Onboarding Best Practices: Building a Strong Start for Long-Term Success

What happens when onboarding is an afterthought? Productivity stalls, morale drops, and new hires struggle to find their footing. And let’s be honest: Most companies don’t invest enough in onboarding, and it shows. New hires are often greeted with disorganized documentation, unclear expectations, and no clear training process to get them up to speed. This can lead to decreased productivity for new employees and trainers alike, low morale, and even high turnover.

Creating an Effective Onboarding Process

Here’s the good news: Onboarding doesn’t have to be a mystery. When done right, it becomes a strategic advantage — one that creates alignment, builds trust, and accelerates productivity from day one. But what does “done right” actually look like? We’ll walk you through concrete strategies to create an onboarding process and build a culture of curiosity and learning that compounds over time. 

10 Onboarding Best Practices for Your Small Business

1. Focus on Everboarding, Not Onboarding

Great companies treat onboarding as a system, not a single event. At Ninety, we use the term “everboarding” instead of “onboarding” to create the clear expectation that learning never stops.

Effective onboarding systems create clarity of expectations, culture, and contribution. New hires should understand what is expected of them in their first 90 days… and beyond. They should also explore your company culture, ideally getting one-on-one time with leadership to help gain a deeper understanding of the company’s values. And finally, they should glean the long-term business goals so they can align their early efforts and strategy to help support the next stage of growth for your business. 

2. Start With a Clear Organizational Structure

The first step to effective onboarding begins before you make a single new hire. Before onboarding begins, make sure your Org Chart is current and clear. Every new hire should come into your organization understanding the Seat they occupy, who they report to, their specific roles, accountabilities, and responsibilities (RARs), and the Core Functions their work supports.

Using Ninety’s Org Chart tool, leaders can define roles and relationships before the first day, creating structure before assigning people. Avoid the trap of onboarding people into roles that haven’t been clearly defined by focusing on the structure first and people second.

3. Align on Vision and Values From Day One

Onboarding isn’t just about productivity… It's about cultural integration. Your people want to know what matters most in your organization and why. Your vision should say who you are, what you stand for, and the overall road map of where you’re going and how you plan to get there. 

Your vision is the foundation of your business and should already be built out within Ninety’s Vision tool. As one of your onboarding best practices, host a Vision Alignment session in the first week where leaders walk through the company’s “why.” Depending on the number of new hires, this can either be a one-on-one meeting or a group session. 

If you need additional content to help build out your vision, Ninety’s Vision Builders Workbook makes it easy to align your team around your mission, Core Values, and long-term goals.

4. Set Rocks and Scorecards Early

New team members need meaningful goals and a way to see whether they’re on track. That’s where Rocks (90-day goals) and Scorecards (weekly metrics) come in. For new hires, assign at least one achievable Rock during onboarding to create momentum. At Ninety, this Rock is often simple and titled “Onboarding,” with SMART goals built in to review processes, meet the team, and work through their first project. 

To help keep new hires on track, you can also add key Scorecard metrics for their Seat and review them during your 1-on-1 meetings. Even though new team members won’t move the needle much in their first quarter, this is a great onboarding best practice to help them become familiar with the structure they will use throughout the rest of their tenure. 

A lot of businesses make the mistake of creating goals and metrics that only focus on Senior Leadership Teams, but these tools are the key to success for every Seat. Every person should have line of sight to how their work ladders up to company success to help build a feeling of accountability and accomplishment throughout your entire organization.

5. Assign an Onboarding Buddy for Each New Hire

One of the simplest yet most powerful ways to improve onboarding? Assign an onboarding buddy. This buddy should be a peer-level teammate who’s walked the path before. This offers a safe, approachable point of contact for day-to-day questions, cultural cues, and unspoken expectations. This isn’t about shadowing for tasks… it’s about building belonging. A well-matched buddy helps new hires feel connected faster, accelerates their ramp-up time, and reinforces your Core Values through real-world interactions. Especially in hybrid or remote work environments, having someone designated to “show them the ropes” bridges the gap between systems and culture. 

