7 Effective Tips for Onboarding Remote Employees Freshteam Blog

Encourage Open Communication-Like an open-door policy improves your office environment similarly, you should create a culture of open communication for remote employees. To facilitate open communication, you can also leverage AI chatbotslike Amber and allow remote employees to voice their concerns anonymously. 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. Offer plenty of recognition for completed tasks and accomplished goals. Starting a new job after what was likely an entirely remote interviewing and hiring process can leave employees feeling isolated. An onboarding experience without some human interaction can also leave off-site employees unsure of where to find information and the help they need to get started.

By aligning with these, you’ll allow your employees to focus on meaningful work starting on Day 1 and beyond. Nearly 50% of employees who had a great onboarding experience report team contributions in the first week. To build confidence before any real work has to be done, prepare a few easy tasks for your new employees to complete early on. Have them fill out HR paperwork, watch a short video, set up their company email/Slack/PM software profiles, etc. Even if onboarding for remote employees ends up taking longer than traditional onboarding or gets disrupted, there are ways to combat that. Onboarding new hires is one of the trickiest challenges HR teams must face when supporting work-from-home and hybrid models.

Tools for the world’s most customer-centric businesses

Schedule Regular Surveys-Roll out regular surveys to understand what is working for your employees and what isn’t. Ask them a mix of specific and open questions to obtain detailed feedback. To provide a human touch, Whatfix allows you to customize the feedback forms and nudge employees to ensure they don’t skip it. In-app Guidance-A DAP acts as an overlay over your existing solution and provides real-time, contextual, in-app guidance to its end users. This contextual help surfaces within the app as tool-tips, smart-tips, and beacons to encourage learning by doing. You can also create interactive walkthroughs to simplify your remote training efforts.See howSentry Insurancereduced its content creation time by 40% and generated savings worth $950K. You need to start strong with a great pre-onboarding by completing these tasks a week or two before the employee’s first day.

Be sure to add software where needed to speed processes and provide the required legal or audit trails. “Use this time to complete as much of the paperwork as possible, and use an HRIS remote onboarding best practices to allow employees to e-sign documents,” Bond-Hillman said. For one, the lack of face-to-face interactions can make it harder for new hires and your team members to communicate.

What is Remote Onboarding?

But at one point, I found myself actually giving my all to reading education material, interacting with my team in meetings, and getting accustomed to the company culture. While this does take a bit of extra work, it will pay off in both the long and short term. Your new employees will feel confident, eager, and comfortable to begin working with your team. You’ll also make them feel welcome and included, which is often challenging when working remotely. To keep it short and sweet for all parties involved, schedule these meet-and-greets for minutes max.

Technology is advancing at a rapid rate and it is up to the organization to catch up with it. Digital Adoption Platforms help organizations and their employees adopt technology much faster and stay ahead of the curve. Allow them to create methods for individual growth within the company. This will motivate the employees to perform well in order to progress their careers. Identify problems, if any, with employee performance and correct these issues before it affects the company.

Tips To Make Your Remote Onboarding A Success

Filo is a trustworthy partner to undertake the virtual onboarding process. These forms can be securely set up online and triggered by touchpoints in your new employee lifecycle. For example, once your new hire accepts the offer, you can trigger sending the contract online via a program like DocuSign. Once returned, the signed contract can be the trigger to send any other forms that must be filled out by new employees. When your hires are ready for day one of work, the task of filling out paperwork will already have been completed, saving you both time during the onboarding process. Through Thinkific, you can use survey tools to gather feedback on your remote onboarding course.

• It’s someone’s very first experience with the company — in their choosing to work with us, our reputation and their career are at stake.
• More than just a basic run-through of responsibilities and tasks, it is important to establish remote onboarding culture in your process.
• Good virtual onboarding ideas include new hire survival kits, brand new buddy calls, and remote welcome team lunch.
• Asking too much of them and forcing them to scramble and face more confusion in a space that is already foreign to them is an easy way to make the onboarding experience a negative one.
• Recommendations and reviews about your company can be more impactful than you think.