Hello friends…

I’m typing this sat in my office sweating, not Thai prison levels but close. I do love the sun so I cant be too British about it… but it is hot though!

Last week was a busy one, I did a webinar about the SPIES model for people and culture functions and then wrote a piece for CX magazine. Todays piece is a deeper dive on the thoughts I shared here

Ps am trying something new this week under the TLDR is a audio version of the newsletter for them who like to listen… let me know your thoughts drop me a Y or N to: [email protected]

Today’s Focus:

TL;DR: Your onboarding was designed for the organisation, not the person arriving. That's why it keeps leaking value, and why a £3 notebook fixes what a £250k platform can't.

Think back to the early days of a relationship, everything was new, full of nervous excitement, everything felt electric full of unknown

It was all about making extra effort because the other person hadn't made their mind up about you to fully invest yet.

Then fast forward, and BAU sets in.

Bills, routines, the same Tuesday evening on the sofa. Nothing terrible, just pretty ordinary. The effort that defined the beginning quietly stops and changes into something different mainly full of known knowns

It's around this time people start proactively putting dates in the diary, trying to inject back something they let drift.

Most organisations do exactly the same thing with their new hires

If you're lucky, the recruitment experience is high-touch, polished, persuasive, and the recruiter is super attentive and everything has a warmth to it. So when the offer lands you feel like the place actually want you.

Then day one arrives.

The laptop has not been set up, the manager is in back-to-backs until Thursday, and the first two days are compliance training dressed up as induction. The information keeps arriving. Ninety percent of it is the "just-in-case" type rather than the "just-in-time" type.

And yet none of it says anything about what it actually feels like to work here.

That's Experience Leak happening right at the start of your new hire's lifecycle.

It's like going on a cinema date with someone, wanting it to be fun, and then watching The Life of David Gale. (This happened to me. Needless to say, she never returned my call… Amy If your reading this am not angry just disappointed)

And this is the same with your new hires, nowhere does it do more damage than in the first 80 days.

Mind the gap

In customer experience, we have a well-established discipline around journey continuity. Which is where the experience shifts, where what a business promises is tested against customer reality. Usually, it's here that trust is lost and behaviours change.

Organisations spend so much on making sure the journey stands up for their customer but very rarely for their employees. Here's the thing you can often fix the majority of customer and employee journeys when you identify the three main fractures that show up.

Let’s look at the three fractures from an onboarding point of view.

Something both my readers in people & culture and customer experience can relate to

The Three Fractures

The first is continuity: Recruitment is one experience, then the first week often feels like a completely different company. The candidate who felt courted, considered, and genuinely wanted, arrives to find a checklist, a stack of forms, and a culture that is too busy to notice them. The emotional shift goes from feeling like you are joining somewhere to feeling like you are being processed

The second is cognitive load: Organisations front-load everything onto day one, most of it compliance-driven rather than care-driven. A well-designed journey staggers information, delivering what someone needs when they need it rather than everything they might eventually need all at once. That difference matters because information overload in the first week does not just frustrate, it signals to the new hire that this journey was designed for the organisation's administrative convenience, not for them.

The third is psychological safety: Organisations that intentionally build windows of discussion into the first thirty days, specifically asking for the outsider's perspective before that perspective gets absorbed and lost into the BAU get a different result. The ones that skip lose the most valuable thing a new hire brings: the ability to see clearly what everyone else stopped noticing.

Why first impression matter

There is a little principle I use when designing new experiences called Primacy Effect.

Basically, it's where we add disproportionate weight to the start of a journey, and everything else after it gets filtered through it

This is why the laptop not ready on day one is not just a small oversight. What you have actually done is signal their arrival wasn’t anticipated and you didnt real care. From that point on everything you do will feel to them, like your flying by the seat of your pants

Don’t believe me?

Ask any of your new hires who got something late on day one.

They will play back to you how everything felt like it was rushed together and the business wasnt ready for them…even if it was.

That signal is something they latch onto within hours, and the culture they were promised in recruitment gets quietly revised in their mind. Slowly they begin to shift from feeling like the main character to feeling like a new entry in the system.

When an organisation fails to signal that a person matters in the first week, the case becomes considerably harder to make after that.

The Psycho logical problem

A lot of the time if you ask how have you made the onboarding better?

you will get, we created a better induction portal, a shorter compliance module, or a 30-60-90 day plan with more touchpoints baked in.

While that does marginally reduce the friction, it usually only increases the benefit to the business, it doesn't necessarily improve the experience for the new hire. So when the score comes back as the onboarding being score as average guess what happens

The portal get refined!

Here is the question that never gets asked

Why do we assume more information on day one creates more belonging?

In my experience, the opposite is almost always true.

A new hire who spends their first day being told everything the organisation needs them to know leaves that day knowing a lot and feeling very little.

The brain remembers the frame, not the context, and when that frame from day one sets it as "you're here to receive information and not to belong", everything starts to fall apart from there

However the things that can shift this, cost next to nothing

Small things carry big weight

The most effective interventions I have rolled out when reimagining customer and employee experience is nearly always the ones that look least efficient from the outside.

Giving a new hire a choice on day one

Changes nothing about the job they have arrived to do yet the weighting of that first interaction changes something structural about how they experience arriving.

The internal narrative shifts from "I am being processed" to "I have agency here," and that shift compounds through everything that follows. Give someone a small, seemingly meaningless decision and you have given them something no induction portal can replicate: authorship.

The person who chose their setup on day one is already a different kind of employee from the person who was handed one.

A manager who blocks the first two hours of a Tuesday for a conversation with nothing on the agenda except getting to know someone is, by “spreadsheet logic” being unproductive.

But by experience logic, they are making the single highest- return of investment available to them, one that cannot be faked, automated, or replicated by any platform on the market. The message it sends is simple: the human is worth more than the output.

Language carries the same weight at near zero cost too.

A role responsible for welcome logistics is performing an administrative function. The same role framed as "Head of First Experiences" holds a completely different brief and attracts a completely different quality of attention. Same process but now with a completely different frame

The reframe costs nothing, and the failure to reframe costs considerably more than most attrition dashboards reveal.

Try it out with your hotel reception, your induction team, or even your SaaS onboarding team. Challenge them to rename themselves as head of first experiences and ask them what they would do differently

Trust me the outcome would be very different to what you have now

Asymmetry nobody talks about

A notebook colour, two hours of a manager's Tuesday, a job title rename. All cost almost nothing, and all of them return something no platform can manufacture.

Dont get confused here this isn’t about free swag, it is about the feeling a new hire gets when they get to make some choices. Nobody ever went home and said wow, the induction platform we have is so smooth.

What does happen, is they go home and tell someone about the little choices they made, how they got to pick a purple notebook over the bland corporate red, how they got to pick a Mac over a PC

When someone builds an experience that suits them, they are already invested and subscribed before the second week starts.

So while the rational answer might be to refine the onboarding platform, the human answer is to buy more coloured notepads

It sounds small, it sounds nonsensical, but little things make big impacts.

Your new induction platform might have cost a fortune for the business, but your people and customers don’t care about that, what they want is the feeling of choice and the feeling of being seen on a Tuesday afternoon by their new manager

Pick one moment in your first-week experience, the laptop arrival, maybe the manager's first conversation, even the name of the first day, and ask:

was this designed for the person joining, or for the organisation processing them?

If the answer is the latter, you have found where your experience is leaking.

Every organisation has a journey it calls onboarding be it for the employee or customers, however very few have ever designed a first impression.