Remote Onboarding Best Practices

Your onboarding process should be one of the essential focuses of your business. Providing a strong introduction to your business culture, mission and values are how you endear employees to your workplace and retain dedicated workers who are comfortable in their environment.

remote onboarding best practices

That’s why you need to encourage remote team building in the form of non-work-related contests, updates, and overall relationship building. Explain to them how asynchronous communication works and that they can organize their workday according to their needs, so they don’t have to be available 24 hours a day.

What Is Employee Onboarding Software?

That’s a pretty shocking statistic, but your organization doesn’t have to fall into it. Don’t assume that your current managers know how to onboard using remote tools. Invest in training from HR to ensure that everyone knows what is expected of them.

Using our employee enablement platform helps lay the right foundation amongst your people. With features like customizable templates, automated reminders, and app integrations, we help you deliver a lasting onboarding experience. With changing markets and customer needs, it’s always necessary to update your employees about any new changes.

Send Them Some Company Swag

Tasks for managers like orientation, introducing the new employee to the remote team, explaining project background, etc. And as the next generation of remote workers joins the workforce, how they’re onboarded has become a focal point of discussion. 71% of HR professionals still plan to use virtual onboarding for their new hires. Remote onboarding became the norm during the pandemic while many businesses struggled with it.

Remember that onboarding remote employees is different from traditional onboarding. It also means embracing digital transformation for your recruiting and onboarding processes. This process is essential to help new hires get up to speed quickly and feel comfortable in their role.

Just Hire Great People?

Lauren Soucy is the VP of Marketing for Time Doctor, the world’s leading time tracking and productivity software. She has 15+ years of experience in marketing at fast-paced companies. Her first passion is SEO, she can’t start her day without coffee, and she enjoys spending remote onboarding best practices time at the beach with her two boys and her husband. An effective onboarding program is considerably more important now with the increasing popularity of remote work. A high degree of employee engagement is a powerful driver of company performance and growth.

  • When onboarding remotely, you want to focus on the social side of things as well.
  • It’s also a good idea to send a list of resources for remote workers so that new hires know where to find everything they need to do their jobs effectively.
  • Not to mention, it helps the onboarding process feel more “official” and organized for remote employees.

To truly benefit from the onboarding process, it is essential that people teams and HR managers prepare and organize accordingly. However, the initial administrative processes and paperwork can be overwhelming for any team. Many professionals choose to use HR onboarding software in order to eliminate paperwork, stay compliant, and ensure a smooth remote onboarding experience from start to finish.

See How Filo Takes Events, Workshops And Meetings To The Next Level

Also, Microsoft Teams allows you to add new hires to teams to promote interaction and participation. You can host virtual meetings or video conferences to introduce new hires to the rest of the team.

remote onboarding best practices

This may be a reflection of how well they acclimated to their position at their new company. Assign either a mentor or a peer “orientation buddy” who they can go to with any questions and grow and learn together. Don’t wait for your new hires to make the first move to onboard them. Take a proactive approach and make sure that you welcome them even before they start their first day. WorkBright is the software that your new Company uses to allow you to complete all your new-hire paperwork. Create an error-resolution workflow to ensure you can communicate with employees and get the right data on file if your employees make a mistake.

This allows them to get acquainted with other members and know who to approach whenever they need help. To help your remote worker feel like a part of the team for real, gift them some company swag. Send a personalized greeting card signed by the CEO , give them a company T-shirt, a hat, some stickers — make them feel welcomed and noticed. During these follow-ups, review company goals and let the new employees know how their work contributes to your business’ overall objectives.

This way, managers and employees don’t fall prey to the “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. Suggest that managers hold weekly virtual one-on-ones, always with webcams turned on. So a white-glove, highly personalized benefits experience during onboarding can go a long way in helping new hires feel supported—and https://remotemode.net/ it’ll set them up for success so that they’ll stay longer at your company. Your onboarding process doesn’t end with orientation on the first day. You need to regularly follow up for at least the first few weeks to ensure the new hires have a good grasp of what was imparted during onboarding.

What Is Remote Employee Onboarding?

This plan should cover all aspects of the onboarding process but most importantly, include milestones that can be used to measure how an employee is progressing through the process. Remote onboarding is the process of welcoming new members to your team remotely and providing them with the tools that they need to do their job. Although onboarding new employees remotely poses its challenges, an effective onboarding process has been proven to improve retention by 82%. Studies show that employees are twice as likely to move jobs if they have a negative onboarding experience. As you prepare for onboarding remote employees, it’s important to set clear expectations for frequent and effective communication. This is often an overlooked aspect of managing a remote team, but it’s the most critical element of success.

