Onboarding: prepare people for the behavior their role requires

The first week is almost always well organized. The laptop is ready, there is a tour, someone goes through the systems, there is a lunch with the team in the calendar, and there is a forty-page document with everything you need to know. Anyone who looks at the onboarding process of most organizations on paper sees a neat process.

Ask someone who has been there for six months when things became difficult, and you rarely get an answer about the systems. You get a story about a conversation. The customer who became angry while she still did not know what she could and could not promise. The colleague who reacted irritably to a question she asked for the second time. The moment when she had to explain something to someone who clearly knew more about it than she did.

That is where things go wrong, and that is what onboarding never prepares people for.

What the literature has been saying about this for twenty years

There is a substantial body of research into what happens when someone new joins an organization, and the outcome is remarkably consistent.

Bauer, Bodner, Erdogan, Truxillo and Tucker brought together seventy samples in a meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Their model shows that three things determine whether someone settles in: role clarity, self-confidence in performing the task, and social acceptance. These three form the link between what an organization does in terms of onboarding and the resulting satisfaction, engagement, performance, and tendency to stay or leave.

Look closely at that for a moment, because there is something here that most onboarding programs ignore. Role clarity is not about whether someone knows the procedure. It is about whether someone knows what is expected of them when it really matters. And confidence in performing the task comes from having done something, not from having read about it.

Exactly those two things cannot be transferred through information. You can tell someone a hundred times that when dealing with a complaint, they should first ask questions before offering a solution. Whether they actually do that when an angry man is standing in front of them depends on whether they have done it before.

What is meanwhile filling the calendar

Set that against what an onboarding period actually contains. The OECD observed in Trends in Adult Learning that short, compliance-oriented training dominates the picture of adult education. In practice, you recognize it immediately in the first month: information security, privacy, occupational health and safety, integrity, the system, the corporate identity.

All of that is necessary, I am not going to claim otherwise, and it is also the reason onboarding fills up so easily. But then the entire first month consists of it, and the conversation in which someone gets stuck in week three is nowhere to be found.

There is an honest caveat here. I sometimes read pieces in which the tour and the lunch are dismissed as wasted time, and I think that is nonsense. Social acceptance is one of the three factors from that research, and it develops around the coffee machine, not in a module. The first week is allowed to be enjoyable. The point is that something else needs to happen alongside it that is currently missing.

The ten conversations of a role

When I work with a team on their onboarding, I always start with the same exercise, and it takes an hour. I ask the people who have been doing the role for some time to write down which conversations a new colleague will encounter in the first three months and where they might get stuck.

For almost every role, that produces a list of eight to twelve situations, and much of that list is predictable. A customer who wants something that is not possible. Asking a colleague for help when you feel that you are supposed to know. Reporting a mistake that you made. Explaining something to someone who is skeptical. Saying that you do not know.

The interesting thing is that everyone can name those conversations, and that they appear in no onboarding program. They fall into the category of things you learn along the way, which in practice means: things you learn by getting them wrong a few times with real customers and real colleagues.

That learning along the way has two costs. The first is paid by the customer. The second is paid by the new employee, in the form of the feeling that they cannot do it, and that feeling is exactly what appears in the socialization literature as low self-efficacy, with leaving as a possible outcome.

Onboarding based on behavior instead of information

What I would do is put that list of conversations into the onboarding process and make them practiceable before they actually happen.

At PractAIce, this is done with an AI avatar in a scenario that the organization builds itself. For an onboarding period, this is attractive because you create the scenarios once and then use them again with every new colleague. The customer asking for a discount on a service that is not on offer, the patient asking whether it will hurt, the resident saying that their previous contact person always did things differently: they are always the same conversations, and therefore they can be described once.

The new employee has a ten-minute conversation, receives feedback from the AI coach on what they demonstrated in the behaviors the team considers important, and can do it again if it did not go the way they wanted. If something went wrong at one particular point, they can isolate that point with a microtraining lasting a few minutes.

