Losing Gen Z? Fix your onboarding first

When 22-year-old Tanya, a product design intern in Bengaluru, logged into her new company’s decade old ERP, she froze. “I felt like I’d time travelled to Windows XP,” she laughs. The same Gen Zer who edits reels at lightning speed, spent her first week googling “What is an ERP?” and wondering if she made a mistake.

Tanya’s story is playing out across thousands of Indian startups. We assume digital natives will glide through any system we throw at them; instead, they slam into legacy dashboards, cryptic workflows and one and done Zoom demos. The result? Silent resistance.

One in four Gen Z employees has already refused to use a workplace tool because the rollout was confusing or overwhelming.

At first glance that seems ironic, Gen Z is also the most excited about AI and automation. This isn’t a rejection of technology; it’s a rejection of technology without context, clarity, or empathy. The mistake is ours, not theirs.

Why founders should care?

• Daily churn hurts: A 15-person product squad that loses just one frustrated junior engineer a quarter can bleed ₹40–50 lakh a year in rehiring and lost velocity.

• Upskilling appetite is huge: Seventy percent of Gen Z say they work on advancing career skills at least once a week, more than any other cohort.

• Reputation travels fast: Glassdoor, HackerRank, Blind, and X are Gen Z’s watercoolers. Poor onboarding stories spread faster than your funding announcement.

 

In the fast-paced world of startups, even well-intentioned training strategies can miss the mark. A common misstep is relying on “figureitout” PDFs and Looms, an approach that assumes silence equals competence. In reality, Gen Z often fears looking clueless. A smarter approach?

Tech Sherpas: pairing every new joiner with a near-peer buddy for 30 days.

Another frequent pitfall is the one-day “firehose” bootcamp. While intensive, these sessions often result in cognitive overload, with retention dropping sharply after just 48 hours. Instead, spaced learning works better, dripping scenarios just before the task recurs, like how Swiggy pushes two-minute nudges ahead of the lunch rush.

Generic LMS playlists also fail to engage, as they often feel irrelevant to the learner’s context. Personalised paths, like those offered by Infosys Lex, which recommends modules based on a current skill graph, lead to deeper engagement.

Lastly, training often lacks a compelling narrative, making tools feel like extra work. The fix? Start with impact. Tata Steel, for instance, opens VR sessions with a real accident scenario, leading to an immediate spike in attention.

A 5-step playbook for founders and HR leaders

1. Day 0 Storytelling: Explain who gets helped when the tool is used well—a customer, a colleague, the planet.

2. Design for Swipe Culture: Break workflows into screens a user can finish in under two minutes. If it takes longer, embed a progress bar.

3. Make Help Proactive: Chat-based copilots that pop up when error rates rise can cut support tickets by more than a quarter. Pilot with open source LLMs to keep costs low.

4. Measure “First Task Success” (FTS): Skip vanity metrics like course completion. Track: “Could Tanya create her first Jira ticket without asking Slack at 72 hours?”

5. Celebrate Curiosity: Turn every “dumb question” into a Slack thread tagged #GoodAsk. Reward the questioner and the best answer. Psychological safety soars.

The road ahead

Gen Z will soon out-number millennials in India’s tech workforce. They arrive with an instinct for discovery and a low tolerance for friction. Treat that as a bug and you’ll keep fixing churn. Treat it as a feature and they’ll become your greatest accelerant.

As Tanya puts it after a month with her techsherpa: “Once someone showed me why the ERP matters, I started building shortcuts for the team.” That’s the promise waiting on the other side of better onboarding.

Founders, the ball is in your court. Invest the same UX love in internal tools as you do in customer apps, and the so-called “digital natives” will not just adapt, they’ll lead your next pivot.

(Lokesh Nigam is the Founder of Kognoz, an HR-Tech firm)