Key takeaways
- Most early departures are decided in the first two weeks, and they are usually about disorganisation, not pay.
- Prepare the desk, the access, the procedures and the first week's schedule before the person arrives.
- A written thirty, sixty and ninety-day plan with a named buddy and a weekly check-in is the whole method.
- Ask the new person what was confusing at day thirty, and fix the onboarding for the next hire.
An owner spends weeks finding the right person and then, on their first day, hands them a laptop that is not set up, a desk that was cleared that morning and the instruction to shadow whoever is free. By the end of week two the new hire has decided whether this is a company that has its act together, and the decision to leave in month four was mostly made then.
Onboarding is the cheapest retention tool a company has and the most neglected. We build onboarding plans as part of our SOPs and playbooks work and our hiring support, and the method below is what we install for companies across British Columbia.
Before day one
This takes a few hours per hire once the checklist exists, and the new person notices every item.
- Equipment set up, accounts created, access granted and tested, with the password manager and two-factor access in place.
- The first week's schedule written, hour by hour for the first two days and by half-day for the rest.
- The procedures for their role available in the place they will use them, and the scorecard for the role written in plain words.
- A named buddy who is not their manager, briefed on what to do.
- A short note from the owner, sent before they start, saying who they will meet and what the first month is for.
The first week
The first week is for context, not productivity. The owner spends an hour on the story of the company, the customers and what matters here. The manager walks through the role, the scorecard and the thirty, sixty and ninety-day plan. The buddy handles the questions that feel too small to ask a manager. The new person sits in on the daily huddle and the weekly meeting and sees how decisions are made.
By Friday they should have done one real piece of work, small and achievable, and had it reviewed kindly. People remember their first win.
Protect the manager's time for this week. If the manager is pulled onto a customer problem on day two, the new person learns that they are the lowest priority in the building.
Thirty, sixty, ninety
The plan sets what the person should know, be able to do and have delivered at each milestone, drawn from the scorecard. At thirty days they know the systems, the procedures and the people, and are doing the core tasks with support. At sixty they are doing them alone to standard and have taken on the first outcome fully. At ninety they own the outcomes on the scorecard and the probation decision is made against written evidence.
Each milestone is a sit-down with the manager, not a questionnaire. It covers what is going well, what is confusing, what they need, and what the next thirty days look like. Probation terms and any decision to end employment during probation are reviewed with your employment lawyer.
The weekly check-in
A fifteen-minute weekly conversation with the manager for the first ninety days is the single most effective part of the plan. It is not a status report. It is the manager asking how it is going, what is unclear, and what they can remove from the person's path. New hires rarely raise problems on their own in the first months. They answer when asked, and they leave when nobody asks.
For remote and hybrid hires the first week is in person where at all possible, and the check-in is a video call, never a message.
Keep notes from each check-in in one place so that the thirty-day sit-down is built on evidence rather than impressions.
Improve it with every hire
At day thirty, ask the new person what was confusing, what was missing and what they wish someone had told them. Write the answers into the onboarding checklist. After three or four hires the checklist is close to complete and each new person starts better than the last. That is how an onboarding plan becomes part of the company rather than a project the owner did once.
The common mistakes are treating day one as an admin task, leaving the new person to shadow without a plan, skipping the weekly check-in once the person seems fine, and deciding probation on impressions rather than against the scorecard. Each is fixed by the checklist above, and none costs more than a few hours a hire.