Onboarding with cooperative games: helping new hires actually get to know their team

Onboarding that teaches the process but not the team

Most onboarding programs are built around a checklist: access accounts, internal policies, org chart, mandatory training. All necessary, none of it sufficient. Someone can finish their first week knowing exactly how to request vacation days and still not have had a single real conversation with half their team.

The result shows up three months in: people who technically "already did onboarding" but still don't know who to ask about what, how decisions get made on their team, or what's expected of them in an ambiguous situation. An employee handbook doesn't fix that. Practice does.

Why a cooperative game fits the first week

A well-designed cooperative game forces, in 30 or 45 minutes, something that would naturally take weeks to happen in real work: a new hire has to ask someone for information, explain what they know, and make a decision together with people they just met.

In Knowledge Files, for example, each department of a fictional company holds a piece of the story behind a case that went wrong. The team has to share evidence, connect it, and reconstruct what happened. Put a new hire into that dynamic alongside people who've been on the team for a year, and everyone starts on equal footing in front of the game's problem — nobody has an advantage from seniority — and the new hire discovers, through play, who explains well, who listens, and who steps up when it's time to decide.

Which mechanic fits which onboarding goal

Not every game serves the same purpose. Pick based on that stage of onboarding's actual goal:

• If the goal is for people to get to know each other and learn to communicate quickly, Blind Operations is ideal: information is split across five roles, and the only way to solve the systems is for each person to clearly explain what they see.
• If the goal is to show how the company's departments connect, Dependency Network teaches, through play, that a decision in one area affects the others — exactly what a new hire needs to understand about how the organization actually works.
• If the team is going to face tough decisions often, Crisis Room gives a first serious taste of discussing things under pressure, with nothing real on the line yet.

A typical case: bringing someone into an already-formed team

Picture a team of six people who've been working together for two years, and a new hire joins. The most common risk is that the new hire stays in "listener mode" for months: they listen, they learn the internal shorthand, but they take a while to work up the confidence to speak up, because they don't share the context everyone else already has.

A 30-minute cooperative game session levels that playing field on one specific point: inside the game, the new hire has exactly the same amount of information as everyone else about the game's world (nobody's played that scenario before). That gives them a real opportunity to lead, propose or correct something, without the weight of "I'm new, better not say anything." It's low-risk practice for a high-value behavior.

How to set up the session without it feeling forced

• Timing: the first or second week, not day one (let the new hire catch their breath first).
• Mixed group: combine new hires with existing team members — never a session with only "the new people" set apart from the rest.
• Facilitation with a Game Master: someone from the team (not necessarily the manager) who can offer a hint if the group gets stuck, and guide the debrief at the end.
• A short but real debrief: 10 minutes after the game to talk about what happened, who naturally took on which role, and what applies to daily work. We cover how to run this well in our debrief facilitation guide.

What not to do

Avoid turning the session into a performance review in disguise. The goal isn't to see "who performed best" — it's to create a shared experience. If the new hire feels like they're being evaluated, they'll play defensively instead of participating naturally, and you lose exactly what makes the exercise valuable.

What to watch for in the debrief when there are new hires in the room

The debrief after a session with new hires deserves one extra question beyond the usual ones: "was there something someone on the team assumed everyone knew, that not everyone actually knew?" This question tends to surface shared assumptions — internal jargon, unwritten ways of working — that the team treats as obvious but that were actually never spelled out. Saying them out loud, with the new hire present, speeds up their integration far more than any onboarding document, because it turns tacit knowledge into an explicit conversation everyone hears at the same time.

Ongoing onboarding, not just day one

Onboarding doesn't end after the first week, and neither should the team practice. Many organizations repeat a cooperative game session at the 30-day and 90-day marks, with the same team, to see how the dynamic has shifted as the new hire settles in. Solo practice bots are useful here too: if someone wants to understand a game's mechanic before the group session, they can try it alone first and show up with more confidence.

If you're building your organization's onboarding program, check out the full platform and add a cooperative game session from the very first week. It's an hour well spent that saves months of slow integration.