Picture a new frontline worker on their first day…
Shift starts at 6am.
The manager is pulled in three directions.
Nobody told them where the break room is, what the safety protocol is, or how to log a time-off request.

So they find a coworker and ask.

That coworker becomes their onboarding system.

Gallup found that only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job onboarding new people. Twelve percent. That number should bother more leaders than it does.

Here's the test I keep coming back to: at the end of week one, how many questions did your new hire have to track down a person to answer?

If the number is high, you don't have an onboarding problem. You have an information architecture problem.

The manager will answer the questions. That's not the issue. The issue is that the answers only exist in someone's head — not somewhere the employee can find on their own.

What sticks after the first week isn't the orientation slideshow. It's whether the new person can get what they need without creating work for someone else.

Where do I request time off? Who do I call when equipment breaks? What's the policy on X?

Those answers should live somewhere findable, on the device they have, in plain language.

If they don't, you've built a system that runs on human bandwidth. And human bandwidth is the one resource every frontline operation runs out of first.

#onboarding #frontlineworkers #employeeexperience #internalcomms #workplaceculture