The coffee is lukewarm, tasting faintly of cardboard and institutional optimism. It’s Day Three. On the giant screen in the front of the room, a beautifully produced video is playing. Actors with impossibly white teeth are talking about the company’s ‘culture of radical transparency’ over a gentle, inspiring synth track. You take a sip from the branded mug-your third piece of mandatory swag-and look down at the laptop they gave you. It has a sticky key and you still can’t get an admin password to install the one piece of software you actually need to do your job. You’ve asked 8 different people, and received 8 different, vague answers.

The disconnect isn’t a bug; it’s the first, and perhaps most important, lesson the company teaches you. You’re being onboarded into a version of the company that doesn’t exist outside of this room and the marketing department’s hard drive. It’s a phantom organization, a corporate hologram designed to look appealing from a distance. The real company is the one you discover over the next three months-a labyrinth of unofficial workarounds, forgotten spreadsheets, and the arcane knowledge of that one person in accounting who knows how to actually get a purchase order approved.

The Cost of Inefficiency

I once hired a consultant, Marcus S., to look at our processes. His background was in optimizing physical assembly lines for a massive auto manufacturer. He walked around with a stopwatch and a clipboard, and his brain saw waste the way a hawk sees a field mouse. He’d point out how a machine operator turning 18 degrees to their left instead of their right to grab a part, over thousands of repetitions, cost the company $88,000 a year. I asked him, mostly as a joke, to observe our onboarding for a new cohort of 18 engineers. He sat in the back of the room for two days, saying nothing. His final report was a single page. It said:

I was defensive at first. We needed to instill the culture! But he was right. We weren’t instilling culture; we were performing it. We were putting on a play for an audience of new hires, hoping they wouldn’t notice the set was falling down behind us.

The Hypocrisy Gap

It reminds me of a text I sent last week. I wrote a long, frustrated message about a difficult client, full of sarcasm and unfiltered annoyance. I thought I was sending it to my colleague. I hit send, and a moment later, I saw that I had, in fact, sent it directly to the client. That feeling-that stomach-plunging, cold-sweat horror-is what a new employee feels, just stretched out over 90 days. They receive this beautiful, polished message (the onboarding) intended for a different audience (investors, the public) and have to sit there, pretending it makes sense in their reality. They see the raw, unedited version of the company in their first real project meeting and have to reconcile the two.

It’s a bizarre corporate hazing ritual. The employees who thrive are the ones who learn to navigate the hypocrisy the fastest. They learn that the official values statement about ‘moving fast and breaking things’ does not, in fact, apply to the expense reporting system, which requires 8 signatures and a blood sacrifice to get a $48 reimbursement. This is a tangent, I know, but think about the old factory tours from the 1950s. Visitors would walk along a polished, elevated walkway, watching gleaming machines operate flawlessly below. They never saw the back rooms, the constant repairs, the grime. That’s what onboarding has become: a guided tour of a Potemkin village.

The real cost is disengagement. You can’t ask someone to invest themselves emotionally in your mission when you’ve started the relationship with a well-intentioned, but fundamental, lie. You see it in their eyes during the endless PowerPoints. They’re nodding along, but their attention is elsewhere. They’re scrolling through their phones, trying to figure out if their direct deposit has been set up yet, or, in the case of one new hire I saw last month, discreetly searching for things like شحن يلا لودو because they’d rather be investing in a digital game world that has clear rules than a corporate one where the rules are a secret. Can you blame them? At least in the game, the path to leveling up is obvious.

A Terrifying Revelation

I’m being harsh. I know I am. And I’ll be the first to admit I’ve built some of these terrible onboarding modules myself. I once designed an entire two-hour presentation on our company’s 18-month strategic vision for a group of new customer service reps. I thought I was giving them the big picture. After the session, a young woman came up to me and quietly asked where the women’s restroom was, because no one had told them. It was a brutal and necessary lesson. My grand vision was useless noise. Her immediate reality was all that mattered. I was talking about landing on Mars when she just needed a map to the launchpad.

So I’ve started to think differently about this. I used to believe this disconnect was a colossal failure of management. A problem to be solved with more surveys and integrated platforms that cost $238 per seat. Now, I have a more cynical theory.