For a while, we had high turnover at our HR generalist level. It wasn't "slightly elevated," it was genuinely high for a team our size. And for a while, we did what most businesses do: we blamed the people. It was probably the wrong hire, it was probably the wrong fit, maybe the role was just really hard to fill. We went through several generalists before we decided to stop blaming the people and start looking at our own processes. That decision changed everything, not just our onboarding, but how I think about turnover in every business that we work with. Because most founders, most leaders, when they see people cycling out, their first instinct is a hiring problem. We need to find better people, we need to screen harder, we need to raise the bar. And that could be part of it. Sometimes that is very true, but more often, what looks like a hiring problem is actually a structure problem. You hire very capable people and then you put them into a system that wasn't actually built to hold them. This episode is about onboarding: what it actually is, what it needs to include, and what we built at Acacia after the data told us where we were going wrong. The process I'm about to walk you through is ours; it was built for a fractional HR firm, but the principles underneath it apply to any business, and it is what we use with our clients. We implemented our version at 7 employees, and by 25 employees, this has to exist. If you're not already subscribed and you are managing a small business, a leader in a small business, and a 1 to 500, then please smash that subscribe button. We talk about building people infrastructure inside of a small business: how do you move a business forward through your people. We talk about the structure of that, what that looks like. Hit that subscribe button. So back to our onboarding. After we decided to really look inward, we went back through five or six generalist departures and looked for patterns. We looked at their exit interviews if we had them, we looked at performance notes, we looked at just what we saw in the first 30, 60, 90 days. And four things showed up consistently. Number one: isolation. Our remote environment made it easy for new hires to feel disconnected. They knew their immediate work but didn't know the team, and in a fractional firm where collaboration is essential, that gap showed up really, really fast. Number two was a downtime trap. Because we were remote and because we were trying to be careful not to overwhelm new hires immediately, we inadvertently created downtime in their first few weeks, way too much of it. Then, when the work ramped up, the adjustment was jarring. They had calibrated to a pace that wasn't sustainable, and the volume felt like it came out of nowhere for them. Number three for us was the in-house to fractional gap. HR knowledge doesn't necessarily change between in-house and fractional work. The laws are the same, the basic principles and philosophies of HR are the same, but the way you execute is completely different. In-house, you have one company, one set of personalities, one set of rules, one full day. In fractional, you are managing the same type of work for eight or nine clients in a single day, and every one of them thinks they're your only client. We were hiring really experienced HR professionals and assuming that they'd make that transition intuitively, and they didn't. We hadn't built anything to help them make it. And then finally, number four is a prioritization as a skills gap. So reprioritization under pressure, it's not a universal skill. We assumed that it was. We were wrong. In an environment where client needs shift by the hour sometimes, the ability to triage and reset, it's absolutely crucial. And for several of our generalists, no one had ever trained them to do it explicitly, so everything felt urgent. Once we knew the four gaps, we rebuilt our onboarding around closing them. Here's what that looks like for us. The first thing that we did was decide that connection is designed and it's not assumed. We changed how new hires meet the team. We now try to have every new hire on-site within their first week. We are remote, but we rent an office and we try to be on-site. They spend a few days with their direct leader and at least one day with the broader team. This is not a one-hour introduction call; they actually do that, but real-time. If you are fully remote or maybe you're geographically distributed, you can adapt this, but you shouldn't skip it. Have the new hire fly to their manager. If other employees are in the area, bring them in for part of it. The goal is proximity early on, even if that proximity is temporary. If your company is not remote, this absolutely still applies, and probably the mistake I see is reducing it to a quick hello. You should set aside real time for the new hire to be with their team. This should be team-building during this period, not just introductions. Finally, we also assign a buddy, someone outside the new hire's direct chain, who meets with them periodically through the first month, has lunch with them, answers any questions, and then every new hire also has a one-on-one get-to-know-you session with every member of our team. We use a questionnaire for these. Some of those questions are very functional: Do you prefer chat or email? How do you like to receive feedback? And then some are intentionally low-stakes, just meant to get to know you, like: Do you like pickles on tuna fish? Those low-stakes questions, they really matter. That builds a connection that doesn't only happen through work conversations, but just getting to know them on a personal level. You're trying to make a person feel like they belong in a team, not just that they're another headcount addition. Fix number two for us was to eliminate that downtime trap, and so for now, week one is fully planned. Every minute of it, and week two is pretty much the same. There is no space where a new hire finishes something and has nothing to do next. Part of how we accomplished this was through our SEED program, which is its own episode on I will definitely get to that, but SEED is Skill Enhancement and Employee Development, and the principle is this: the structured training fills the space that used to be empty. This is online training. A new hire who is consistently engaged with learning material, client introductions, and shadowing doesn't really develop the expectation of downtime. So when the work ramps up, it's not a shock; it's just a continuation. We also changed when we introduced new hires to clients. We used to wait until they were fully trained, and that created a cliff: weeks of training with no client exposure, then a sudden wall of client work. Now we bring them into client work earlier in a very supported way so that that ramp is gradual instead of vertical. Fix three for us was to document our way of doing things. I've talked about this a lot, but the in-house to fractional gap was a knowledge transfer problem. We were assuming new hires would absorb the Acacia way through observation and osmosis, I guess. And