Many companies still believe that onboarding a new employee consists of a few simple steps: issuing a laptop, creating accounts, providing access, showing them their workplace, and giving a standard company presentation.
After that, the employee is supposedly ready to work.
Spoiler: This is not onboarding!
This is the technical setup of a workplace.
Real onboarding is a complex process. A new person needs to understand where the company is heading, how decisions are made, the context in which teams operate, where the real boundaries of responsibility lie, and why internal processes look the way they do.
And this is where things get interesting.
Processes are perfect only in courses, consultant presentations, and methodology guides. In a real company, there is always history, compromise, internal agreements, limited resources, complex relationships, accumulated technical debt, and decisions that were once temporary but have existed for several years.
A new employee sees none of this.
They see only the result and often mistakenly interpret it as incompetence.
The First Weeks Tell You More About a Company Than the Interview
When a manager expects a new employee to become fully involved in the work within two or three days, or simply hands them important projects without properly introducing the context, this is a serious signal.
You do not necessarily need to quit immediately because of one urgent task. But if urgency systematically replaces onboarding, and questions are perceived as weakness or an irritation, you should think carefully about where you have ended up.
It works roughly the same way as evaluating a restaurant. There are a few simple signs that allow me to understand whether it is a good place or not even before the food arrives.
- If you can already smell a heavy kitchen or ventilation odour at the entrance, it is better to leave.
- If, in a half-empty restaurant, you are seated at a sticky table covered in crumbs and they only start cleaning it after you arrive, it is better to leave.
- If the restroom has overflowing bins, dirty mirrors, broken plumbing, or other obvious problems that no one is fixing, it is better to leave.
- If the food is covered in sauces, spices, and decorations designed to hide the quality of the main ingredients, perhaps you should not return.
Individually, each of these signs can still be explained as an accident. But together, they show the business's attitude towards details, standards, and customers. This means that the whole combination is hidden from your eyes in the kitchen and then presented beautifully on your plate — the main thing is, just eat it. No one cares that you might wake up in hospital tomorrow.
The same thing happens when you join a company.
The first weeks reveal the company's real culture far better than the corporate values on its website.
Probation Exists for Both Sides
We often forget that probation is not given only to the company. From day one, the company evaluates our productivity, initiative, learning speed, and ability to work with the team.
Meanwhile, the employee is usually focused on only one thing: trying to pass probation without appearing incompetent.
This is a mistake.
Probation is the best time to strip the company down to the skin and understand whether you want to stay there.
- How do people speak to one another here?
- How are decisions made?
- Are you allowed to ask questions?
- Are mistakes acknowledged?
- Do managers have time for their employees?
- Are important decisions made deliberately, or does everything constantly happen in firefighting mode?
You should evaluate the company as carefully as the company evaluates you.
Otherwise, after a few months, you may discover that you have ended up in a system where you dislike the people, the rules are unclear, and the management style contradicts your values and common sense, while leaving requires completing a notice period that can sometimes last three months.
Do Not Try to Save the Company in Your First Week
A new employee often has a natural desire to prove their value quickly. This is especially common among leaders, managers, and people who join with experience from other companies.
They start noticing problems and almost immediately propose solutions:
- "Why do you work this way?"
- "A process needs to be introduced here."
- "This person should be responsible for another area."
- "Let's set up Scrum."
- "The communication structure needs to change."
- "I have prepared an email with a list of process violations."
Do not do this!
Most likely, the people around you are no less intelligent than you. They also see many of the problems. But every problem has a context.
Perhaps the solution has already been tried and did not work.
Perhaps there are limitations that you have not yet been told about.
Perhaps the process looks illogical because it serves several conflicting interests.
Perhaps the company is living with a heavy legacy that cannot be changed by one email or a new diagram in Miro.
Often, a system becomes so complex that the people who continue working within it appear passive only to an outside observer. In reality, they simply understand which changes are possible now and which ones would create even more chaos.
Against this background, a new employee with their obvious and "correct" ideas may look not like a reformer, but like someone who has not yet understood anything and has already started teaching everyone else.
Public remarks, demonstrative criticism, and complaints to a manager about colleagues who are supposedly performing their responsibilities incorrectly work especially badly.
First, understand the system.
Understand the context!
Urgent Projects in the First Weeks Are a Warning Sign
You should be especially careful when a new employee is handed a project marked "important and urgent" almost immediately.
The person does not yet know the project's history, stakeholders, hidden conflicts, technical limitations, or management's real expectations.
Yet results are already expected from them.
What follows is a predictable chain:
- The employee starts asking a large number of basic questions. Colleagues become irritated because they do not have time to explain the context. The employee tries to appear productive and begins making decisions based on incomplete information.
- After that, mistakes, conflicting expectations, and mutual accusations appear.
- The company thinks the new employee is not coping.
- The employee thinks the company is chaotic and incompetent.
Even though the original problem was poor onboarding.
A good manager can hand an important project to a new employee fairly quickly. But together with the project, they will provide the context, the history of decisions, a list of key people, known risks, and room for questions.
They will not expect someone who has been at the company for four days to start making high-quality decisions in the same way as an employee who has worked there for several years.
What Good Onboarding Looks Like
Good onboarding does not mean that a new employee needs to be protected from any responsibility for several months. It means gradual immersion in the context (how many times have I already used that word?).
- First, the person gets to know the company, the product, the teams, and the key processes.
- Then they observe how decisions are made.
- They gain access to project history and previous discussions.
- They participate in meetings.
- They take on their first tasks with clear boundaries and available support.
- They gradually receive more independence and responsibility.
- At the same time, good onboarding requires effort not only from the company.
- The employee must also enter the existing system respectfully.
If, from the first days, you feel that this really is your company and these are your people, that is wonderful. But even then, you should not immediately try to open a window for everyone into the world of Agile, Scrum, proper processes, and effective communication.
Do not stop people from working!
Do not try to look like the smartest person in the room.
Do not become a source of endless emails, remarks, and process initiatives.
Listen first.
Ask questions.
Study the history.
Understand people's motives.
Separate genuine incompetence from a forced compromise.
Because the most important thing in any company is context (yes, I used that word again). And it is almost always what remains invisible during the first weeks of work.
The Main Takeaway
Onboarding is not the moment when an employee is given a laptop.
Onboarding ends when a person understands not only what is happening in the company, but also why it is happening that way.
The company must give a new employee time, information, support, and room for questions.
The employee, in turn, should use probation not only to demonstrate their effectiveness, but also to evaluate the company honestly.
This is the perfect time.
8 July 2026
