The State of Being Adrift
By the time Day 9 rolls around, the initial adrenaline has curdled into a very specific kind of quiet desperation. Our new hire-let’s call him Marcus-is currently sitting in a swivel chair that smells faintly of industrial cleaner and the broken dreams of his predecessor. He has completed the mandatory security training modules, those soul-crushing slide decks where he had to click ‘Next’ 79 times to prove he knows not to pick up mysterious USB drives in the parking lot.
Now, he is adrift. He is currently clicking through a SharePoint site that hasn’t been properly indexed since 2009. The org chart he’s looking at features a ‘VP of Strategy’ who retired 19 months ago. There is a profound disconnect between the ‘Welcome to the Family’ LinkedIn post the company made last week and the reality of Marcus sitting alone, waiting for an IT ticket to be resolved so he can finally access the shared drive.
It’s a betrayal of the contract. Not the legal one, but the emotional one. We spend $9999 on recruitment software and headhunter fees, only to drop the prize into a void of indifference the moment they badge through the front door.
The Sand Sculptor’s Foundation
I’ve been thinking a lot about Sofia T.-M. lately. She’s a sand sculptor I met on a coast in Northern Europe, a woman who understands foundations better than any HR Director I’ve ever encountered. Sofia T.-M. doesn’t just pile sand and hope for the best. She treats the moisture content of the base with a reverence that borders on the religious. She told me once that if the base is off by even 9 percent, the weight of the upper towers will inevitably crush the foundation before the sculpture is even 49 percent finished.
Weight crushes the base.
Intentionality prevents failure.
Corporate onboarding is Sofia’s sand sculpture, except most companies are trying to build the towers while the base is still dry, loose dust. We focus on ‘provisioning’-a cold, mechanical word. We provision a laptop. We provision a desk. We provision a login. But we rarely integrate a human being. Integration requires a level of intentionality that doesn’t fit neatly into a Jira ticket.
The Buddy System: Corporate Ghosting
The administrative checklist is the enemy of the strategic investment. When we view the first week as a series of boxes to be cleared, we tell the employee that their presence is a task to be managed. The ‘Buddy System’ is usually the first casualty of this mindset. Marcus was assigned a buddy named Sarah.
Sarah is lovely, but Sarah is also currently managing 39 urgent emails and a product launch that was supposed to happen 19 days ago. To Sarah, Marcus isn’t a colleague to be mentored; he is a disruption to her workflow.
– Marcus’s internal monologue
She gave him a quick wave on Monday and told him to ‘ping her if he needs anything,’ which is the corporate equivalent of saying ‘please never talk to me.’ This isolation starts the clock on churn. Marcus looks at the 2009 org chart and realizes that if they can’t bother to update a PDF, they likely won’t bother to update his career path either.
He feels like a wrong-number caller in his own life-someone who showed up at the right place but is being treated like an intruder.
The Cost of Friction (Conceptual Metrics)
The First Sale
We need to stop seeing onboarding as an HR function and start seeing it as the first ‘sale’ to the employee. The candidate experience doesn’t end when the offer letter is signed; that’s just the end of the preamble. The real story begins when the friction of reality meets the gloss of the recruitment brochure. If the experience of working at your company feels like a downgrade from the experience of interviewing for it, you’ve already lost.
This is why platforms like ems89ดียังไง are becoming so vital in the modern landscape. They understand that the ‘middle’ of the experience-the actual day-to-day integration of people into a culture-is where the value is either realized or incinerated. You can’t just throw a person into a digital ecosystem and expect them to swim if the water is stagnant and full of 2009-era debris. You need a hub, a center of gravity that feels as alive as the people you’re hiring.
Sofia T.-M. once spent 19 hours on a sculpture that was destined to be washed away by the tide in 9 minutes.
The point was that for those 9 minutes, the structure was perfect. It proved that someone cared enough to do the work properly, even when the duration was temporary.
In our world, the ‘sculpture’ isn’t temporary-or at least, we hope it isn’t. We want Marcus to stay for 9 years, not 9 months. But we treat the beginning as if it’s an inconvenience. We hand him a 49-page handbook written by a legal team and expect him to feel ‘inspired.’
Welcome, Not Onboard
The org chart is a tombstone, not a map.
– Author’s realization
You ‘onboard’ a new server. You ‘onboard’ a piece of software. You *welcome* a human being. The difference is subtle but tectonic. Welcoming involves vulnerability. It involves admitting that the SharePoint site is a disaster and that the ‘VP of Strategy’ actually left because the culture was toxic, but we’re trying to fix it now.
The Necessary Investment of Time
0 Minutes Pinged
49 Minutes Lunch
Trust Built
It involves Sarah actually closing her laptop for 49 minutes to take Marcus to lunch and talking about something other than the Q3 projections.
The sound of someone having to start over from zero.
Conclusion: Building to Withstand the Tide
We have to ensure that when people call out to our organizations, looking for a place to belong and a way to contribute, the person who answers actually knows their name and has the keys ready. Because if we don’t, the sand will stay dry. The towers will never rise. And Marcus will be looking for his next ‘Day 1’ before he’s even finished his first 90 days.
The churn isn’t a mystery; it’s a direct result of the foundation we refuse to wet. We are all sculptors, whether we like it or not. The only question is whether we are building something that can withstand the tide, or if we’re just making a mess on the beach while the clock ticks down to the next 5:09 AM interruption.