Repetition in a stable context makes behaviour more automatic.
More quotesBusinesses love trying to change established behaviour. It looks heroic. There is an enemy called “resistance”, a campaign, a training programme and—if everyone is lucky—a branded workbook.
The cheaper opportunity usually happened months earlier, when the habit had not yet become a habit. The Nurse Family Partnership is vastly more consequential than onboarding software, so turning its results into a chirpy growth hack would be grotesque. But the timing lesson travels. First-time mothers were forming new routines; the support did not have to compete with an earlier version repeated for years.
The ordinary workplace is full of smaller first times. A new employee discovers on Tuesday whether decisions happen in the official system or in a private message to Steve. A new customer learns from the first bill whether pricing is intelligible or an ambush. A new manager discovers whether raising a problem earns help or a faintly threatening chat about positivity. Whatever happens first becomes “how things work” with astonishing speed.
Yet onboarding is often a guided tour of the organisation’s furniture: our values, our features, our seven charming departments. Very little help arrives at the exact moment somebody must do the important thing.
Forget the tour. Find the first behaviour that makes the next good behaviour easier. Make it obvious, possible and rewarding quickly enough for cause and effect to meet. Once the workaround has a name, an owner and a bloody committee, you are no longer teaching. You are negotiating with local tradition.