Dunder Mifflin’s Guide to Training and Onboarding: Lessons from The Office

Onboarding Teaches Culture, So Define the Behaviors Behind Your Values

Onboarding is not just a skills checklist. It is a new hire's first taste of your company. In week one they learn what you care about. They also learn who you are as a supervisor. Page framed it as an introduction to the company and its values.

She pointed to the meta contingency (many small behaviors that build a culture). Single behaviors join into a network. That network makes acting a certain way stronger over time. In plain terms, it is your company culture. If nobody names the behaviors, the culture forms by accident.

When she asked the room for values, the chat filled fast. Kindness. Support. Growth. Collaboration. Then came the harder question. How much of that shows up in your actual training? Each value means something different to each person, so she ran the exercise both ways. Name a behavior, then find the value. Name a value, then list the behaviors.

For passion, her own examples were small and countable. Bring one new idea to supervision. Finish one piece of professional development. Show up to the meetings. For collaboration, the room got sharp. Attend a team meeting each week. Ask direct staff for input when building a treatment plan. Post updates in the group chat so everyone stays current. When a definition still feels fuzzy, use her test. How can I tell?

So the point here is to show values need to be complemented by defined behaviors.

From the talk — Mellanie Page

Cut the Jargon in Early RBT Training

Our field runs on acronyms. The people learning them are often brand new. Many RBTs (entry level ABA staff) come straight out of high school. For some, this is a first job. Big words on day one feel like a wall.

Page put it bluntly. Terms, concepts, and principles do not prepare a behavior tech to do the job. She pulled out the two action words: prepare and do. Big words do neither one. The science vocabulary still matters. It just does not have to come first.

What works instead came straight from the room. Model the skill. Give the person a turn. Give feedback. That is BST (show, practice, then give feedback), and it needs almost no vocabulary at all. Pair a technical word with a plain word, then give a real example. Over time the term gets layered onto a skill the person can already do.

The point here is we need to quit the jargon.

From the talk — Mellanie Page

Shape Staff Learning the Way You Shape Any Other Skill

Eagerness is the trap. We want to share all of it. So we hand new staff concepts, plans, and support strategies they cannot use yet. Page compared that to an initiation: a flood of policies, steps, and terms in week one.

Her fix is a thing we already teach. Shaping (build a skill in small steps) is not just for clients. We condition skills in staff too. So start where the learner really is. In her experience, that point is much earlier than most teams assume. She asked the room to rate their own shaping of training on a one to five scale. Most answers came back as twos and threes.

Two moves follow from that. First, build set times into training to hear barriers and questions. Lecture rolls on and the what if questions never get asked. What if my client walks away? What if there is a distraction? Second, go deep instead of broad. She was honest about her frustration with the broad 40 hour training. There is only so much time, and not every concept gets used in week one, or ever.

We can't possibly teach everything that we would eventually want them to know.

From the talk — Mellanie Page

Three Tests for Whether a Skill Belongs in Training

If you cannot teach everything, you need a filter. Page offered three.

First, high impact. Some skills ripple outward. Learn to pair (build rapport before asking for work) and you gain instructional control (getting a client to follow your lead). That control builds the relationship you need to teach. The same goes for reinforcing behavior and setting up the MO (making something worth working for). Her non example: hours of admin tasks. That is an area to trim.

Second, how often it comes up. Frequent skills create practice, and practice builds fluency (smooth, fast, correct work). Teach the thing a tech will use every single session, not the thing that shows up once a month.

Third, socially significant (it matters in real life). Her test is a sentence you have to finish out loud: you are learning this because. If you cannot finish it, cut it. She also wants the trainee to agree. If they do not see why it matters, you lose their reason to learn it. Her own non example was the long history of the science. Fun for us. Not day one material for a new tech.

If there's a skill that's not needed frequently, then it's likely not critical.

From the talk — Mellanie Page

Write Expectations That Leave No Room to Guess

Clear expectations are slow work, and they prevent most of the problems we blame on new staff. Page's checklist has five parts. Name who does the behavior, what the behavior is, and where it happens. Then add when it happens and how it should be done. Skip one and the directive falls apart.

