When I read your account of your onboarding at two different companies, I can only see a company with a good culture and another company with a poor culture. If you had onboarded the first company remotely, I bet you would have got check-in messages. Similarly, if you had onboarded the second company on-site, nobody would have cared about how you were doing.
Yes, but that's the company culture the one I'm replying to is advocating for. A culture where you never should dare asking anyone for help, as you're inconveniencing them. Just sit silent with your problems and schedule a meeting the next day, and they might find it in their heart to help you. Or also get annoyed by "all the meetings destroying their focus time"..
I advocate for another culture, as I've seen everybody beihg happy with it.
I advocate for a culture where onboardings are mostly self service and most documentation is up to date, frequently available, and easy to access. A culture where people are not afraid to ask questions, but they rarely have to, because most of the stuff is at the docs, and they never wonder who to ask, because they've been told who their onboarding "buddy" is. The person being onboarded is also aware that it's probably a good idea to batch their questions into a list, so they can discuss them with their buddy during their scheduled meetings, but is also not afraid to ad-hoc ask questions, because no documentation is perfect. If these ad-hoc questions are too much and too often, it might be that something in the self service is missing, and that is remedied accordingly.
In the culture I advocate, everybody's satisfied, learned well, and mindful of each other's time and flow, and it has nothing to do with being in the office or not. In fact, I have anecdotally noticed that in-person companies are more likely to use existing people's time and attention as crutches for compensating for a the lackings of a comprehensive on-boarding plan, which is what I believe the OP experienced and wrongfully thought to be the solution.
