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This article is part of our Opinions section, where we invite industry professionals to share their views on the most pressing technology questions of our time.
Ever since the pandemic, the world’s been getting more remote and distributed. It’s one of the reasons why I believe, more than ever, that in-person onboarding is absolutely essential for tech companies.
It’s not an easy choice by any means. It takes time, travel, coordination, and deliberate effort. But the benefits of in-person onboarding far outweigh the logistical hurdles. In fact, I would argue it’s one of the best investments you can make in your people if you want to build stronger teams, faster.
Starting a new job remotely can feel extremely isolating, like you’re being dropped onto an island with nothing but a laptop and a Slack login. When you set out to design your own in-person onboarding program, it should be to flip the script on the status quo of remote working.
In fact, the end goals of what your remote working program accomplishes should look something like this:
There’s good rationale for why you would want to bring people together for their first few days. It’s a chance to create a shared starting point for the new joiners. That way, they get a cohort of peers that they can refer back to throughout their journey. They get to meet each other, learn together, eat together, and even compete in friendly Kahoot quizzes that reinforce what they’ve learned from each other.
As for how you build that process, don’t do it in a vacuum. It should be a collaborative effort between various departments. If you’ve got teams that span People to Revenue to Engineering and beyond, you should be sitting them down and asking:
There are lots of ways your onboarding program can shake out, but one option is a three-day onboarding program structured around clear daily themes, led by different departments across your organisation. You can even work with your sales team to build a revenue-specific, two-day onboarding that follows the company-wide program. This can be super useful for creating a more well-rounded experience that supports the aforementioned core goals: help new hires ramp up faster, feel more connected, and build trust from day one.
Over and over, I’ve heard from new hires that there’s just no substitute for in-person interaction when it comes to understanding our culture.
Sure, remote onboarding is more ‘efficient’ in a way. And it can handle intros and logistics, of course. But it can’t replace bonding over lunch, sharing a joke between sessions, or shaking hands with a new coworker. It skips the intangible, emotional aspects of joining a company. That’s where belonging lives. You can’t use remote onboarding as a substitute for that.
So if you’re going to onboard new members, don’t just consider doing it in person, but consider team dinners, picnics, icebreakers, and informal chats. New hires need to feel welcome by being given lots of ways to find their footing (and their people) in this new foreign environment they find themselves in. I like to think of this as ‘finding your tribe.’
One of the most important things to understand about onboarding, even if you do it in-person, is that it’s not just a one-time event. It’s a journey. So, while you may lay the foundation for your onboarding program, you should continue to evolve the experience to include clear 30-, 60-, and 90-day milestones so that the support and growth continue after that first induction week.
Consider pairing every new hire with a New Hire Buddy as soon as they accept their offer, too! That’s a great way to help build trust, answer questions, and build a personal support system even before day one.
You might be surprised at just how effective a good in-person onboarding strategy can be. But don’t rely on gut feelings: track the impact through surveys (e.g. Culture Amp) and onboarding debriefs. Ideally, you should also track the impact that your onboarding strategy is having on voluntary and involuntary attrition rates to date. But if you ask any team that has implemented decent in-person onboarding programs what the impact has been, you’ll likely hear overlapping results: faster ramp-up times, higher confidence, stronger cross-functional connections, increased comfort in approaching leadership, and clarity in role and expectations.
In-person onboarding isn’t really about nostalgia or tradition. It’s about building community, clarity, and confidence from the start. It’s a signal to new hires that they matter, and you’re there to set them up for success. In a remote-first world, make space for real, human connection. It shouldn’t be a luxury. It’s a strategic advantage.
