Every ramp motivates somebody. The question is which force does it. The Ramp Motivation Audit is a free 16-statement diagnostic that returns the composition of your onboarding: how much designed pull it carries, how much stake the hire holds, and how much accumulated pressure is doing the work your design should be doing. It takes about 6 minutes, needs no login, and prints.
Signed to day 1 is the dead window most programs ignore. Weeks 1 to 2 is where the hire learns what this place rewards. Weeks 3 to 12 is the long middle where most ramps quietly stall. Month 4 and after is the stretch nobody designs, and it sets 12-month retention rather than the 30-day survey. The audit scores pull against pressure inside each phase and rescales them so the 4 are comparable.
A verdict of Flat, Fear-ramped, Forced march, or Pulled. The weakest phase. The weakest pull to build and the heaviest pressure to remove, each with a specific move. Ramp time is a workflow problem, not a content problem, and motivation is one of the places that workflow shows up first.
It is a free 16-statement diagnostic covering 4 phases of a new hire's first year: signed to day 1, weeks 1 to 2, weeks 3 to 12, and month 4 and after. It returns which forces your ramp actually runs on, which phase is weakest, one thing to build, and one thing to remove.
Flat means nothing is pulling hires forward and nothing is pushing them, so ramp speed is whatever the hire brought with them. Fear-ramped means the motivating force is access gates, uncertainty, and fear of being caught out, which shows up as month 3 to month 6 attrition. Forced march means real design plus real pressure, so hires ramp fast and a share of them leave anyway. Pulled means the ramp itself does the motivating.
Because they behave differently over time. Designed pull, meaning a real challenge, visible progress, and agency over the work, keeps working after year 1. Pressure moves people until they can stop. The distinction is adapted from Yu-kai Chou's Octalysis framework, which separates positive motivators from urgency-based ones and shows that systems built only on urgency hit their numbers and lose their people.
Because 2 ramps can total the same and be opposite operating problems. A ramp scoring high on pressure and low on designed pull needs subtraction, and a ramp scoring low on both needs its first real challenge. The composition tells you which, and the total does not.
Yes. The 16 statements, the verdict, the phase read, the drive breakdown, the share link, and the printable result are free. The paid Workflow Audit ($75,000, 2 weeks) runs the same read against observed work instead of a self-report.