7 Effective Tips for Onboarding Remote Employees Freshteam Blog

Be sure all existing employee documentation is digitized and hosted on a company intranet for easy access. Many companies use an intranet or internal wiki to maintain digital documentation of projects, successes, failures, and culture outside of day-to-day operations  (at Owl Labs, we use Notion). Onboarding buddies help new hires get acquainted quickly by providing a go-to resource https://remotemode.net/ for basic questions. Many people feel more comfortable asking a buddy questions about culture, processes, or company norms than they would be asking someone in HR. Consider providing a list of helpful bookmarks or setting up an onboarding-specific page with direct links to relevant content. Limit “required” content to the absolute essentials and some cultural flavor.

The buddy system ensures that new employees always have someone to guide them every time they get stuck at work or simply need a friend to lean on. It is natural for new hires to feel isolated during their initial days, especially in a remote work environment. It will not take much time for this feeling of isolation to aggravate, if not handled on time. While in the pre-pandemic era, new employees could shadow their seniors and build bonds over coffee breaks, the virtual world works differently. Without the warmth of in-person interactions, employees are likely to feel out of place and unwelcomed in a new workplace.

Bringing Them Back: Key Considerations as Employers Bring Employees Back Into the Office

A lot of companies are promising to stay remote even after the lockdowns have been lifted, or introduce a hybrid work-from-home plan that allows employees to come into the office just a few days a week. Start off by sending new hires a well-written onboarding email before they enter the office. This gives them a comprehensive overview of your company’s culture, people, and values. Likewise, you can also include important reminders, policies, and protocols to be observed during work in your email.

As productivity is one of the major remote onboarding challenges, a structured onboarding program with goals and expectations clearly laid out can be a huge help. It can set new hires to a good start from the start and boost their productivity by a whopping 70%. Instead, it can be equally, if not more, engaging and fun as the long-gone work from office days.

Schedule Regular Check-Ins

A hiring manager can achieve this by sharing key communications and presentations from the leadership team during the onboarding process. Remote employees have gone from being the exception to becoming a major part of the workforce. In fact, a Gallup survey in June of 2022 found that 8 in 10 people are working hybrid or remote – making them the majority of most companies’ cultures. With a larger population working remotely, there’s been a change in how companies onboard new employees. Getting off to a poor start breaks a new employee’s confidence and leads the organization to question the wisdom of the hire.

Onboarding remote employees requires a bit of planning, but you can still set new hires up for success when they’re working from home. Here are five common challenges you might face while onboarding your virtual team, plus solutions to stop these pitfalls in their tracks. Remote onboarding is the process of welcoming new hires to your team and getting them up to speed.

Tips to Improve Your Remote Onboarding Process

Bringing on new team members when your entire organization isn’t in the office can pose some risks. It’s just not possible to follow the same steps remote onboarding best practices as you would for onboarding a new hire in person. However, that doesn’t mean that remote onboarding is not possible or can’t be done effectively.

• As more businesses have expanded globally, various hiring and onboarding processes are becoming streamlined.
• Are you providing them just with a laptop, or do they also need a screen, keyboard, mouse, cables, and other equipment?
• The point of remote onboarding is to offer an employee an exciting, integrative experience as part of your organisation, even if they are not in a physical office location.
• You can ask them to check off what they have read using a remote onboarding checklist.

If you’re going to need to order and deliver any equipment, make sure to do it as early as possible. While this can be a little complicated when dealing with remote hires because you’ll need to know where to get the items delivered, it should be one of the first things on your list. COVID-19 has pushed most of the world to make a lot of changes over the past couple of months. But while we’re all itching to get back to “normal,” one thing is unlikely to change completely––going back to the office. If you’re new to a team, or a new executive, read on for ideas you can implement. For example, for a person who has joined your content marketing team, the courses can be around how to write killer content and how to optimize the content for search engines.