The old saying “First impression is the last impression” goes well with onboarding employees in your company. It is through onboarding that you get a chance to create the best impression on a new employee.
In the remote age, most interactions and communication now often happen online instead of in person. This is true for even welcoming new employees on board. It is this process that makes employees feel part of your company. They get to know about your organization, its work culture, its ethos, its goals, and its long-term vision.
Onboarding requires a good planning process. You should try to list out every step of the onboarding process. This ensures that new employees don’t get confused or lost due to excessive bombardment of information right on day one.
You also need to create communication channels that allow the new hires to reach out for help anytime, even if they are in a different time zone. Hence, planning is extremely important.
Here are some tips and tricks that can help you, onboard remote employees, online:
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Chalk out onboarding goals-
The primary goal for any organization is to give a warm welcome to its remote employees through smooth onboarding. When onboarding remote employees, you need to be clear about what it is that you want to achieve and how you are going to get there to set employees up for success.
Sometimes physical distance may create a sense of discomfort and hesitation in the minds of new employees. Especially when they are in a different geographical location and time zone, they may feel left out and feel shy even to ask questions via email.
So you must try to be proactive and draw and share a plan in advance so that expectations are clear.
You can create an onboarding checklist in which you can break down the goals and tasks of new employees by day or by week. For instance,
Day 1 goals:
- Complete all the HR paperwork
- Creating an account on the eLearning platform
- Get acquainted with the company’s goals and vision
- Virtual meetings with the manager and other supervisors
Week 1 goals:
- Virtual meeting with the entire team
- Learn about companies’ products, services, and eLearning courses
- Start online training
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Develop a clear cut plan-
You must develop a clear-cut timeline for the timely completion of each milestone in the onboarding process. This way, you will introduce remote employees to the overall structure of the onboarding plan. This will positively impact productivity in their first few weeks of joining.
By creating plans and scheduling meetings with well-defined agendas, video links, etc., you can invariably reduce the stress and anxiety of new employees. Hence, you can slowly and steadily introduce them to all the people, processes, and projects of which they will be a part.
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Interact virtually-
Offline working kept new employees going. They could interact with colleagues anytime, talk during tea breaks and ask any questions anytime as they were all around. Direct face-to-face interaction creates a sense of belongingness. However, as online working has started, new hires often complain of being left alone.
This needs to be addressed for sure. Any feeling of isolation can drive away new hires from your organization. Hence, it is vital to make them feel comfortable and wanted.
So, if you’re onboarding remote employees, you can schedule brief video calls both with the entire team and their colleagues. Such interaction can remove all their hesitation and fears, and they will reach out to you whenever needed. Also, their enthusiasm level accelerates once they see their other coworkers working hard to achieve career goals. You can make use of employee onboarding software to foster engagement between new employees and other team members. Even the best onboarding software today fit within small business budgets.
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Send introduction emails and messages-
Once an employee is inducted into your company, you can rotate an email or message to every other member of your company to welcome a new employee on board. You can write the name, hobbies, interests, qualifications, and job role of the new employee. You can also add their photo so that they get familiar with the new employee.
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Provide an organizational structure-
When inducting new employees into your company, make sure that they don’t get overwhelmed due to too much information bombardment on the first day itself. Instead, you can provide them with some PDFs or documents or even videos telling them who is who in the company. They can revisit such files anytime.
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Set up remote communication channels-
Establishing proper communication in the offline working setup is quite difficult. But it’s equally important to create a communication channel that guides newly onboarded employees on how and when such communication tools need to be used.
Conclusion–
With this, we end up our deep dive into how to onboard remote employees online. We hope you will use the aforementioned tips and tricks for onboarding new hires.
Naveen