Workshop · People
The first thirty days
A new hire spends week one waiting for access and learning the job by interrupting whoever happens to be nearby.
- Duration
- 2 hours
- Delivery
- On site · Virtual
- Participants
- From 8 to 25 participants
- Investment
- Request a quote
Investment depends on scope, number of participants and delivery mode. We prepare a proposal at no obligation.
The problem it solves
Hiring someone takes weeks of deciding. The role is posted, candidates are interviewed and compared, a salary is negotiated. Receiving that person takes fifteen minutes of improvisation on Monday morning. The mismatch shows immediately: the equipment has not arrived, system access depends on somebody who is on holiday, and the workstation is solved with a borrowed chair.
What follows is learning by interruption. The new hire asks whoever is sitting nearby, who is not necessarily the person who knows best, and inherits their shortcuts, their habits and their version of why things are the way they are. Nobody wrote down what this person should be able to do by the end of week one, so nobody can say whether it is going well. The supervisor assumes HR has it covered and HR assumes the supervisor does.
The cost is paid twice. First in how long a capable person takes to become useful, which stretches without anyone measuring it. Then in the mistakes of the early weeks, which get attributed to the person rather than to the entry they were given, and which sometimes end in an early departure. The role is posted again and the cycle restarts, with the same improvised Monday.
What it covers
The workshop treats onboarding as a sequence with stages, owners and checkpoints rather than as a welcome folder or a stack of forms. The first piece of work is descriptive and usually uncomfortable: each participant reconstructs how entry actually happens in their organization today, not how it is supposed to, including who received the last person hired and what that person did with their first four hours.
That map is used to order everything that belongs before day one, which is where most of the recoverable time is lost: access, equipment, workstation, permissions, uniforms where they apply, and a named contact person rather than whoever happens to be free. The group builds a checklist with an owner per line and a deadline that falls before the start date, because a checklist with no owner reproduces exactly the problem it was meant to solve.
The second part designs week one and month one: what is taught, in what order, by whom, and what is deliberately left for later. Participants draft explicit expectations at thirty, sixty and ninety days for a real role in their company, written as things the person must be able to do rather than as qualities they must display. A group exercise covers onboarding for shift, route and field work, where the assigned buddy is not sitting nearby and supervision happens over a radio or a phone.
The closing section deals with checking and correcting. It sets the contact points the direct supervisor and HR hold during the first month, what is asked at each one, and what to do when an onboarding is clearly going badly, which is the conversation most often postponed and by far the cheapest one to hold early.
What participants learn
- Design the first thirty days as a sequence with an owner assigned to each stage.
- Identify what must be in place before day one: access, equipment, workstation and a named contact.
- Develop explicit expectations at thirty, sixty and ninety days for a specific role in the organization.
- Implement checkpoints with the direct supervisor and with HR through the first month.
- Evaluate an onboarding that is going badly while there is still time to correct it.
Agenda
- Before day one: access, equipment and an assigned buddy
- Week one: what is taught, in what order and by whom
- Explicit expectations at thirty, sixty and ninety days
- The documentation that is needed and the documentation nobody reads
- What the direct supervisor owns during the first month
- Checkpoints, and what to do when an onboarding is going badly
- Onboarding for shift, route and field roles
What the organisation leaves with
- A pre-start checklist with an owner and a deadline on every line.
- A written week-one itinerary: what is taught, in what order and by whom.
- An expectations document at thirty, sixty and ninety days for the role the company hires for most often.
- A first-month checkpoint calendar with dates, owners and the questions each checkpoint asks.
Programme details
- Format
- Workshop
- Also available as
- Executive talk · Intensive workshop
- Languages
- Español · English
- Includes
- Participant workbook
- Action plan
- Post-training resources
- Facilitation
- ALUD Consulting LLC — Global Business Transformation.
Who it is for
- Companies hiring continuously or seasonally.
- Supervisors who receive new staff with no defined guide.
- HR leads standardizing how people enter the company.
Frequently asked questions
- Does it work for seasonal hiring or for route-based crews?
- Yes, and those cases are handled specifically. An onboarding where the assigned buddy is not sitting nearby requires deciding who teaches, at what point in the shift, and how learning is checked without stopping the operation, which is a different design from an office.
- Who should attend, HR or the supervisors?
- Ideally both, and if only one group can come, the supervisors. Most of onboarding happens in the work area rather than in the administrative office, and a sequence designed without the people who will run it ends up as a correct document nobody follows.
- Does the workshop hand over a ready-made welcome handbook?
- No. What the session produces is your company's sequence, with owners and dates, and that is what decides an onboarding. The welcome document is later internal drafting work, and it is worth saying that having one is often confused with having an entry process.
- What part of this can we apply next week?
- The pre-start checklist, which depends on nobody else and usually resolves half the visible problems. The week-one itinerary and the ninety-day expectations need agreement with the area supervisors and one more round of review, so a couple of weeks is a realistic expectation for that part.
Request this programme
Tell us the context and we will prepare a proposal tailored to your organisation. No obligation.
Working this inside the organisation
If this challenge will not be settled in one session, ALUD Consulting LLC works it as consulting: management consulting, human resources, strategy, organisational design, leadership development and business transformation.