Welcome E-board: Designing a Successful Remote Onboarding Process
Setting new employees up for success looks different when working from home is the standard. Seamless onboarding helps avoid decreased morale, increased turnover, and lost productivity. So, what’s the key to a successful remote onboarding process?
Tailoring your onboarding workflow to accommodate a hire who’s never set foot in the office or shared coffee with her supervisor.
A savvy remote onboarding program is more than just moving your meet-and-greets to Zoom. It should focus on the specific challenges faced by new employees working from a spare bedroom rather than a boardroom.
A Remote Onboarding Process for Employee Success
When designing your remote onboarding process, you should deliberate, integrate, customize, and streamline.
Deliberate
Experts recommend budgeting at least twice as much time and effort to developing and executing a remote onboarding process than an in-person process. Between allowing for technical mishaps and accommodating your team’s scheduling priorities, remote onboarding processes have more logistical moving pieces. Designing your remote onboarding process carefully also means paying attention to new issues or challenges unique to remote work. These may not have factored into your organization’s previous procedures.
Integrate
The absence of organic opportunities to connect and learn might leave your latest addition struggling when it comes time to send out invoices or contribute to a monthly meeting agenda.
Formal mentorship programs and scheduled check-ins with critical function leaders are key to helping new team members. They help new employees learn the ins and outs of how your organization operates daily. Managers should connect with their reports on day one. Also, junior hires should receive structured guidance from their peers and direct supervisors. Be clear about roles and responsibilities with leaders and reports to avoid confusion about who can or should do what.
To further foster connections and put names to faces, ‘camera-on’ is the new ‘open-door’ policy says Fiona Claridge of Own The Room.
Customize
Traditional onboarding processes tend to focus on general policies and procedures that may not apply to your newest employee. A more efficient approach? Data-driven training designed to fill knowledge gaps and optimize performance.
Cangrade’s remote onboarding platform provides new employees with tailored course materials based on their Pre-Hire-Assessment results.
Streamline
Remote onboarding begins the moment your amazing candidate accepts your offer. If you know your organization will provide technical resources like laptops or printers, arrange for a trial run before shipping them off. Likewise, collect all logins and other access tools in advance to minimize the risk of technical glitches.
Shared documents and calendars not only give new hires valuable insight into ongoing processes and projects. It can help you track employee progress and identify areas where your organization may want to offer specialized instruction and training.
Successful remote onboarding requires ingenuity and advanced coordination. With the help of technology and teamwork, you can ensure new hires begin with confidence in your organization and their own skills. Deliberate planning that focuses on integration, optimization, and customization sets your employees up for success – no matter where they are.
Learn more about how Cangrade can simply your remote onboarding here.