Cultural onboarding at scale: How to keep it human as you grow

Most companies think onboarding is about tools, logins, and Slack intros. But that’s the easy part.

The real challenge is making people feel like they belong. Without culture, all you’re doing is hiring bodies, not building a company.

When you’re a team of 10 or so, culture is natural. It’s in every conversation, every decision. But as you grow, and especially when you’re remote,  it doesn’t scale by accident.

Suddenly, people join and feel lost. The work is there, but not the values. 

In this post, we’ll call out the hidden costs of bad onboarding, why cultural alignment matters from day one, and how smart companies bake culture into every step of the journey without sacrificing speed.

Bad onboarding costs more than you think

Gallup found that just 12% of employees strongly agree their company does onboarding well.

That’s a brutal stat, and it shows.

With one in three new hires leaving within the first 90 days, companies need to pay more attention to onboarding. 

When you rush or neglect onboarding, here’s what you’re really signing up for:

• Cost of replacing lost employees (an average of £25,000 per employee). 
• Lower productivity. 
• Disconnected and disengaged staff.
• Culture suffers because no one knows how things are really done.

When an effective onboarding process can increase retention rates for new employees by 82%, onboarding isn’t just a tick-box exercise. It’s a key advantage.

The real onboarding gap is culture

Most onboarding covers how work gets done, but very few cover how people behave when no one’s watching. That’s culture.

And when it’s missing? New starters are left to decode it on their own.

In a small team, this stuff is obvious. In a fast-growing org? You need to design for it or risk losing it.

“Company culture is the backbone of any successful organisation. When it's weak or poorly transmitted everything else starts to slip.” - Patty McCord, former Chief Talent Officer, Netflix 

What high-growth companies  get right

Great startups don’t just add headcount. They scale culture with intention.

Here’s how they do it:

1. They speak a shared language

Airbnb takes onboarding seriously, starting with a thoughtful preboarding experience that includes a welcome pack, personalised note from leadership, and a digital guide. 

Once onboard, new hires go through sessions focused on community, belonging, and inclusion, which are core pillars of Airbnb’s culture.

2. They make it personal even at scale

GitLab runs onboarding asynchronously, but still pairs every hire with a buddy and sends personal welcome notes in Slack.

Scalable doesn’t have to mean soulless.

3. They decentralise cultural ownership

Stripe embeds its cultural principles into daily work, making documentation and values everyone’s responsibility, not just HR’s. .

4. They invite feedback

The best onboarding is never finished. It evolves. Smart companies build in check-ins, ask new hires what works, and what feels off, and fix it.

Metrics that actually matter

You can’t scale what you don’t measure. Here’s what to track if you want onboarding that builds belonging, not just competence:

Culture & connection

• Do people feel like they belong? (Ask it directly.)
• Can they name your values after 30 days?
• How many meaningful 1:1s have they had?

Role clarity & confidence

• How quickly do they ship something valuable?
• Do they feel clear on what success looks like?
• Would they recommend the onboarding experience?

There are tools, such as Lattice or Culture Amp that make this easy, but what matters is asking the right questions and acting on the answers.

Five practical ways to keep onboarding human

Want to make your onboarding feel like your company, not a generic HR process?

1. Build a culture pack

Skip the corporate PDFs. Create something that feels like your company. This could be stories, videos, rituals, even inside jokes.

2. Assign real culture champions

Nominate people who live the values to run intro sessions or host open Q&As. Culture spreads person to person.

3. Be intentional with buddies

Don’t just assign whoever’s free. Pair new hires with people who model the culture you want to scale.

4. Hold culture check-ins

After 30–60 days, ask: What surprised you? What’s unclear? What’s working? You’ll learn what your handbook didn’t teach.

5. Re-onboard at key transitions

New role? New team? Coming back from leave? Onboarding shouldn’t be a one-off. Keep culture fresh at every stage.

Final thought: speed without soul doesn’t scale

Fast growth is great. But if you’re hiring fast and skimping on cultural onboarding, you’re building a house on sand.

If you want new hires to stick around, perform, and feel like they matter you have to make your culture impossible to miss by embedding it into the onboarding process. 

Culture doesn’t scale by accident. It scales because you choose to make it visible.