Employee Onboarding: The Ultimate Predictor of Productivity
Employee onboarding has always been a great predictor of company productivity. With the rise of AI, it may be the ultimate one.
I’ve always believed that employee onboarding is a great predictor of productivity.
You want to know if a company is productive? Just watch what it takes for a new person to get their first piece of work done.
If hours, a dream. If days, great. If weeks, poor. If months, run away.
This has nothing to do with the typical HR theatre around onboarding plans, team building, and psychological safety snake oil.
This is about companies that don’t really need any of that because:
- The systems they work with are legible and designed for safe development and testing.
- Knowledge is written and lives where the work happens, not in people’s heads.
- Tools and data are accessible without gatekeeping.
- Decisions leave traces.
- You can be trusted by default because the right guardrails are in place.
Now, with the rise of AI, these conditions for productivity have taken on a whole new level of meaning.
If systems can be operated programmatically, if “safety” means the ability to spin up environments and iterate without waiting for approvals, and if “trust” means clear privileges with clear boundaries: then AI won’t just be a tool your people use. It will become a new team of employees.
The companies that will get the most out of AI right now are not necessarily the ones throwing more tokens at it. They are the ones that have been carefully building the right conditions for human productivity all along.
Legible systems. Written knowledge. Autonomous access. Safe experimentation. Trusted competence.
Companies built around these principles didn’t need AI to succeed. But AI needs them.
An Egyptologist documenting hieroglyphic inscriptions at the Karnak Temple, Egypt, 1927. Cover photo by Nationaal Archief on Unsplash.