When’s the last time you took a holistic look at your onboarding process from the new employee’s perspective?
When most organizations think about onboarding, they think about HR paperwork, benefits enrollment, and maybe a welcome lunch. If you put yourself into the new hire’s shoes, is the experience going to inspire confidence? Excitement? Doubt? Regret?
As an IT service provider, we’ve helped onboard thousands of new employees across hundreds of law firms, associations, and SMBs. Of the many lessons we’ve learned, an important one is this: Your IT onboarding experience is one of the strongest signals of your corporate culture.
What Is the Role of IT in Employee Onboarding?
From the moment a new hire receives their laptop (or doesn’t), logs into Slack (or struggles to), or joins their first video meeting, they are forming impressions about:
- How your organization operates
- What you value
- How your people treat each other
- Whether they made the right decision
Think about how you’d define a “great” onboarding experience. Many of the organizations we work with strive to:
- Fully inform and empower new hires
- Validate their decision to join
- Minimize ramp-up time
- Set the tone for risk tolerance, values, and expectations
- Be consistent and equitable
This goes beyond making your new hires feel good for the sake of feeling good—20-50% of employees quit within their first 100 days of a new job. Conversely, strong onboarding improves retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%.
How Technology Reinforces (or Undermines) Culture
Culture is shaped by interactions, and interactions are shaped by technology. Whether you’re aware of it or not, your onboarding process will answer the following questions for new hires.
1. Who Is Worth What Level of Investment?
- Do executives get premium devices while junior staff get outdated machines?
- Do new hires receive hand-me-downs?
- Are remote employees treated differently than in-office staff?
These choices communicate hierarchy, fairness, and investment in people.
2. How Does Your Organization Communicate?
- Is Slack the primary communication tool, meaning most conversations are written out asynchronously?
- Are phone calls preferred over direct messages? Are there expectations of advanced notice or formal scheduling?
- Are cameras mandatory during video calls? How do you determine participants for a given meeting?
Consider how your policies may impact employees with varying communication and learning styles.
3. How Easy Is It to Be Heard?
In hybrid environments especially:
- Are remote employees equipped with proper cameras and microphones?
- Can they meaningfully contribute in meetings?
- Do presence indicators (Slack/Teams) encourage accessibility?
If someone can’t be heard — literally or figuratively — engagement erodes quickly.
4. What Level of Autonomy Is Granted?
- Can employees experiment with tools?
- Are systems locked down tightly?
- Are approvals required for everything?
There is real tension between security, usability, and perceived trust. Understand what message you are sending.
Two Questions to Ask — Constantly
As you refine onboarding, repeatedly ask:
- How are we reinforcing our culture?
- How will location affect the experience?
These questions will help prevent accidental inequity and ensure alignment between your values and your systems.
Why IT Must Be Involved
When IT and culture are so tightly linked, you can see the danger in treating onboarding as “an HR thing.”
In an ideal scenario, your IT team should know precisely what hires have been budgeted for the coming year and when they’re expected to start. Once an offer letter is signed, they should be notified right alongside the hiring manager.
Besides notification, IT should have a hand in:
- Architecting the employee’s experience
- Training on tools and proper use
- Setting an appropriate tone with security
- Getting them fully comfortable with your systems
As a first step, have them help define what a “successful” onboarding looks like in your organization. If you can co-build the goal, you’ll have their buy-in from the start.