they couldn't, because in a remote, very fast-moving environment, there isn't enough proximity for osmosis to work. So we built it out explicitly. We now have documented Acacia way processes for everything that we do: handbooks, audits, performance reviews, leaves of absence, open enrollment. Every core function has a baseline document that reflects how we do it, not just what the law requires, but how we approach it as a firm. We do customize things by client, but this Acacia way is the baseline. It's the it is the if the client doesn't care, if the client listens to our process and loves it and wants that, then this is just what we implement. If there's pieces of that process they don't like or they want to change based on their industry or what we know to be true about their business, then we'll do that. But the reality is that we have a baseline way of doing everything in our business. And that's true for your business. Every business has a way, a set of standards, preferences, approaches, and norms that distinguish how work gets done here from how it gets done somewhere else. Most businesses never write it down. They expect new hires to just figure it out, and then they wonder why it takes so long for people to operate independently. You want to document your way, whatever that looks like in your business: the client intake process, the communication standards, the escalation path, the quality bar, all of it. If a new hire has to ask you how to do something that you do every single day, that is a documentation gap, not a hiring gap. Remember, in the last episode, I said that every question a new hire asks that could have been answered by a written document is a gap. Fill it in in real time while you're teaching. Don't answer it verbally and just move on. This is how institutional knowledge stops living only in someone's head. It's how a founder, any leader, gets above the business, and it's how new hires ramp way faster. And then fix number four was to train the soft skills we were assuming. This is, I think, one that businesses really skip, and it's the one that really cost us a lot before we fixed it. We created a structured training program. That's our SEED program. I mentioned that earlier. It lives online, and it covers not just the tactical skills, but the soft skills required to operate effectively in our environment: time management, prioritization, what we call ready mode guidelines, which is a framework for how to triage and reprioritize when multiple urgent things hit at once. It covers things like how to be a good remote coworker, how to communicate in chat in a way that's professional and respectful, how to work asynchronously without losing accountability. None of these are HR skills. None of these are tactical skills. They're operational skills. They're soft skills. And most new hires, even really experienced ones, have never been trained on how to do them well. They've developed habits from wherever they worked before, and those habits may or may not fit your environment. The gap that you're tolerating here is not a character problem; it's a training problem. Figure out the soft skills your environment actually requires. Identify where new hires consistently fall short and build training around those gaps. It's not a nice-to-have; it's a must-have. In environments that move fast, it's the difference between someone integrating quickly and someone struggling for months before they either improve or leave. The Acacia process is really specific to our environment, but there is so much that transfers, and here's what that is, what's going to transfer regardless of industry size or structure. The first thing that's really important is that it starts before day one. The new hire really should know what to expect before they arrive. Not logistics only, but what does their first week look like? Who will they meet? What will they be doing? First-day anxiety is real. Founders underestimate how much of early disengagement traces back to a new hire walking in with no clue what's going on. The second point is that it runs for 90 days minimum. This is not orientation; it's onboarding. Orientation is a day. Onboarding is a 90-day integration into your performance expectations, your documented way of doing things, and your team. The first 30 days, someone is still figuring out whether they made the right choice by leaving their past company and coming to yours. Real productivity integration doesn't even begin until day 45 or 60. You need to build accordingly. Next, it has a very clear owner. Not just their manager is going to handle it, but someone who is accountable for whether this person is getting what they need at each stage of the 90 days. That accountability needs to be very explicit, and it needs to be assigned. Next, it is cross-functional. New hires should have structured conversations with people outside their immediate team, not informally, but built into their schedule. They need to understand how the whole business works. You cannot expect someone to operate like an insider if you've only shown them one corner of the building. Next, it defines outcomes at 30, 60, and 90 days. What does good look like at each of those checkpoints? What are the behavioral expectations? What are they struggling with? What feedback do they have? What performance standards are we applying? These cannot be assumed by the leader or the employee. What you don't state explicitly, people will fill in with their interpretations from their last job, and their last job was not your organization. Next, it includes connection, deliberately, integration into a team. It's just not automatic for everyone. You want to build it in: physical time where possible, buddy relationships, one-on-ones across the organization, low-stakes conversations like what do you like on your tuna sandwich that make a new hire feel like they're joining something rather than reporting to someone.The next episode in this series covers role specialization because once people are onboarded properly, you are going to see their ramp fast. Then the question becomes whether the roles themselves are built in a way that sets them up to succeed long-term. If you recognize any of what I described in your own onboarding or in your own departure patterns, this is really where the work starts. Don't do anything else until you fix this onboarding. If you want to chat about this topic further or just see what else I have to say about leading a small business, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn profile will be linked below, and you can just send me a note, tell me how many employees you have in your organization. I would absolutely love to connect with you. Most founders build reactively. They focus on sales, marketing, and product, and they treat people as an afterthought until the people start costing them everything. A business where people building is intentional, where onboarding is a system, not a first week, where new hires are set up to succeed instead of left to figure it out, that is a business that scales. Let's build that.