Your Onboarding Process Is Teaching Your Culture, Whether You Mean It To or Not

Part 2 of 6 in a series on onboarding, supervision, and helping new staff find their place.

Every organization has things it says it values. Collaboration, learning, service, community, belonging, growth. Those words live on a website, in a strategic plan, or somewhere in an employee handbook. But when someone joins your organization, they start learning something more important: what those values actually look like here.

That’s why your onboarding process should be a direct reflection of your organization’s mission, vision, and culture. It does more than teach someone how to do a job. It teaches them how your organization really works. It’s the same idea I wrote about in Your Brand Is More Than Marketing: people learn who you are from what they experience, not from what you tell them.

Culture you can see: the first week’s order of operations

In the first week, a lot of your culture shows up in the order you do things.

Start with the basics that make sure someone gets paid, gets their benefits set up, and finishes the central HR tasks. That can feel administrative, but it’s care. It tells a new person you’ve thought about what they need to feel secure.

Then focus on introductions to the people they’ll work with every day, the colleagues in their immediate team or department. That’s where relationships need to start. New hires are exciting, and plenty of people across the organization, including key stakeholders and collaborators, will want to meet them. A quick hello or a pop-by is great. The deeper “let’s get to know each other and figure out how we’ll work together” meetings can wait for the following weeks.

The first week should focus on getting settled and spending time with the people they’ll see most often. That means shadowing meetings and events rather than taking an active role in them. And it should include the traditions that make your team yours, whether that’s Friday lunch off-site as a group or the mid-week afternoon coffee run.

Explain the why, not just the what

New employees need information: processes, expectations, systems, responsibilities, and deadlines. But information becomes much more useful when people understand the reasoning behind it.

Simon Sinek made this point famous in his 2009 TED talk: most organizations can tell you what they do, some can tell you how, but “very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do.” Onboarding is one of the best places to fix that.

Say you’re walking a new team member through how events get planned in your organization. Don’t just hand them the proposal form, the budget template, and the timeline. Explain why the proposal asks the questions it asks. Explain why the budget template is set up the way it is, and how following it helps the process move forward. Explain who the key players are and why they’re involved, and why the timeline is set where it is within the bigger picture of planning the event.

When people understand the why, they eventually become self-sufficient. They know who to involve at each step and where to go with their questions. You’re giving them the why, the how, and the what, so they can make their own decisions, take ownership of their role, and contribute in a way that connects their skills to the work.

Connect their values to yours early

The conversation about values shouldn’t start on day one. It should start during hiring, and then carry into onboarding in ways the new person can actually feel.

Say your organization values being courageous in your thinking and actions, and during the interview process, a candidate shares that they love trying new things. During onboarding, find ways for them to connect with that value right away. Maybe there’s a process, procedure, or event that needs to change. That could be a great project for them in their first three to six months.

That one decision does a lot. It shows you listened, and that the organization lives up to its values. It connects their values and working style to the organization’s priorities and helps them see how they can meaningfully contribute. And it gives them a sense of belonging on the team, along with quick wins and real moments of pride early on.

The values conversation is ongoing and should never really end. It’s about connecting their values, working style, skills, and expertise to your values, principles, and ways of working. (I’ll dig into what happens when those don’t line up in a separate series on values in practice.)

Design the experience on purpose

If onboarding helps set expectations and shape culture, it deserves more attention than assembling a schedule. So ask yourself: what are we teaching people about who we are through the way we welcome them?

Not through the presentation about your values. Through the experience itself. New employees are learning your culture from the moment they arrive. The question is whether you’re designing that learning on purpose.

Next in this series: the supervisor’s role in a new employee’s onboarding experience.