person is at home, available, with no audience to impress. They can come back to a question, ask another the next day, compare it with what they already know. And when a single session brings together several people who will arrive together, they start getting to know one another before leaving — which, on arrival, changes a great deal.
WHAT IT SHIFTS
Day one stops being a starting point.
When pre-arrival preparation has taken place, arrival changes in nature. It is no longer the moment when everything begins, but the moment when what has already been understood gets checked on site. The questions asked on day one are more precise, because the general ones were asked earlier. And the manager no longer spends the first week re-explaining the framework: they can work.
This does not remove surprises — a real plant never looks quite like what people said about it. But the gap then concerns details rather than the very nature of the work.
There is one condition, however. Pre-arrival preparation that amounts to broadcasting information reproduces, at a distance, the very flaw it claims to correct: a lot of content, little verification. What makes it useful is the space left for questions, and the fact that someone on the organization's side stays reachable between sessions. Without that, you have not integrated earlier: you have only sent the documents earlier.
What, in our first week, really requires being on site?
Everything left after that question can start earlier. Usually that is most of it.
This text goes deeper into one dimension of our expertise The full argument, the evidence and the possible forms of engagement are set out on the expertise page.
Onboarding, integration and retentionCONTINUE
Other insights on onboarding, integration and retention.
- Insight A good welcome can mask poor integration You can feel very well received and still spend a long time without understanding how to actually succeed in the work.
- Insight An organization does not retain people on its own A company can create an excellent workplace and still not be able, on its own, to build everything that makes people want to stay.
- Insight The departure is usually the last signal, not the first By the time the letter arrives, the story has usually started well before.
- Insight After recruitment, integration has already begun The contract may be signed while integration is only just beginning.