When building your team remotely, hiring is only half the job done. The other half is about job retention and setting candidates up for success. To achieve this, recruiters need to use the best remote onboarding techniques.
However, it isn’t easy to create a remote onboarding experience for remote employees. Compared to traditional onboarding practices, remote onboarding requires way more documentation. It is also a hassle to replicate the personal factor found in a physical setup.
Employees can feel isolated when working remotely. Recruiters also need to provide constant instructions to individuals working in different time zones. It leads to a lack of engagement and often leaves the employee confused.
To ensure your new employees thrive in their role, mastering remote onboarding is vital. Here is a checklist that every recruiter must keep in mind while remote onboarding.
How to Onboard Remote Employees?
It is essential to offer a structured onboarding when hiring remote employees. That is why we’ve curated this checklist for all the recruiters looking to get new hires up to speed on their new roles.
1. Send IT hardware to new remote employees
Make sure that you order laptops and other hardware well in advance. Ask the IT department to assist the workers with the setup.
2. Assist new hires with Paperwork
Instead of asking new employees to sign the documents physically, use E-signature tools so that they can sign them comfortably and share the same with you in a secure environment.
3. Help them understand your company culture
To do so, you can provide them with videos and pictures from annual meetings. Presentations on your company values can also be shared online.
4. Ensure that new employees understand how to use communication tools
Providing them manuals on how to set up video conferencing software, company email, and group messaging tools can be a great way to ensure that. You can also describe the same using video tutorials.
5. Plan role-specific training
To effectively train remote hires, you can use user-friendly and interactive training courses. Including quizzes can boost engagement as well. Once the session is over, you can follow up by answering queries, if any.
6. Set specific goals and expectations for each new remote employee
As hiring managers, you can define both short term and long term goals for new hires. For effective remote onboarding, you can also develop and share a weekly and monthly task calendar.
Now let’s understand how to onboard remote employees and what platforms and tools for enabling the same.
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Structuring Remote Onboarding of Employees
To ensure the smooth transition for both employees and recruiters, structuring the remote onboarding process is essential.
Employees are more likely to stay with an organization if they experience great onboarding. Here is how companies can structure remote onboarding of employees successfully.
1. Having a clear plan
If you want to effectively onboard employees, develop a clear plan which has specific milestones. Apart from covering all the aspect of remote onboarding, it should also include the work expectations from an employee.
Setting milestones and a timeline would make your employees more productive and give them structure as they settle into their new workplace. In addition to that, a Q&A section can be included to familiarize employees with the company’s culture and vision.
2. Gift your employees a welcome pack
You can gift your employees a welcome pack electronically. They should ideally get delivered before their first onboarding session. Do not share any confidential information on that. Instead, try to include email addresses and mobile numbers of vital teammates.
The information provided must help the employees in their first few months in the company. To create a sense of belonging, recruiters can also make a video and send it to the new employees. However, try not making it too formal.
3. Try onboarding new employees into pairs or groups
You can make the remote onboarding process less stressful by putting the new employees in a group or pair. Moreover, it also leads to new teammates getting to know each other better and is way less intimidating juxtaposed with meeting one on one. As mentioned above, remote work can lead to isolation. To counter that, use group onboarding.
However, if you’re not able to do it for various reasons, invite all the new employees to a group session.
It’d allow them to meet the fellow teammates that they haven’t already. But more than anything else, employees would get a chance to build a strong and lasting relationship with each other. All in all, they’d get a sense of belonging.
4. Organize group gatherings or any off-site meeting
In addition to pairing them in groups, it’s essential to organise an off-site meeting for the employees. It’d allow them to meet one another in person and interact. If employees feel a sense of belonging, they’re more chancing of retaining them. However, recruiters shouldn’t hold this off-site meeting at the company office.
Additionally, if the employees put up, in geographically distant locations, hiring managers use web conferencing software to organize a social meeting. It might not have the same impact as a physical meetup, but it’s essential.
5. Collaborative learning
Recruiters must provide enough opportunities to employees for collaborative learning. It’d allow them to learn from each other. With remote onboarding, it becomes all the more vital for building a team-oriented culture.
Video mentoring sessions can be planned for new remote employees. More experienced managers can use these to help them become well-versed. Webinar software can also be used to host sessions for educating employees.
How To Onboard Remote Employees With These 9 Tools
There are various remote onboarding platforms and tools in the market currently.
Here are some of the most effective ones recruiters should use depending on their needs.
1. Slack
Written communication can only take recruiters so far. That is why there is a need for a tool that’d allow teammates to video chat with ease. Slack helps individuals with just that.
How to onboard remote employees without letting them feel alienated? A popular video chat App, Slack, provides easy launch of informal video conferences so that people don’t miss out on vital visual cues. In addition to that, Slack provides a personal touch that makes new employees feel part of a community.
2. Bambee
Remote problems require remote solutions. If you’re an organization who’s HR team is swamped or doesn’t exist, Bambee is what you need. This tool will provide you with remote HR managers.
With immense stress during remote onboarding, a tool like Bambee can do wonders. Moreover, it’d also help you save time and cover all the details even you didn’t think.
3. Monday.com
To involve your new employees in a project or teach them about significant aspects of a topic, use monday.com. It provides easy collaboration amongst teammates and makes employees feel involved.
Kudos to the thriving interface, Employers, can easily assign tasks to their employees while keeping them updated.
4. Assembly
In a remote work culture, it is vital to encourage recognition of new employees since day one. Using assembly, companies can get employees into a recognition program.
That will make employees feel like they’re part of a team. It also allows them to see past recognitions to understand company values. Moreover, they get to recognise one another and provide help by answering queries.
5. Goosechase
As an employer, it’s essential to break the ice with your employees as soon as they join. Goosechase is a platform that all employers can use to welcome new remote employees.
The best part? It gets done using a virtual scavenger hunt. You can make a personalized scavenger hunt and get to know your new employees in a fun manner. Even the employees get to communicate with their fellow mates and break the ice.
6. Swag
How to onboard remote employee with some welcome work from home kits? These kits would add the tangible factor that’s missing from your remote onboarding process. Plus, these kits would make it easy to deliver swag to your new employees and bring them into the fold.
7. Gusto
Gusto is a platform known for making remote onboarding more streamlined. Once you send a job offer to an employee using the App, Gusto take over. It navigates new employees through tax documents, deposit forms, and more.
Gusto also lets you build a community by allowing new hires to introduce themselves. This platform is also time-saving and permits you to track engagement.
8. ClearCompany
This tool offers an automated onboarding process. It is responsible for tracking, storing, and delivering all the vital remote onboarding documents.
Using this software’ smart forms, recruiters can save time, money, and avoid errors. Their portal gives new remote employees a personalized welcome and all the necessary information about the company. It can be accessed using any device.
9. Click Boarding
As a tool, Click Boarding provides companies with complete information about where their employees stand in their onboarding process.
Moreover, employers can easily understand what needs attention and create a customized remote onboarding experience. Sharing tasks and managing checklists also becomes easy. Companies can also add their office map and employee directory.
Conclusion
Building a remote team requires careful planning. While hiring talented individuals is one part, the other is to provide them with an environment where they can thrive. how to onboard remote employees without it taking much of your time?
Use these platforms and tools to make this process more efficient and painless. This will also ensure that your new employees start working quickly and effortlessly.
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