Take the directive "report an incident right away." What counts as an incident? Who do you tell? Without that, a new tech pauses or tells the wrong person, and the response comes too late. Take "collect data." On which skills? How often? Why does it matter? Teams watch five teaching moments an hour go untracked and then wonder what went wrong.

Even "engage with your client" needs a definition. Do I follow their lead? Only when they are doing what I asked? All the time? She described policies and steps as clear definitions (exact, observable wording). They should also work as task analyses (a job broken into steps). And do not skip non examples. We tell people what to do and forget to show what not to do.

Most failures and shortcomings of new team members are due to lack of clear expectations.

From the talk — Mellanie Page

Link the Work to Outcomes, Then Assess What Motivates Your Staff

We fight hard for meaningful programs for clients. We rarely hold staff training to that same bar. Page's questions were direct. Is this training needed, or is it just habit? Do we tell trainees why each piece exists? Without a purpose, you have taught the steps and skipped the heart of the job.

That gap turns into turnover later. A tech knows they are doing the right thing. They cannot connect it to any outcome for a client or the company. The work is hard. Over time they fade, and then they go.

Motivation does not just appear because we want it to. People are reinforced by different things, so ask. She shared a simple tracker: team members across the top, items down the side, and a score for each one. Add your own options as you learn them.

Not every reinforcer has to be an item. Social time counts. Public credit counts. Lunch with a leader counts. If social contact is what lights someone up, invite them to a meeting they would enjoy. It does not have to be a meeting they are required to attend. You cannot match every preference on a team. You can still ask.

And as basic as this sounds, it's so important to assess preferences early and often and be clear about what reinforces team members.

From the talk — Mellanie Page

Engagement Techniques That Make Training Stick

Page shared a stat she came across. Attention span sat at 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds by 2015. A goldfish holds nine. Meanwhile a 40 hour training runs 144,000 seconds. Attention drifts the whole way through it.

Retention follows the same line. Lecture style learning holds about 5 percent. Active participation pushes that toward 75 percent. So when a tech asks a basic question a week after training, they probably did hear the answer. It was never practiced and it was never reinforced.

The methods she and the room named are easy to run. Role play, even though people dread it, because it forces you to stay in the moment. Practice runs and real problem solving. Quiet time to reflect on what just happened, with a few guided questions. Stories and humor, since feelings make learning stick. Personal examples, which also show you who has not connected with the material yet. Student teaching: let trainees teach each other while you listen in. Games and friendly contests.

She also pushed learners to generalize a skill into new settings. Teach a token economy (earn points, trade them for rewards) in a classroom. Then ask how it would work in a grocery store with nothing to carry. That guided jump is derived relational responding (linking ideas nobody taught directly). She used the same idea for reinforcer variety. A child loves one animal toy. Ask what they like about it: is it soft, is it pretend play, is it animals? Then branch out into new options. Creativity can be trained.

Humor, I think, is a great way to make examples memorable.

From the talk — Mellanie Page

Connect First, Then Train: The Part Most Onboarding Skips

Her last clip was a sales scene. One character connects before he pitches. The other jumps straight to business. Page said we do the second thing in training all the time. We open with policy and steps and never learn who is in the room.

Connection here means real rapport. Who is this person? What matters to them? Supervisors put on the expert cap when being human would do more work. She pushed back on the memory excuse too. If you care about something, you tend to remember it. If a name or a detail keeps slipping, that is usually about what you are prioritizing, not about your memory.

The ideas from the room were simple and repeatable. Check in before and after a session. Ask about the person, not just the job. Name your own weak spots so the new tech can relax. Run daily debriefs and one on one time. Look for things you have in common. Share what makes you nervous. Build a pairing process for staff, not only for clients.

Her closing frame flips the usual script. We act like the trainee is selling us on why they belong here. In truth we are selling to them. We want them, and we want them to stay. That means sharing values as behaviors, setting clear expectations, and tying their role to the mission. It also means listening for barriers and building learning worth showing up for.

My big takeaway here is just before you sell, make sure you connect, right?

From the talk — Mellanie Page