Onboarding Remote Employees 8 best practices

When working in a remote environment, it’s crucial to get your new hires online access as fast as possible. Since remote employees’ only connection to their teams is via the internet, without access new employees feel cut out. Our automated onboarding workflows make your new hire’s first experience with the organization a positive and proactive one.

Encourage your wider team to prioritize calls with new team members and be welcoming and supportive to newcomers. While there’s general information that every new hire should know about your business, onboarding should eventually diverge depending on what team your new employee is joining. This portion of onboarding is one of the most important and will likely extend into weeks or months into a new hire’s tenure. An effective onboarding program is considerably more important now with the increasing popularity of remote work. If your current circumstances will allow it, organizing an in-person gathering of all your new remote workers can address the isolation issue and help create a sense of belonging for them. Additionally, how you supervise them during the onboarding phase will set the tone for their future work.

Onboarding

But, for many companies seeing remote work as a viable strategy going forward – even post-COVID, developing a remote onboarding process will pay off in the long run too. That’s why companies need to structure an effective and informative virtual onboarding experience for all new employees. Well-thought-out onboarding is especially important for remote employees, given the physical limitations and lack of opportunities to organically bond with peers and integrate within the company culture. The core best practices shared here form a foundation for solid remote onboarding. An organized and itemized onboarding checklist ensures that a new employee completes everything they need to, while also providing them with concrete tasks to complete and feel like they’re making progress. Provide relevant links and information to each task so that new hires have access to all the details they need.

Words alone aren’t enough to convey the nuances of company culture — it’s the actions and interactions between employees that really define a culture. When it comes to introducing new hires to your organization’s culture, it’s important to show it through video. Enable collaborative on-the-job learning remotely by building a searchable https://remotemode.net/blog/10-best-remote-onboarding-practices-to-adopt/ video knowledge base with contributions from employee-generated videos that offer explanations, best practices, how-tos and more. This provides all of your employees an opportunity to learn from colleagues across the organization with whom they may not interact with much, which helps build a stronger unified culture among remote teams.

Business

These small yet impactful moments show consideration, help bridge the omnipresent digital divide, and allow newcomers to gain a deeper understanding of their colleagues’ personalities. Click here to connect with a specialist and learn more about the Wisetail LMS platform. Andy is a technology & marketing leader who has delivered award-winning and world-first experiences.

Have the new hire’s manager schedule one-on-one time with them, whether this is on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Communicate openly about company values, upcoming projects they’ll work on, team objectives as well as their individual goals. Using a cloud-based system can make these documents and information accessible to your remote employees via the internet. Remote onboarding became the norm during the pandemic while many businesses struggled with it.

Remote Onboarding Best Practices to Acclimate New Hires Fast

Remote working creates a set of new challenges for managers who are used to traditional methods of managing team members. Walkthroughs like this allow virtual workers to see other employees in action. What’s more, they lessen feelings of isolation, even if the videos or images aren’t current. It allows employees to make eye contact, as well as observe facial expressions.

Working from home necessitates technical know-how but that can’t be expected from employees without timely support. Provide guidance and support wherever needed to keep employees engaged and productive. It is also important to do frequent check-ins on employees undergoing training. Without an assigned companion at the workplace to depend on, https://remotemode.net/ most remote hires often hesitate to ask for help. Work-life balance is significant to an employee’s work productivity as well and it can be provided with a well-thought-out remote working strategy. Putting your staff on a rigid training schedule is likely to aggravate them and, as a result, reduce their interest in the training process.

This article is for both – remote-first companies and those operating remotely temporarily due to the pandemic. It contains 10 remote onboarding best practices to ensure happy, engaged, and thriving remote workers. By asking for feedback on your remote onboarding process, you’ll provide each new employee with an experience that’s better than the last, building a distributed team that’s well equipped to do their best work. Being truly onboarded—having a full understanding of one’s role and the ins and outs of a company—realistically takes weeks, or even months.