The Onboarding Psychology Playbook

Most onboarding is built around information transfer: policies, systems, org charts, compliance modules. The research on organisational socialisation says the information is the easy part and almost never the reason someone leaves. What decides whether a new hire settles is whether four questions get answered, and a handbook answers none of them.

This playbook covers those four questions and what actually answers each, a day one, week one, month one and month three sequence, why a named buddy outside the reporting line is the cheapest retention intervention available, and the 30-day conversation that catches the person who will otherwise resign in month five. It includes a 30/60/90 plan template and a manager checklist, plus a section on remote and hybrid onboarding that names what is genuinely lost and what replaces it.

For HR teams, hiring managers, team leads and founders.

What it is not: a compliance or induction checklist. It assumes you already have one. This is about the part that decides retention, and it is deliberately opinionated about measurement: it argues that new-hire satisfaction scores are weak evidence and twelve-month retention by manager is strong evidence.

10 pages, A4, formatted for printing. Delivered as a PDF immediately after payment.