  • Working remotely can be a challenge for those accustomed to a traditional shared workspace, so you have to go out of your way to make sure new virtual hires feel comfortable enough to share their thoughts.
  • With the right onboarding strategies and a clear remote onboarding plan, the challenges of remote working can be effectively managed.
  • Here are dozens of surprising onboarding statistics that will help you combat the Great Resignation.
  • In traditional employee onboarding processes, new hires are usually shown around the office and introduced to other employees.

As a result, many nuanced impressions and messages get lost in translation which can further result in misunderstanding. It can be difficult for new hires to mingle with the team, especially in a remote setup. In a traditional setup, they have more opportunities to get to know their teammates through small interactions like eating together during breaks, chatting at the water cooler, or along the hallway. But in remote work, they have limited ways of reaching out to their teammates. You can’t expect your new hires to remember everything about the company in just one sitting. Hence, they must always have access to important documents and information about the organization.

So you shouldn’t be just feeding information to the new hires, and should constantly ask for feedback from them to improve the process. Also set up a team call so that everyone can say hello face-to-face. Set goals and expectations and give them a big picture of how things work on their new team. Grant them access to systems such as email, instant messaging tool, role-specific systems, etc. Explain what they can expect during their first week, and make sure they know how they can get in touch with their coworkers and other important staff. Setting the right expectations can avoid conflicts and misunderstandings when they start.

By announcing the arrival of the new employee, it will help them feel more comfortable messaging their teammates if they have any issues or need help with something. This will help the new employees get to know and understand the company better, easing them into the process of working there. Over the long term, while a role can evolve, adapt, and become more complex and ambiguous, having clarity from the start will create a foundation from which the individual can more readily adapt. This makes it the ideal time to share all ideas related to company culture and company values so that it really entrenches itself in your new hire’s work habits. Encourage existing employees to share feedback on internal processes. An initial in-person gathering can also strengthen the quality of all the inevitable virtual meetings and communication going forward. Group onboarding helps make managing all your new hires far less of a hassle and can save a lot of time for your managers.

Introduce The New Employee To The Team

Filo’s virtual onboarding training enables you to conduct the remote onboarding process with efficiency and success. Remote onboarding during COVID saw many companies face new challenges without significant experience. One of the biggest challenges for remote workers is having access to the right tools and information. At the start of the onboarding process, new hires should be given any login credentials or software they need to perform their job. In some situations, it might be possible to have a universal, company-wide login, while others may require each user to have their own. Onboarding can include a lot of new information, and even with the best onboarding process, there will be questions.

Discuss upcoming projects, organization leaders, and access to shared employee resources. Another thing Czar recommends is that companies invite new hires to team events before they officially start. You can start virtual onboarding by inviting them to Demo Days and other team events as soon as they agree to join. Create a survey to let employees give open-ended, anonymous feedback on every aspect of their onboarding experience.

Bonus Tip: Create A Remote

The Mom Project supports women throughout their working motherhood journey. Search for career opportunities with vetted, family-friendly employers, and get access to job search tools, career development resources and a thriving community of moms and allies. Just as in traditional onboarding, you can expect introductions to your team and coworkers early on. If at all possible, ask for these to be face-to-face connections, even if that means over video. Being able to put a face to a name is beneficial for everyone involved and can go a long way to helping you integrate more quickly into the team.

Make them feel welcome, and follow up by gathering feedback to evaluate and refine your onboarding process. Often you’ll have to look beyond local job candidates to find the best talent. As more companies choose to hire remote workers, they face the challenge of creating an onboarding process that accomplishes this goal for virtual employees. Widespread work-from-home for COVID-19 has made the onboarding process all the more challenging. Most companies plan to work fully or partially remote for the foreseeable future.

Some researchers recommend extending the onboarding process to at least a year. They argue that this can improve employee retention and make new hires feel more comfortable and valued. The duration of onboarding depends on the complexity of the role, and that should guide you on setting the right period for your company and new hires. It’s easy for a remote employee to feel distant and separated from on-site workers and even other remote workers. Since they won’t get to clock in each day, have a chat by the coffee table, or run into anyone at lunch, they can feel very disconnected from their coworkers and that can impact loyalty and team commitment.

Record Your Employee Onboarding Videos

Provide an individualized remote onboarding plan with video check-ins and goals. Your remote employees can choose the best and most optimal way to get to know your company, its culture, and people through personalization.

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