# Why Onboarding Is Just... Bad

- **Episode:** [161](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/161.md) (2025-01-09)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** onboarding, bad-onboarding, employee-experience
- **Time:** 24:27–27:33 (start 1467s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/161?t=1467](https://truthliesandwork.com/161?t=1467)

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[24:27] Nora Burns: Onboarding is just Yeah, onboarding is just bad. It's just bad. And the thing is, we have organizations that are doing a lot of work on designing really solid employee onboarding experiences. And here are all the steps and here's what you need to do. And then we've got frontline managers who are skipping those steps because they don't have enough time to go through them all and get that employee on the register or doing the housekeeping or stocking the shelves or delivering the merchandise. Their their bandwidth is not there, so we have to move our hiring further up along that we're ahead of it so that we actually have the time to put into play what headquarters has has come up with. One of the biggest trends from from a management standpoint is throwing corporate under the bus, like whenever they didn't want to deliver hard news or. The manager had a challenge with something happening on the front line, I heard time and time again, well, corporate says we have to, or headquarters says we have to. And instead of owning up and having a discussion about the whys of what something is that's going on in the workplace, and sometimes they just made it up. Like, they wanted a behavior to change, so they'd be like, well, corporate. And I was like, there's no way corporate had an opinion on that. I've worked corporate. They don't even know that that's happening. So, I think that there isn't a lot of managerial courage developed within some of our frontline supervisors and managers. And I think that's a real gap for us to be able to fill, to have people have real conversations human to human with the employees that are working with them. And so, that, that I think is one of the biggest trends that I recognized. I mean, there's areas on risk assessment where we've got major leakage in confidential information. We really are, at least with the organizations I worked with, were very willing to give out our employee information to other employees, which was a little disturbing to me. Like all employee cell phone numbers and emergency contacts are all listed on a long list in the employee break room, which meant other employees without my permission had my cell phone number. And I got inappropriate text messages coming through to that cell phone number as a result. Very shocking is the fact that I was sexually harassed at every job. And as the person who has been doing sexual harassment prevention training and do investigations for organizations when there is a complaint and coaching of bad behaving employees, I was surprised at how prevalent it is. Even with all of that background and knowledge that I have going in, No one harasses the head of HR, but put that same person behind the counter wearing the polyester uniform, every single job. We've got to do better than that. That was shocking to me