8 Tips for Remote Onboarding
We have previously discussed how to hire during a pandemic; If you have taken on this challenge and found a great candidate, how can you successfully onboard them remotely?
With the pandemic forcing companies to work at home for the first time, remote onboarding will be a new task for many. However, you cannot ignore onboarding or use the onboarding process you used in the office.
When working remotely, you will need to adjust this process to work without in-person contact. You will also need to put a lot more emphasis on ways to make the new hire feel included and like they are part of the team.
Understanding how to successfully onboard employees remotely is especially crucial if you plan to keep employees working from home long-term.
To learn more, read on for our eight tips for remote onboarding!
The Importance of Successful Onboarding
Having a strong onboarding strategy is highly important. A well-planned onboarding process alone can reduce turnover and increase employee engagement. Onboarding also contributes to the employees success and helps with team integration.
With the move for many to remote working, this process has had to be adjusted to continue being successful.
Along with ensuring all training to do the job well is provided, onboarding helps with employee integration and team bonding. The latter happens naturally when in-office but needs to be focused on more during remote onboarding due to the loss of in-person contact.
Having a successful remote onboarding strategy is especially important if you plan to stick with remote working long-term. You’ll also need a remote onboarding strategy for all employee levels from entry-level employees, that will need a lot of training, to the most experienced positions.
Having a strong remote onboarding strategy is crucial if your team will work from home long-term.
Top Tips for Remote Onboarding
If you have new hires joining your remote team, keep the following eight tips for remote onboarding in mind to make their integration a success.
1. Explain the Onboarding Process in Advance
As you won’t be able to go over the process in person, send an outline of how the onboarding process will work to the employee. This includes giving an overview of what training will be undertaken, what meetings they will have on their first few days, and what their first week or two will look like.
You can also send a list of other employees on the team and their duties (discussed below), your remote-working policy, and a list of equipment needed.
Explain How Their Work and Progress will be Checked
Also, explain check-ins that they can expect to get throughout the day and how communication will be handled.
You may request that another employee checks in with them or that they keep a list of tasks they completed and any problems they had.
Explain that these frequent checks are just for their first week or so on the job to avoid the new employee feeling micromanaged. This is especially important for more advanced employees - explain it is simply to check everything is going well and not to try to disrupt their processes or way of doing the job.
2. Make the New Hire Feel Welcome
When adding a new employee to your team, it’s always important to make them feel welcome. This is even more important when onboarding remotely.
New hires will not have the ability to interact with their co-workers in person. Therefore, making them feel welcome and like they’re part of the team will take more work.
Due to this, before even thinking about job training, begin the process of integrating them into the current team.
Conduct a Welcome Meeting for Team Introductions
A good way to begin the process of employee integration is to get all employees (or all employees the new hire will work closely with) to send a welcome message. This can be via email or messaging app. Alternatively, host a video call for introductions.
Having each employee explain their role is also very helpful and lets the new hire know where they fit in. They will easily understand who they’ll work with on a similar level, who is above them, and who they are managing.
Creating a document with each employee’s name, a picture, job title, contact details, and a list of the tasks they are responsible for can help a lot as well.
You may also want to arrange one-on-one virtual meetups with those the new employee will work most closely with. For example, the new hire may have a one-on-one video call with their manager. These can be to discuss the role and/or to simply get to know each other.
Also, make it easy for new hires in management positions to connect with the team they will manage. Ask them how they want to go about this and try to meet that request.
Begin the process of integrating the new employee by introducing current employees to them via video call.
Keep the New Hire’s Communication Style in Mind
It can be useful to offer a range of meeting options or ask new hires how they would like to connect with the team. When in-office, one-on-one relationships are built based on each employee's communication style.
Forcing a new hire into “your way” of meeting the team can isolate them if that’s not the way they build relationships. For example, a more reserved employee may like one-on-one meetings or smaller group meetings, as opposed to a video call with ten plus employees.
Host Team Building Events
Try to host more virtual events when you have new hires too. For example, host a virtual lunch or happy hour with games and icebreakers.
Also, try to invite the new hire to events as soon as possible, even if this is before their start date. Of course, don’t make this mandatory, especially if they’re still working at another job.
3. Ensure They Have All Required Equipment
Before their start date, you’ll need to make sure that new hires have all the equipment needed to do their job well. You cannot just assume employees will have these things or will purchase them at their own cost.
