Education

Best Practices for Remote Onboarding on a Distributed Team

When you start the onboarding process before their first day, new employees can effectively familiarize themselves with the tool and other project management or communication software. Fortunately, a well-planned virtual onboarding program can address these questions and more. Although there are definite similarities between the two types of onboarding best practices, there are a few remote-friendly considerations for virtual onboarding. By aligning with these, you’ll allow your employees to focus on meaningful work starting on Day 1 and beyond.

remote onboarding best practices

Even if you’ve established a healthy culture of psychological safety, remote new hires may not implicitly feel it right away. They won’t be a witness to their infallible veteran colleagues frantically debugging issues and coming to the realization that the issue was something small and obvious. When I first joined a company as a developer, I felt like the biggest imposter in the world. I didn’t know what version control was, let alone what a server was or how to run code on one. I spent my nights furiously googling, terrified that I would disappoint everyone by not being a fully productive team member from day one. Since then, I’ve been on a mission to help create a positive and smooth onboarding process for as many people as I can—whether it’s their first day at a new company, or their first day as an engineer.

Individualized Development Plans

This video shouldn’t be too formal, it should make the employee feel at ease in their new work environment and allow them to get to know the company and its employees a bit better. You can incorporate these practices into your remote onboarding strategy to achieve an efficient process for everyone involved. Hiring managers must be adequately trained and attuned to the nuances of remote onboarding.

  • We’ve highlighted some of the most indispensable elements to successfully onboard remote employees.
  • Make sure that they have access to the benefits that on-site employees have, for example, if your company offers subsidized gym memberships to employees you can extend that benefit to remote employees as well.
  • In our practical guide to working from home, we touch upon how to deal with and adapt to remote working successfully.
  • The concept has become increasingly popular in the last few years, and it’s essential to make sure your remote employees can efficiently and easily settle into their roles.
  • While on-site this happens organically, in the case of a remote employee, it should be facilitated properly.

Reckitt, the global consumer products company, sends a care package to new employees’ homes before their start date. It’s filled with the company’s products, and a warm note linking the products to the company’s mission. Everyone who https://remotemode.net/ joins your company will need to collaborate with others and embed themselves as part of your wider team. Encourage new employees to meet with fellow team members in the company—face to face—that they’ll work with across projects.

Just hire great people?

Instead of relying on icebreakers and dreaded silence, set the team up to have real conversations right away by establishing a baseline pool of topics that everyone can discuss. One format I particularly like is a multimedia content “playlist” that the team curates together—a compilation of anything safe for work which showcases the unique personalities and interests of team members. Perhaps folks remote onboarding best practices will add favorite background music for focus time, links to podcast episodes, books, blog posts, pet pictures, descriptions of their remote work setups, and so on. Sharing this in advance helps to break the ice, providing new team members a window into what others on the team are interested in or care about. Leveraging peer mentoring in your onboarding program can have a number of benefits.

An emphasis on company culture is also a fantastic way to bolster your new employees’ sense of belonging and camaraderie in their work environment. This makes it the ideal time to share all ideas related to company culture and company values so that it really entrenches itself in your new hire’s work habits. A valuable benefit to regular check-ins is that it sets the right stage for receiving constant feedback on the onboarding process. Besides addressing any potential issues as they arise, you are also likely to get a much clearer idea of where you can improve. If your current circumstances will allow it, organizing an in-person gathering of all your new remote workers can address the isolation issue and help create a sense of belonging for them. This is a key element of remote work positions as employees usually need to register and access a host of different communication, productivity, and other workplace tools.