Hungry Minds · A working demo
Your first
90 days.
Onboarding built as a journey people want to finish. A demo we made with no client brief, to show how we think an induction should feel.
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Onboarding built as a journey people want to finish. A demo we made with no client brief, to show how we think an induction should feel.
A new starter, left alone at a computer.
An information dump.
Their first impression of the place. Flat, and lonely.
People to meet, the workplace to explore, the setup to get done, the team to find, the job to try and time to reflect. First 90 walks the new starter through each one, in order, and marks it off as they go.
The work is learned in the work, so the guide goes where they go. It is fully responsive. It opens on a laptop at the desk, and on a phone while they walk the floor, meet people and try the job.
Talya Bauer’s research for the SHRM Foundation names them. We design every onboarding program around these four. Each one needs a different kind of experience, and only one of them fits inside a module. The guide teaches that one directly and drives the other three out into the workplace.
The guide hands over a name and a reason to go and find them. Every one of these is a specific, doable ask, so the network gets built one small task at a time.
This is the one that decides whether somebody stays. So every moment here finishes with a real person and a real conversation, which is where belonging gets built.
Expectations get set early, and in their own words. Targets written with their manager, the questions worth asking handed over, and the wobbly parts practised with somebody watching.
A demonstration is the honest evidence that somebody can do the job, so the guide asks for the task itself. Writing the targets together brings the manager in early.
Culture lives in the small everyday moments. The guide drops the new starter into a few of them early and gives them somebody to ask. They find their feet by joining in.
People feel part of a place once they have joined in, been asked what they think, and had a first win noticed. These moments hand a new starter all three inside ninety days.
Week one carries the handful of things that cannot wait. The rest spaces out across the month, so each one lands near the work it covers and has somewhere to stick.
Spacing is what makes compliance stick, and it protects the first week for the things a new starter will remember. It also leaves room for the other three.
The four jobs decide what goes in. These decide how it is built. Each one comes from something we know about how people learn, and each one changed what the demo does.
Day one is the smallest part of an induction, not the whole of it. So the demo runs across four stages, each with its own job, its own colour and a badge at the end. A stage opens only once the one before it is finished.
Week two is when the first doubts arrive, and day thirty is when somebody works out whether they can do this job. Recognition inside the first ninety days is what makes somebody decide they belong, so the program has to still be running when it happens.
The journey board is the home screen, not a menu of modules. The next stage glows, finished stages carry their badge, and the ones ahead stay locked but visible. There is always one obvious next thing to do.
Onboarding fails quietly, by fading out. A visible route and a small earned win give somebody a reason to come back. That is how a ninety-day program survives a real job.
A moment opens on a scene, asks one honest question, answers it warmly, and finishes. Two minutes, then the map updates and the day carries on.
A new starter’s working memory is already at its ceiling: new names, new building, new everything. Load forty minutes of policy on top and almost none of it lands. Small, spaced and one decision at a time is the only shape that survives week one.
Every moment is built around something the new starter does: a choice, a recall, a decision with consequences, a line they write for themselves. The interaction is picked for the job the moment has to do, so no two in a row feel the same.
Being asked to retrieve something beats reading it again, by a wide margin, and the effect grows when the asking is spread over time. A scenario does the same job for judgement. People cannot be told how to handle a hard moment, they have to have a go at one first.
What you are looking at is our demo, in our brand, with a generic office in it. The four things an induction has to do, and the four decisions underneath, are what we would bring to yours.
Completions still get recorded, and they still count. They are just not the whole picture. Watch for a first independent task reached sooner, and the real job demonstrated at thirty and ninety days. A new starter who says they feel part of the team. A manager who says yes when you ask whether they can do the job.
Send us your induction and the first-week schedule that goes with it. We will tell you which of the four it does and which it misses. Then which parts would do more out in the workplace.
1300 162 393 · hungryminds.com.au/contact · More learning. Less yawning.