6 min read
The first week sets the tone for everything that follows. A new hire spends those days deciding, mostly unconsciously, whether they made the right call — and whether this is a team they belong on. Paperwork and a laptop don't answer that question. Onboarding activities do.
This got harder with remote and hybrid work. A new person can't absorb the culture by osmosis from the next desk anymore; you have to be deliberate about it. The good news is that a handful of well-chosen new-hire onboarding activities, spaced across the first month, do most of the work.
Here are the ones that actually move the needle — and how to run them well.
People don't quit in week one. They quit the feeling of week one, three months later. Early belonging is one of the strongest predictors of whether a new hire stays, and it's built through small social moments, not org-chart diagrams or a 40-tab setup doc.
Every activity below does the same underlying thing: it creates a low-stakes way for a new person to be seen by the team, and to see the team as people rather than names in a directory.
The warmest onboarding moment can happen before the new hire has logged in once. Have the team write a short welcome — a line each about what they're looking forward to, a small in-joke that won't land yet but will in a month, a genuine "glad you're here."
Collect it as a team welcome card rather than a Slack thread that scrolls away by lunchtime. When everyone contributes privately and it's delivered as one keepsake on the first morning, it reads as intentional — because it is. It's the difference between "we remembered you were starting" and "we were waiting for you."
If you've never run one as a group before, here's how to get the whole team to sign a digital card without chasing anyone down.
The standard "go around and say your name and role" is the weakest possible introduction. Nobody remembers it, and the new person learns nothing about who these people actually are.
Replace it with a real icebreaker. A few rounds of a live quiz, or a game of Two Truths and a Lie, tells a new hire more about the team in ten minutes than a week of meetings — and, just as importantly, lets the team learn something about them. The reveal-and-laugh moment is what turns colleagues into people.
Truveal is built for exactly this: live team icebreaker games — quick quizzes, Two Truths and a Lie — with a shared reveal moment and a leaderboard, designed to run in a few minutes on a call. It works as well across a video grid as it does in a room, which is the whole point for hybrid teams.
Belonging also comes from understanding how the team works, not just who's on it. Let the new hire sit in on the recurring rituals early — before they're expected to contribute.
For an engineering team, that often means the planning meeting. Having a new developer watch (or even join) their first sprint-planning session is a low-pressure way to learn how the team estimates, disagrees, and decides. If your team runs estimation online with something like PointPoker, a newcomer can drop into a room and follow along without anyone slowing down for them — they pick up the team's rhythm by watching it happen.
The same principle applies to any function: bring them into the standup, the retro, the weekly sync as an observer first. The rituals are the culture, and watching one is worth a page of documentation about it.
Set up a handful of informal 1:1s between the new hire and people outside their immediate team — fifteen minutes each, no agenda, explicitly not about work. A "coffee chat" rotation does what no onboarding doc can: it builds a thin web of real relationships across the org, so the new person has more than one face they recognise in a big meeting.
Keep it small — four or five chats over the first few weeks, not a marathon. The point is connection, not endurance.
When onboarding is fully remote, every activity above matters more, not less — there's no hallway to absorb the culture from, and no ambient sense of "this is what people here are like."
The encouraging part is that the strongest ones translate cleanly to a screen. A welcome card lands the same way in an inbox as it does on a desk. A live icebreaker game closes the distance a video grid creates better than any "tell us a fun fact" prompt. And shadowing a ritual is arguably easier remotely — a new hire can quietly join the call and watch. Deliberate beats spontaneous when spontaneous isn't on the table.
The most effective ones create early belonging rather than just transferring information: a team welcome card before day one, a real icebreaker game instead of a round of names, shadowing the team's actual rituals in week one, and a no-agenda coffee-chat rotation in the first month. All four work in person, hybrid, or fully remote.
If you do just one thing from this list, make it the welcome card — it's the lowest effort and the highest signal, and it's the first impression the new hire gets of how this team treats its people.
Create a team welcome card on WishWarmly — collect a private message from everyone, deliver it as one keepsake on day one. It takes two minutes to set up and works for teams of any size, anywhere.
For more on the format, see our guide to group ecards for teams.
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