There is a second benefit that only becomes apparent later. The conversations you create for new people are also useful for people who are already there. At most organizations, it turns out that part of the existing team avoids those same conversations just as much, except that by then it has taken the form of an ingrained habit. Why that avoidance rarely has anything to do with character is explained in Soft skills training: behavior is not a character trait.

Spread it out over months

One more thing about timing, because this is where things often go wrong again.

The tendency is to cram everything into the first two weeks. That is understandable, and it works counterproductively because someone who has just joined does not yet have any context to connect it to. Cepeda and colleagues brought together 839 measurements from 317 experiments in Psychological Bulletin and showed that distributed learning consistently outperforms concentrated learning, with the optimal interval increasing as you want to retain something for longer.

For onboarding, that means: two conversations in week two, two in week four, two in week eight, and the final ones around month three. That is not a more demanding program than half a day of onboarding training. It is the same number of minutes, distributed differently, with a considerably higher chance that it will stick.

Baldwin and Ford already described in Personnel Psychology that the work environment partly determines whether new behavior is sustained. For a new employee, that environment is still malleable, which means that in the first months you have more influence on habit formation than at any other point in the employment relationship. We currently use that period mainly to make people read things.

What you should measure it by

Most organizations measure whether someone was satisfied with their onboarding period, usually with a survey in week six. That result is nice, and it is strongly related to whether the immediate colleagues were nice.

A more useful question is after how many weeks someone independently handles the conversations that are part of their role, and how many of those conversations they still pass on to an experienced colleague. That second number is surprisingly easy to find out by simply asking, and it says more about the quality of your onboarding than any satisfaction score.

We wrote about the broader question of how quickly an organization implements new behavior in How long does it take before new behavior is really there in your organization?. The logic is the same, except that onboarding is about someone who does not yet have anything to unlearn, which makes it easier than anything else.

Frequently asked questions about onboarding

What is onboarding?

Onboarding is the set of activities through which a new employee gets to know their role, the team and the organization. It encompasses more than the introduction day and in practice continues until someone is functioning independently.

Why do new employees leave in the first few months?

Research into socialization points to three factors: uncertainty about what is expected of someone, insufficient confidence in their own ability to perform, and the feeling that they do not yet socially belong. Information transfer mainly addresses the first point and barely addresses the second.

How long does good onboarding take?

Allow three to six months, depending on the complexity of the role. The activities can be short, provided they are spread across that period rather than concentrated in the first two weeks.

What should an onboarding program include besides the systems?

The conversations that make up the role. Ask experienced colleagues to write down which eight to twelve situations a new employee will encounter in the first few months, and make those situations practiceable before they occur in real life.

Can AI support onboarding?

Yes, especially for practicing conversations. Scenarios that you build once can be reused with every new colleague, which suddenly makes behavior-based onboarding affordable for roles with high turnover or frequent hiring.

 

If you want to know whether this delivers something for your organization, there is a short test that costs nothing. Ask three people who started in the past year about the conversation in which they felt most uncomfortable. If you get a similar answer three times, you have your first scenario. What happens next, we would be happy to show you on the page about AI avatar training or simply in a conversation, in which we work together to turn that one situation into something your next new colleague can practice.

 

Sources

• Bauer, T.N., Bodner, T., Erdogan, B., Truxillo, D.M. & Tucker, J.S. (2007). Newcomer adjustment during organizational socialization: a meta-analytic review of antecedents, outcomes, and methods. *Journal of Applied Psychology*, 92(3), 707-721. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.92.3.707
• Cepeda, N.J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J.T. & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis. *Psychological Bulletin*, 132(3), 354-380. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354
• Baldwin, T.T. & Ford, J.K. (1988). Transfer of training: a review and directions for future research. *Personnel Psychology*, 41(1), 63-105. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1988.tb00632.x
• OECD, *Trends in Adult Learning*, July 2025. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/trends-in-adult-learning_ec0624a6-en.html
• OECD, *Skills in the AI age*, OECD Artificial Intelligence Papers, July 2026. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/skills-in-the-ai-age_972bd15e-en.html