The Onboarding Conversations Workbook.
Twelve conversations every manager should have with a new hire — and how to have them well.
Onboarding is a conversation problem, not a content problem.
Most companies hand new hires a stack of training content and call it onboarding. Then they wonder why people leave in month three.
The honest answer: most time-to-proficiency problems aren't training problems. They're sequencing problems. And most first-year retention problems aren't compensation problems — they're conversation problems.
The Onboarding Conversations Workbook gives managers the twelve conversations that matter, in the order they matter, with the prompts and decision criteria to run each one well.
Twelve conversations. Ninety days. Done well.
The arrival
Day-one welcome, role-clarity check, "what success looks like" framing, manager working-style, communication norms.
The grounding
First-week debrief, the "what's confusing" conversation, and the conversation about what they're already noticing about the team.
The integration
The 30-day check-in, the "is this what you expected" honest read, and the relationships-and-stakeholders conversation.
The commitment
The 60-day proficiency conversation, the 90-day "do we both still want this" check, and the on-ramp-to-goals handoff.
Every conversation includes: when to have it, what to prepare, opening prompts, decision criteria for what comes next, a manager script for the moments most managers fumble, and a follow-through page for what gets written down.
Built for the people onboarding the next hire — and the one after that.
We've watched a lot of first ninety days.
LUMid is a learning & development studio out of McKinney, Texas. We design training programs for the kinds of teams where ramp time, retention, and conversation quality actually move the business.
This workbook is the distilled version of what we've watched work — across hundreds of onboardings — in support orgs, technical teams, and small businesses. It's the playbook we wished every manager had on day one.
Start with your next new hire.