At Ninety, every new hire is paired with an experienced onboarding buddy who has been with the company for at least a year. The onboarding buddy schedules a weekly meeting and creates an Issues list so the new hire can document all of their questions throughout the week. They then take the dedicated meeting time to review the new hire’s questions and explain more about the company culture and processes.

6. Build a Cadence of Meetings and 1-on-1s

Unclear communication is one of the fastest ways to erode trust during onboarding. New employees can feel abandoned or pushed aside when they aren’t given the face time they require to truly integrate with the rest of the team. 

To help provide structure during the onboarding process, use Ninety’s tools to help create a repeatable meeting rhythm that builds confidence. Schedule Weekly Team Meetings with a consistent agenda to help new hires gain visibility into their teams and processes, along with bi-weekly or monthly 1-on-1s between managers and their new direct reports. Also encourage new hires to use the Shared Issues list to bring attention to roadblocks and ask questions throughout their onboarding process.

Ninety’s 1-on-1 tool helps leaders prepare for and track employee conversations, turning reviews into coaching sessions and catching any issues early into the onboarding process.

7. Turn Learning Into Growth With the Knowledge Portal

Onboarding is ultimately about learning, and the best onboarding best practice is to provide a seamless training experience for your new hires. Ninety’s Knowledge Portal transforms static training into dynamic growth. Use it to create custom courses for new hires based on their role or department, walking them through the tools and processes they need to be successful. 

Before hiring for each position, have team leaders create videos that walk through processes step by step and have your new hires watch them as part of their training. The Knowledge Portal makes it easy to track completion of onboarding content and tie learning directly to business KPIs, RARs, or Rocks. Best of all, the Knowledge Portal makes it easy to share new trainings and updates with entire teams, so every employee can stay up-to-date. This helps your business create the ongoing education that turns onboarding into everboarding. 

8. Ask New Hires to Rate Your Onboarding Process

Most onboarding programs miss one critical step: asking how it’s going. To new hires, the first few weeks can feel like a whirlwind, followed by complete silence once they’re up to speed. It’s essential for organizations to ask for feedback after the onboarding process and incorporate that feedback into a more streamlined onboarding experience for future hires. 

To help you optimize your onboarding best practices, Ninety’s Assessments tool helps you gather real-time feedback and understand how confident new hires feel in their role. You can ask questions and create surveys that identify gaps in your onboarding process, then improve the process using this data.

9. Create a Clear 30-60-90 Day Road Map

Clarity drives confidence, and a clear 30-60-90 day plan gives every new hire a structured path to early success. This road map should outline what new hires are expected to learn, accomplish, and contribute in their first three months. 

The goal isn’t to overload them with tasks, but to build momentum in stages. Start with orientation and foundational learning (first 30 days), then move into ownership of tasks and goals (60 days), and end with full-seat accountability and strategic contributions (90 days). Within Ninety, you can tie each milestone to Rocks, To-Dos, and even KPIs in their Scorecard, so progress stays visible and measurable for both new hires and their leaders.

10. Reinforce Structure, People, and Culture with the 9 Core Competencies

Each stage of a company’s development requires different onboarding priorities. In the early stages, success relies more on understanding the immediate business needs of creating your vision and serving your customer. In stage two, your organization needs to enable growth by emphasizing clear goals and hiring the right people. Then in stage three, you need to reinforce structure and meetings to drive consistency.

That’s why Ninety’s 9 Core Competencies and Stages of Development frameworks guide which areas to focus on as you scale. Use our free assessments to determine where your company is now — and what to prioritize next as you create your onboarding best practices.

Onboarding Is a System, Not a Checklist

If you want your new hires to thrive — not just survive — onboarding has to evolve beyond day-one slideshows and scattered documents. Treat onboarding like every other system in your business, creating a thoughtfully designed, measurable, and continuously improving structure that can be refined over time. 

At Ninety, we’ve built the tools to make onboarding clear, structured, and scalable — without the chaos. So ask yourself: Is your onboarding program helping people thrive? Or are you still leaving too much up to chance? Let’s fix that — together. Start your free trial with Ninety!