August 8, 2026

Read Time - 4 minutes

Only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job onboarding new employees.

~ Gallup, Why the Onboarding Experience Is Key for Retention

I have sat through the two-day onboarding extravaganza that does everything - benefits, breakout rooms, and branded tote bags.

I have also experienced the opposite. A flash drive, a key to my office, and the catch-all phrase. Kind, well-meant, and often useless to someone still wandering the halls in their first week:

“Let me know if you need anything.”

One approach gives a new person nothing to sort. The other gives them everything at once. Either way we made them do the sorting, and that is the one job they are least equipped for in their first few weeks.

For the record, I’ve been guilty of doing both of these with new hires.

We often roll out the red carpet for the interview. The dinner, the campus tour, the carefully chosen colleagues at lunch. Then they accept, and we roll it back up.

There is a better way.

Onboarding is hospitality

This is not just about setting a new person up for success. How we receive someone is a statement about us. The interview is where we are at our best on purpose. The first few weeks are where they find out what we are like when nobody is trying.

Which is why real onboarding cannot be handed upward. HR or the provost’s office can process a person, but only a unit, the place where that new faculty or staff member will show up every day, can truly welcome one.

Central HR sequences for the whole payroll. We sequence for one. We are the ones who know what actually matters in someone’s first week and what can wait until October. Which three people they should meet before they ever need something from them. Which of our processes is far more complicated than it looks, and which person can help if they get stuck.

Talya Bauer’s onboarding research for the SHRM Foundation names four C’s: Compliance, Clarification, Culture, and Connection. HR is built for the first one. Paperwork, benefits, the signature on the policy acknowledgment. But culture and connection are not documents. They are the hallway, the faculty meeting, the first time someone watches us disagree with a colleague. Those cannot be shipped over from another building.

Robert Boice studied new faculty across three campuses and found that only 5 to 9 percent got established quickly. He called them quick starters. By their second year they were comfortable in the classroom and publishing enough to be on pace for tenure.

Everyone else was buried in class prep. 13 to 27 hours a week of it, which leaves nothing for writing.

The difference was conversation. Quick starters spent about 4 hours a week talking with colleagues about teaching, and that is how they got prep down to roughly 90 minutes for every hour in the classroom. Those recovered hours went to their own scholarship.

Nobody assigned them those conversations. They went looking. Most people will not, and we usually do not find out until the tenure file lands.

What preparing for someone looks like

Run everything past one question.

Does this person absolutely need this right now? If not, it waits. Almost everything on your list is important. Very little of it is Monday.

Sort what’s left into Day 1, Week 1, and Month 1.

Day 1 is what they need to walk in and start. Their assignment and their materials. An office that is clean and ready, their name already on the door. And every system they will touch, requested and working before they arrive: the LMS, the SIS, the shared drive, the budget system, the room scheduler, the travel portal. All of that usually takes longer than we think, and every missing login is a small message that says we were not ready for you.

Week 1 is what they need to make the week work. Routines, logistics, the handful of processes they will run into by Friday.

Month 1 is what they need to get good at the job. Teaching development, advising protocols, the evaluation timeline, the events already on the calendar.

Everything else waits for the next meeting, and we say that plainly, so people stop hoarding agenda items.

Tell them what this place cares about.

The instinct is to front-load policy, because policy is concrete and we can check it off. But what shapes how someone works here is not on any form. What do we value in this unit? What are we most proud of? How do we take care of our students, and how do we try to take care of each other? What are we still working on?

Say those out loud in the first week, with examples. Someone handed forty forms still has no idea what kind of place they joined.

Make the introductions. Do not just give the names.

Not “the office,” not “HR,” not “my door is always open.” Name the people inside and outside the unit this person will actually work with. The registrar contact who fixes what the system will not. The grants administrator. The chair in the department they will co-teach with. The vendor rep. Then set up the meetings yourself, so the arranging is not theirs to do. Those introductions are the real welcome.

Hand them the operational calendar.

The academic year laid out on one page. When the schedule is due. When assessment reports are due. When budget requests open and close. When the enrollment crunch hits. When evaluations happen. Faculty need it. Staff need it more, because their year is mostly deadlines they have never seen before.

Bottom Line

We do not have to roll the carpet up.

A person’s first two weeks tell them more about us than the interview ever did. They learn whether we plan. Whether we notice. Whether the people here get taken care of when nobody is watching. They learn it before they have taught a single class or advised a single student.

None of this needs budget or permission. It needs somebody to sit down with a blank page and be intentional about the experience they want new hires to have.

The people we onboard well will not remember the agenda. They will remember that somebody thought about them before they arrived.

Try This Before Friday

Find the last person who joined your unit. Ask them one question: “What do you know now that you wish somebody had told you in your first week?”

Write down what they say. That list is your Day 1 bucket, and they just built it for you. Most of us have been sitting on it for years without asking.

That's it for today. Thanks for reading.

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