When I started with BeatBox two years ago (almost to the day as I write this), the key issue facing me was pretty clear-cut: BeatBox had built a robust and tangible culture that was unique in our industry but now we were preparing to rapidly expand headcount and we needed a way that people could get a consistent, thorough onboarding experience that allowed our culture to scale alongside our personnel. One of the primary challenges that we had to contend with was the same that many companies continue to struggle with: a working environment that is fully remote.

Beyond that, BeatBox is an alcohol supplier which means that we will always be a distributed workforce; in the US, every state — and sometimes even municipalities — control their own liquor laws and there is no real way to be successful without having people on the ground in any location in which you hope to be successful. As a result, it was even more important that everyone was operating from the same playbook and able to quickly capture and use BeatBox’s unique voice, regardless of what background they brought with them into our business. 

Fast forward to today: I’m happy to share that we’ve successfully onboarded more than 200 new hires in two years through the program we built while maintaining a 95% employee engagement score. 

So how did we do it?

The Importance of Being Onboarded

We started at the beginning. Seems simple right? Onboarding is a massively important but frequently overlooked part of building a successful business, especially if you hope to build one that centers its culture as a crucial component of differentiation and employee engagement. Studies show that 86% of employees make key decisions about their likely tenure with a business within the first six months and 20% of them make those decisions in the first 45 days. In spite of this, only 20% of companies report having a “proactive” approach to onboarding, often choosing instead to let individual managers and teams get their new hires up to speed [What Scientific Research Says About Employee Onboarding — 32 Statistics and Finding, Preppio].

The risk with this approach is that no matter how aligned you believe your teams to be, each new hire is now getting a different and siloed vision of how the company works that is further subject to how that team is feeling mentally and emotionally in any given week. Instead, at BeatBox we took the time to work cross-functionally with all divisions and leaders to understand the business, understand key failure points when new hires joined, and crucial information that all employees needed and built a program around that. Every new hire who starts goes through a shared first week of onboarding that catches them up on the history of the company, educates them on current goals, explicitly articulates the culture and values, and then guides them through selecting benefits and participating in employee initiatives like our Women’s Group and employee led charitable giving program, HeartBeat. For those coming from outside our industry, there are modules designed to catch someone up quickly on how the liquor business works. There are crash courses for tech that could conceivably be new to someone, ranging from Microsoft and Google office suite products to Asana. 

Finally, we cohort our new hires into two cohorts per month, each of which also have introductory meetings with departmental leaders to understand the business, put faces to names, and share a little bit about themselves. It’s a busy first week, but it’s one that’s hard to leave feeling like you don’t know what’s expected of you or who to go to for what.

One thing we quickly learned is that managers often are confused about the expectations for them during onboarding, which are rarely articulated. To solve this, we built documents that are mirror images of each other for the manager and the new hire to have that level-set expectations and tasks for the first week and then include descriptions of how someone should be feeling in months two and three. Beyond this, we also built frameworks both in document and project management software (Asana) format to build and share 30-60-90 plans. 

The results so far have been strong: employees routinely express strong satisfaction with our onboarding program, with the overwhelming majority of them calling it the best program they’ve experienced. New hires call out their “front row seat” with leadership, the humor embedded in our training, and the structure making it easy to learn about different parts of the org. New hires regularly mention the way that our intentional approach to onboarding made them feel like the company really centers its employees, with one even going so far as to tell us they “thought onboarding sucked everywhere, but not here.”

But we haven’t sat back — instead we’ve worked with departmental leaders to understand their business units’ specific needs and built additional training material that follows the first week which guides the new employee through the specific intricacies of their function and role, up through the remainder of their first month. The best example of this being our “School of B.O.X.” sales onboarding that walks new sales hires through how BeatBox approaches the “basics”, “opportunities”, and “execution” our sales partnerships with our distributors as well as crash courses on key retail accounts at the national chain level. 

Clarity is Key to Strong Workforce Engagement

In the 25 years that Gallup has tracked employee engagement, they saw a peak in engagement in 2020 — at only 36%! From there, things have trended back downward with 31% of employees engaged on average and, perhaps more distressingly, 17% of them actively disengaged [U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low, Gallup, 2025.] Many business leaders have attempted to solve this by pushing for return-to-office mandates to recapture the “magic” of being around each other in person, but these engagement levels aren’t aberrations caused by remote work: these have been the norm for decades. 

This approach neglects two major points. 

First, in 2025, regardless of whether your relationships are primarily local or spread out across the country or world, it’s very likely that you maintain those relationships largely with the aid of remote-first tools like phone calls, texting, email. And social media. Why do we, then, assume that people somehow are incapable of forging the same bonds they have in their social life at work via digital means? 

Second, workers pretty consistently report high levels of satisfaction with the increased flexibility and cost savings that remote work offers them, why then would engagement be dropping? 

I argue the real culprit is actually an age-old problem that persists in just about any large group: lack of clarity. In the same article cited above, only 46% of employees told Gallup that they clearly know what is expected of them at work and only 39% felt someone cared about them at work. Worse, only 30% felt someone encourages their growth and development, which is an item strongly linked with retention.

By building our onboarding program specifically on the premise of providing clarity into how and why the business operates the way that it does and then moving onto how and why your role and function fits into the business, we aim to help people adjust to the business at a reasonable pace and in a manner that meets them where they are in terms of operational knowledge as they make the transition. 

From there, we also explicitly state (and restate via engagement in learning-specific Slack channels for individual contributors and people managers as well as quarterly live trainings) how the People & Culture function, and specifically Learning & Development, can be leveraged to support each employee on their journey via coaching, learning stipends, self-service tools, and tuition reimbursements. 

So far, the results have been strong. BeatBox has maintained an engagement score of over 95% both years since we introduced our onboarding program and we’ve just been certified as a Great Place to Work for the second year running as well. 

How We Turned Onboarding into a Brand Experience

Too often businesses spend loads of time and money building a unique brand style and voice only to then have a pretty cookie-cutter work culture. Sure, the tech boom of the early aughts and teens brought new workplace perks but behind those foosball tables and in-house smoothie bars have been the same ruthless annual layoffs that have been happening since Jack Welch was ruling the roost at GE.; it’s hard to care how hip your now-former employer’s social media is when you’re budgeting out your severance pay and preparing for a job search.

As we set about building our onboarding program at BeatBox, we partnered with our Talent Acquisition, Core HR, and Marketing teams to approach this program as a customer acquisition and retention project. We worked hard with marketing to understand the visual style and voice and tone of the BeatBox consumer brand and work that into our onboarding materials. 

We worked with TA to ensure that job descriptions had the same clarity that our onboarding has and that our onboarding materials were carrying a throughline from the stated expectations in the JDs. We worked with Core HR to understand the benefits packages and the cultural touchstones that made our workplace unique, and from there we set to work on building an onboarding program that mirrored and expanded on everything a new hire would have learned during the hiring process. 

As a result, we have new hires regularly going out of their way to tell us how refreshing and fun they found our onboarding materials and how they could feel right away that BeatBox is a different work environment than anywhere else they’d been, similarly to how our online presence is pretty different from a lot of our competitors. By focusing on leveraging and reinforcing the brand that our business had built in our marketing, we were able to more easily build onboarding content that could be at once informative, fun, and unmistakably BeatBox.

By embracing our onboarding program as a means of reinforcing our brand, establishing clarity, and providing a cohesive and consistent introduction to the company for new hires, we’ve been able to successfully add 200 new hires in the two years I’ve been at BeatBox while maintaining a thriving and tangible culture that truly ensures that every new hire feels welcome at the party.