Lisa starts her new job today. She’s looking forward to it. A new environment, new colleagues, a fresh start. But the moment she walks in, she notices it straight away: she can’t do anything yet.
There is no desk yet, no laptop and no email account. So instead of getting started, she begins her first working day by asking around. First her manager, then HR and IT. Someone says everything has probably already been requested; someone else thinks it hasn’t.
By the end of the morning, Lisa has told the same story three times and waited for something twice, but she still doesn’t have a fully working setup. Meanwhile, she’s starting to feel like she’s a burden to everyone.
We see this happen time and again with our clients.
HR gets the blame — unfairly
In many organisations, the responsibility for onboarding lies with you, the HR manager.
That sounds logical. But in practice, a large part of the execution is outside your control.
Accounts are created by IT, access is approved by operations, and finance makes sure everyone gets paid. That means a new employee has to be registered in the accounting package and in the payroll system. If that doesn’t happen on time, there’s no guarantee the payslip is correct or that the first salary arrives on time.
As the HR manager, you are the one who has to coordinate the whole process, while a large part of the execution lies outside your direct influence.
This means you have to track progress somewhere, constantly check whether everything has been picked up, and remind people when it hasn’t. The entire mental load sits with you, while you have little influence on the outcome of the onboarding process.
So what we see is that onboarding is not a tightly organised process, but a collection of loose steps spread across different departments. Everyone delivers their own piece, but the whole is missing. The process relies on manual actions and handover moments. And when something goes wrong in that chain — which almost always happens — you get the blame.
As long as onboarding is manual work, it will keep going wrong
Many organisations have set up this process in their own way. Sometimes quite neatly, even.
There’s a checklist. There are agreements. Maybe parts have even been automated in the HR system. And still it keeps going wrong. That’s because the core of the problem isn’t being solved. The onboarding process remains manual work. And that makes what happens to Lisa the logical consequence of how onboarding is usually set up.
As soon as you depend on manual actions between different departments, tasks get left behind, information gets forgotten and exceptions add extra complexity.
On top of that, nobody has the full overview. Everyone looks at their own piece, while the bigger picture is missing. The result is that onboarding is not a process that runs by itself, but something that has to be managed continuously.
The real impact only shows up later
A new employee who can’t get to work on day one is annoying. But that’s not even the biggest problem.
Because onboarding is such a manual process, as an HR manager you spend most of your time arranging, checking and chasing people. There is often no time left for a proper induction.
And when that start is messy, it sticks. Someone begins with the feeling that things aren’t in order. And that’s not easy to shake off. We regularly see employees leave again after a few months, even though there is nothing wrong with the work itself. The cause often lies in how they started.
And perhaps even more importantly: you never get round to what HR is actually meant for. Safeguarding culture, making sure people land well and feel part of the organisation. When that structurally fails to happen, it affects how teams work together, how new people connect and, ultimately, how the organisation functions.
You won’t solve this in your core HR system
Maybe you’ve already tried to solve this problem within your HR system. But the problem sits precisely between systems and departments. At the moments when information is handed over, tasks are passed on and dependencies arise.
As long as that part isn’t properly set up, onboarding remains a process that relies on people instead of on a structure that takes over the work. And the same applies the other way around when someone leaves. Accounts stay active, licences keep running and access isn’t always revoked on time. That is a concrete risk.
When do you know you have a structural problem?
A simple gauge: look at your operational meetings.
If onboarding keeps coming up in your meetings, you are essentially fighting symptoms all the time and losing hours to waiting, aligning and checking, when none of that should be necessary.
How to make onboarding actually work
Aligning even better or managing even more tightly is not going to solve this. The solution lies in automating the onboarding process. Actions are carried out automatically at the right moment, across systems, without anyone having to chase them.
- Tasks are followed up automatically and reminders are sent when something is left behind
- Dependencies fade into the background
- The process keeps running without anyone having to actively watch over it
There will always be exceptions, but the vast majority runs smoothly by itself. And that is exactly what you need to prevent someone like Lisa from grinding to a halt on her first working day.
As long as your onboarding relies on people, this will keep happening. Only when the onboarding process takes over the work does the problem disappear.
Want your on- and offboarding to simply be handled? See how we do it here.
