The onboarding content nobody writes down
Most employee onboarding content captures processes but misses institutional knowledge. How employee stories keep the context new hires need.
Growing companies get very good at writing things down.
The product roadmap is documented. Processes live in Notion. Customer calls are recorded. Decisions sit in Slack. HR policies are searchable.
And yet some of the most valuable knowledge in the company stays strangely fragile.
It lives in sentences that begin:
"Do you know why we always...?"
"The funny thing about that customer is..."
"Originally, the product was supposed to..."
"Nobody remembers this, but..."
That is institutional memory.
And most onboarding barely captures it.
Documentation records what. Stories explain why.#
A process can tell a new employee what to do.
It rarely tells them why the process exists, which painful mistake created it, or when experienced people know to ignore it.
That context normally travels informally, from experienced employee to new one.
As a company grows, that stops working.
At 15 people, the founder tells the story over lunch.
At 50, somebody else repeats it.
At 150, the new employee gets a link to the values page.
Something gets lost.
Onboarding is a distribution problem#
Companies tend to think of onboarding as content creation: what materials do we need to make?
Another way to think about it is distribution.
People inside the company already have the context a newcomer needs.
The challenge is capturing it and getting it to the right person at the right moment.
Five kinds of story to start with#
If I were building an onboarding story library, I would start here.
- Origin stories. How did the company, product or team actually begin?
- Customer stories. Which customers changed the way the company thinks?
- Failure stories. What went wrong, and what changed afterwards?
- Culture stories. When did somebody behave in a way that shows what the company values? There is more on this in company culture videos.
- People stories. Who should a newcomer know, and what do they know that isn't obvious from their title?
The leaver problem#
There is an uncomfortable deadline attached to institutional memory.
People leave.
A colleague who has been somewhere for eight years may walk out with hundreds of small pieces of context nobody realised lived only in their head.
The normal exit process collects equipment, removes permissions and perhaps asks for feedback.
It rarely asks: what will we lose when you go?
That is a missed opportunity.
Record people while the context is alive#
This does not need a documentary crew.
A good prompt and a phone camera can be enough.
What matters is knowing what to ask, and making a habit of recording at natural moments: arrivals, anniversaries, launches, promotions, departures and big milestones.
A different way to think about onboarding content#
The future of onboarding does not have to be another 80-page wiki.
The wiki has a job. So do training videos, checklists and HR systems.
But a company is not only its processes. It is also accumulated human context.
If you want a new employee to understand how the company really works, let the people who built that context tell them.
Before they forget, or leave.
Where People Stories fits#
People Stories makes the recording easy at exactly those moments. A farewell video already asks colleagues for their memories of someone leaving; the same link and prompts can ask the person leaving for what the team should remember.