This includes providing office furniture and tech items, like a computer, and anything else they may need, such as a printer or software. Make sure they also are provided with a budget for stationery or set up the delivery of supplies as needed.
To really make the new employee feel welcome, send other perks that they would get in office. This includes coffee and tea supplies, snacks, and/or gift cards for once-a-week employee lunches.
Plan in Advance
If needing to purchase and send equipment, make sure this is set up a few weeks in advance. This way, there is sufficient time for the new employee to let you know what they need and for you to get it sent to them before their first day.
Even if working at home is temporary, make sure you supply them with as many things as you can. These may just be provided on loan until they get back in the office but offering supplies can make a great first impression.
Ensure new hires have all equipment needed, such as tech items, before their start date.
4. Initiate Setup of Online Elements ASAP
Make sure the setup of technology is initiated as soon as possible. This should be done either before the new hire’s first day or as one of the first tasks on their start date.
This process includes providing links and login information for software, communication platforms, the company intranet, and their email.
If any software used is new to them, for example, if you use a work messaging platform they haven’t used before, create a document to help them get up to speed with it or provide access to tutorials.
This is a highly important step in remote onboarding. Without access to communication channels and other digital resources, they cannot connect with the team or even do their job!
5. Go Over Remote Work Policy
It can be more difficult for employees to know what is expected when not in-office. To help with this, ensure you have a remote work policy and go over that with the new hire as soon as possible.
This document will cover things relating to what is expected of them when working remotely.
For example, while many offices have some flexibility on hours to work, they generally follow an 8-4 or 9-5 model, whereas this varies a lot remotely. Therefore, you need to outline work hours if applicable as some companies allow remote workers to work whenever while others stick to set hours.
As employees will be accessing company information from home, outline the policy for keeping that information safe. Whether that be by using a VPN, creating a separate user account for work if using their own device, or any other security measures.
Of course, also include things from your in-office policy that are still relevant when working at home.
6. Create Checklists and Onboarding Folders
To make the onboarding process as easy as possible for all involved, create folders containing all onboarding documents. You can also create checklists outlining what needs to be covered.
Start by setting up a cloud-based file system or a special onboarding folder on your company intranet. Then put all documents the new employee and those onboarding them will need in that digital folder.
This includes documents on remote work policy, a staff overview, training manuals, process checklists, and anything else that will be useful to the new hire.
Then create checklists that cover all the things the new hire will need to go over. Once each thing has been covered, the new hire and those training them can check it off. This makes it easy to see what is left to do and make sure nothing gets missed.
Be sure to go over your remote working policy, including hours to be worked and security measures.
7. Establish Goals and Expectations
When employees are working remotely, it can be more difficult to ensure they are on track. It also makes it harder for them to know if they are doing what is expected.
That alone can cause stress and even burnout in employees. Not knowing if they are doing well or not can also greatly affect productivity.
This can be solved by setting clear goals and expectations from the onboarding stage onwards.
Schedule Check-Ins
To help with this, you may also want to factor in more check-ins, for example, a weekly review. But try to make this a two-way system to avoid micromanaging.
For example, have a weekly meeting where the employee’s manager goes over their work. Highlight what they're doing well, and where they could improve. But also allow the employee to have input. Allow them to mention where they would like more help or how certain things could be improved.
8. Get Feedback
Many companies will be new to remote onboarding and will be building their strategy for this process from scratch. Therefore, feedback is crucial to improving the remote onboarding process going forward.
After a month or so, ask the new hire for feedback. This includes asking them what worked well and what could be improved or added to the process.
Additionally, ask the main team members working with the new hire what could have been improved.
Take this time to also ask the new hire what they think could be improved with the overall remote setup. You will likely be in the process of adding the first new hires to your remote team. Therefore, these hires may have feedback on how your remote operation can be improved based on their previous experiences.
They will bring both a fresh perspective and will be able to incorporate things that worked well at other remote jobs.
In Conclusion
Hopefully, these tips for remote onboarding will help with the integration and training of new employees while working at home. Although you’ll need to make adaptations to your onboarding process, these changes are easy to implement and will help greatly in getting new hires up to date with your company and working at home setup.
Do you need help with the remote recruitment process? Lynne Palmer can help!