This will make the newcomers feel included and reinforce the validity of their decision to accept your job offer. According to HCI, 83% of high-performing companies start the process of onboarding new employees before their first day. Don’t leave this off until the very last minute – this will make everything hectic and chaotic. Set up video calls with their team members and other key employees as soon as possible, including co-workers, their manager, any direct reports, and employees from other departments they will work closely with. This will enable your new starter to put a face to a name and get to know the team and the business better.

Using technology like CloudCall’s call recording feature can make processes such as remote training much easier. Allowing new employees to listen back to sales pitches and meetings can be an invaluable source of information. Getting a new hire to take over a client or candidate from a colleague can be virtually seamless if they are able listen back to past conversations. For remote onboarding, consider kicking off the day with a virtual coffee meeting.

Share your handbook

Consider sharing a personalised welcome pack with them, with useful items like branded notebooks, pens and other items that can help make them feel part of the team. It’s also important for employees to get to know other teams outside of their daily interactions. A great way to encourage this is to ask other teams to include them in their remote meetings, this way they can learn about the business and what roles other people have throughout the organisation. Use social media, such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and your Benify platform, if you have one, to showcase your culture. At Benify, we encourage new employees to follow the company’s social channels, where we continuously publish content even while working remotely. For example, we have an initiative where different teams take turns in managing our Instagram account, where they show their workday. We also recommend new employees read our blog posts to be inspired and learn more about the various parts of the organization.

• This is another classic onboarding initiative, but it’s one that can easily be neglected in a remote working context.
• Organise one-on-one catch ups with team members, as well as group catch ups, to boost team morale and integrate your new starter into the team.
• This works even better if you can make it a collaborative process, enabling them to input when they are ready for more content.
• Communication is everything – you want each new hire to feel plugged into their new workplace from the word ‘go’.
• They’ll feel much more confident on their first day on the job because they’ll already be prepared and know where to turn to with their questions.

In fact, taking on full responsibility for this might mean you don’t give the new starter the time they really need. This is an obvious one, but it’s a good chance to talk to the new employee on a human level.

Onboarding employees in a remote world

So that new remote employees feel fully trained and capable to do their very best. Whether you are on-site or remote, onboarding new employees is a process not an event. Onboarding includes everything from those initial introductions to the first big project they work on independently and beyond. During and after their remote onboarding process, request feedback so you can ultimately course correct or improve the process for the future. Depending on the type of equipment you use and your level of IT expertise, getting new hires set up to work remotely when you’re also working from home might be a new challenge you haven’t experienced before. We’re hearing from many of our clients that organising equipment for remote employees is the biggest hurdle at the moment with onboarding remote employees. Assuming you already have a process for providing new starters with the necessary equipment you just need to figure out how best to adapt this to the ever-changing situation.

Below are some tips to ensure your remote onboarding process is a success. It is always good practice to check in with a new starter regularly, but this is even more pertinent when onboarding someone remotely. In fact, it may well be that these will need to be even more frequent than if you were inducting someone in a physical location with other team members present. It is important to strike a balance between creating clear lines of open communication and making someone feel like they are being micro-managed, even from a distance. Reinforce your video call or phone chats with clear actions over email – this will also give you something to refer back to in your next catch up. Endless days of compliance training, for example, will not be motivating!

Share your remote working policy

In the Robert Walters remote onboarding series, we equip you with the toolset to make the shift to onboarding new talent remotely, overcoming the barriers that come with an absence of human, tangible interactions. Once the new hire starts, the buddy system will ensure your new hire doesn’t fade into the digital abyss that can so easily happen when working remotely. It can also help your new hire to understand your organisation’s culture, including when people usually take a lunch break, what communications channels are used or who to reach out to for IT help. During their first days, remote employees should meet with their co-workers, their manager and direct reports as well as employees from other departments they’ll work closely with. Check in with them regularly if you are a line manager or have someone from HR make sure they are accommodating fine.

Such benefits include a better work-life balance, increased hours of productivity and more trust between businesses and their employees. Regular virtual team building and ice breakers online games work and can lift the morale of any remote employee. Be sure to organise some of these regularly so that your workforce have a feeling of belonging and can socialise with others even if online. Computer security is a very important aspect for a remote employee, especially because there is no office anymore and some are on the road all the time if they are digital nomads. Things like data encryption, logging in, using VPNs and the virtual desktops are just a few examples where your IT team should consider as must do. Over time you will be able to develop and hone an effective onboarding strategy that works not only for employees who are able to work in-house but also for those who join the team remotely. As such, it is worth setting up new hires with whatever they need well in advance of their start date, as part of the onboarding process.

Evaluation is a critical part of remote employee onboarding – it should bookend the process. Implementing regular evaluation motivates employees to stay focused on their goals and helps create and maintain a productive momentum. remote onboarding best practices It also allows them to share any difficulties directly with their managers. Without face-to-face interaction, establishing a meaningful connection with new colleagues and an entirely new company is far more difficult.

• If culture is represented by people behaviours when nobody’s looking, then it’s even harder when so many interactions are almost invisible.
• The learning process is constant, so setting the onboarding process to one week it can make new employees feel pressurised to know and understand everything, which is impossible to achieve in only one week.
• The platform is a unified communication and collaboration platform that features video conferencing, instant chat and secure document sharing.
• The Team QuestWhen entering a new job, employees can be overwhelmed with the heavy load of information thrown at them from day one.
• Finally, assigning them with a mentor or creating a “buddy” system will have a positive effect on their morale and their performance as well.
• With the changes brought about by the global pandemic, including a massive shift to remote work, the onboarding process is now an even bigger—and virtual—part of an employee’s overall experience.