Handing over a laptop, a PDF and a quick «welcome» isn't onboarding: it's improvising. In this episode of Jugando en Serio (in Spanish), Thalía Penagos, Global Director of People Operations & Talent at IPC Systems, explains how she links onboarding and employee retention in a company with teams in around 30 countries, and why it all starts before you hire.
A global onboarding that adapts along three axes
IPC Systems, a 53-year-old company in a very specialized niche (encrypted communications for trading in the financial markets), is in the middle of a transformation: it is moving its products to the cloud, looking at new markets and needs new profiles.
That's why Penagos starts from a global onboarding: the same rules, the same language and the company's principles translated into behaviors. She then adapts it along three axes: country (laws, culture, size of the business), seniority (a manager is not an intern) and department (joining sales is not the same as joining HR). And finally, person by person: the Madrid office alone brings together 25 nationalities.
How long does it last? Explaining all this takes time: the goal is six months, even if the probation period ends after three in some countries.
Retention starts before you hire
Penagos sees onboarding as part of a «cultural operating system» that runs from recruitment to retention. If you share the company's principles and tell candidates you'll assess competencies based on them, they already know what matters.
Once people join, the first thing is context: what the company sells, how it makes money, who it sells to and where their work fits in. Context, clear expectations and belonging: that, she says, is how you sow in order to reap.
For me, onboarding doesn't really start on day one, not even at preboarding, when you gather the information needed for that person to join. It really starts when someone prepares for an interview and gets to understand the company.
The SAC + H framework: simplify, automate, centralize and humanize
When she joined IPC to globalize People Operations, each region worked its own way. To shift the team's mindset, she created an acronym. S stands for simplify, starting with understanding why: a company founded before the internet existed carries processes nobody questions. So she showed her team the video of the monkeys and the ladder, in which no one remembers why they don't touch the ladder: that's just how things are done.
A is for automating manual work to focus on what adds value. C is for centralizing: documentation in SharePoint (nothing is shared without a link: attachments get lost and, across time zones, nobody knows which version is the latest), the HRIS as the single source of truth, and war on «Excelitis», those stray spreadsheets that break any automation. Then came the H for humanize: making every process an experience you'd want to have yourself.
A checklist gets compliance; a strategic asset builds belonging
The process is documented and loaded into the HRIS, but the difference lies in the details: someone greeting you at the door, or a lunch with the team already booked on day one. The buddy role, which they are redesigning, follows the same logic.
Penagos proposes three translations: the business, into what it means for each person; the culture, into behaviors (if a principle is «quality and operational excellence», you need to say what it means, how it's measured and how it's recognized); and first-day anxiety, into belonging. The sign that it works: when someone stops saying «they» and starts saying «we».
If you have a checklist and just want to tick a box, you'll get compliance and that's it. If you really see it as a strategic asset, you'll build identity, retention, alignment and, ultimately, results for the company.
Feedback, managers and employee experience
Onboarding ties in with feedback culture. Penagos recalls a line from an HR Business Partner while they were preparing manager training: «It's not performance news, it's performance review». In their self-assessment, both employees and their managers list three things that went very well and three that could improve, so one bad moment doesn't hide the positives.
Putting this into practice means training, communicating again and again, measuring behaviors and recognizing them. It pays off: for Penagos, employee experience translates one hundred percent into customer experience. Her advice for this week: start with the S, question why things are done this way and redesign from there.
