Obsidian Delta

Part 4 of 5 · Opportunities: built on open infrastructure

  1. What is already solved
  2. A tutoring practice with a kit for every hard topic
  3. French editions: a business in a gap
  4. The first week on the job, from one page
  5. Run an initiative on the desk

October 18, 2026 History

The first week on the job, from one page

The first week is the part of a job the owner explains while doing something else, and it is where a small business can lose the person it just paid to find. The knowledge of how the work really goes lives in one head, and the new hire arrives on Monday. We start from one page the owner can write in an evening: what the business is, how its day runs, the rules it will not bend, who to tell. From it comes a five-day module in the owner’s own process, and the next hire starts a step ahead, because the last one has just done the week.

One page, five days

Open First Week at the Bakery. The bakery is made up: a neighbourhood shop with eight staff. It runs five days. Each is about a two-minute read with one activity, a three-question check and a manager’s note with a sign-off line, and prints as a one-page job aid. The activities: tap a plan of the shop floor, match allergens to products, put the opening and closing steps in order, handle a complaint at the counter, spot the hazard. All of it comes from a brief of seven short headings, printed in full on the page. The page says nothing in it is specific to baking: swap “proving drawer” for “walk-in fridge” and the shape holds.

A cab company’s five lines would be the dispatch screen, the first airport run, the complaint that will come, the money at the end of the shift. A clinic’s front desk would write the morning opening, check-in, the upset caller, the record that must be right. The bakery is a model-generated example, not a food-safety certification, and its page says to replace every rule with your own. The same goes for licensing or privacy rules.

A module should not replace the person beside the new hire. It puts what they would otherwise say aloud every time on the page, so their time goes to what only they can do, and then it hands over. Open Dave and Aisha, two made-up people on a first on-call rotation. By her third shift Aisha had found the bad commit in two minutes with a log-search tool Dave had not used, and his page tells him: “You’re the learner here — tell her that.” It names what comes next: Aisha guides the next new hire. Whoever is a step ahead, right now, on this, is the guide.

What a lost first week costs

Start with the figure most often quoted and least often traced. The Center for American Progress (Boushey and Glynn, 2012) reviewed 30 case studies in 11 research papers published between 1992 and 2007. Across the 27 that exclude executives and physicians, the typical (median) cost of replacing an employee was 21 percent of annual salary; across the 22 case studies of workers earning under fifty thousand dollars a year, 20 percent. Estimates run from 5.8 to 213 percent, and only two of the 11 papers counted indirect costs, which the authors say may be “hidden and difficult to ascertain.” That measures replacing someone, not a bad first week. Larger figures circulate: Gallup’s onboarding page repeats a six-to-nine-months-of-salary estimate it attributes to SHRM and adds that “others in the field believe the cost to be much higher,” naming no study. We do not use them.

On early exits, a 2010 SHRM Foundation report on onboarding (Bauer) states: “Half of all hourly workers leave new jobs within the first 120 days.” It cites a 2010 conference poster we have not seen, so we cannot give you the population. Gallup’s page says “only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job onboarding new employees”; it is dated 16 May 2018 and gives no sample. Read both as signals, not measurements.

What a first week should do is better evidenced. A meta-analysis of 70 unique samples of newcomers (Bauer and colleagues, 2007) tested a model in which adjustment (clarity about the job, self-efficacy and social acceptance) mediated the effects of how an organisation brings people in, and of newcomers seeking information, on satisfaction, commitment, performance, intentions to remain and turnover. “The results generally supported this model.” Our reading: a one-page brief delivers the first of the three by construction, because it writes down what the job is. We have no measurement of our own on early turnover yet.

What to do this week

Write the five days as five lines. One line a day, in your words: what a new hire must be able to do by the end of that day, and the one thing every new hire gets wrong on it. Add the rest only if you have time: your hours, who to tell, the rules you will not bend, your real opening and closing steps. That is the brief. The module comes back from it.

There are two ways to get it built. The recipe is free: on the trainer door, the plain prompts MP-11 and MP-12 turn a one-page brief into a module in the AI chat subscription you already have, and you read it before a new hire does. Or Obsidian Delta does it for you, from the same page: that is the packages door. The generic version is published free, so the next owner in your trade starts a step ahead too. The version with your hours, rules and names stays yours.

Part 3, French editions, a business in a gap, looks at a gap in French-language teaching resources; part 5, run an initiative on the desk, moves from one hire to a whole team and its documents in one place. How a module like this is made, from the brief to the person who reads it before it goes out, is set out in how a showcase is made.

What does every new hire get wrong in week one? One line is enough, in a comment or a message.

Sources

Where this connects

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