Onboarding Remote Employees? Here Are 5 Best Practices You Need to Know

A virtual team meeting during the first week can give them insight into how the organization operates. Feeling left out is no fun, especially when you are working and training from home, and sometimes onboarding can leave new hires feeling lonelier and more anxious than they were before. This can happen when company culture is not explained to new employees during the onboarding process. We have compiled a list of tips for ensuring a successful and effective remote onboarding process. If you’ve never done onboarding for remote employees before, you will need to adapt your current materials and process for virtual training and access.

remote onboarding tips

Our expert-approved templates will save time while still giving you plenty of room to personalize each new hire’s experience. Hiring a new employee is expensive and time consuming—and what happens during onboarding can make or break long-term retention. In this in-depth guide, you’ll learn actionable tips for improving new hire paperwork, assigning onboarding tasks, facilitating personal connections, and more. As you build your online onboarding process, you’ll soon learn what works for your company and what doesn’t. Check out some of these best practices to steer you in the right direction.

What Is Remote Onboarding?

Instead, create a schedule so new hires know what’s most important, and give them a realistic amount of time to complete tasks. Forcing a new hire to complete a confusing array of tasks is one source of a negative new employee experience. Making the most of preboarding helps you focus on higher-value aspects of onboarding on the employee’s first day. „Use this time to complete as much of the paperwork as possible, and use an HRIS to allow employees to e-sign documents,“ Bond-Hillman said.

  • On top of content creation, collaborative learning should also happen during the onboarding process.
  • Check-ins also allow your new employee to bring up any concerns or issues they may be having.
  • With TOPYX online learning platform, administrators can create and deploy onboarding programs that get the results they want.
  • The ability to tailor the remote onboarding process for each of your new employees is one advantage of virtual onboarding.

An online learning platform like TOPYX LMS is perfect for onboarding because of built-in features like learning paths, which are ideal for delivering onboarding programs and role-based training. 74% of employees feel that they don’t receive adequate development opportunities at work. To ensure that your new employee has access to ongoing learning and development opportunities from day one, leverage performance incentives and e-learning tools to help employees grow and upskill. Not only will it lead to happier employees, but over time, it will increase your employee retention as well.

Employee training

For example, if you encourage health and wellness among your team, perhaps you can create an incentive for your remote team to get outside, exercise, or create some sort of healthy habit. You can then utilize such initiatives to attract more remote workers to your company. Whenever you hire a remote employee, part of their onboarding should include meetings with managers, team leaders, and key personnel within your business. The first step is ensuring everyone understands what’s expected of them during the remote onboarding process. You can avoid confusion and frustration later on by getting everyone on the same page from the start.

How do you successfully onboard remotely?

  1. Get everyone on the same page about what's expected.
  2. Set up a dedicated onboarding space.
  3. Make sure the basics are in place.
  4. Introduce them to the team members.
  5. Give them a tour (virtually)
  6. Assign a buddy.
  7. Provide training and resources.
  8. Schedule regular check-ins.

One of the key differences between remote and in-person onboarding is visibility. Meaning that, for extended periods of time, a new employee may find themselves https://remotemode.net/ alone in their role. What this could mean is that you may want to design a remote onboarding process that stretches over a longer period of time.

Ready to boost your employee engagement?

HR software, for instance, may assist in streamlining your hiring procedure, including the onboarding of remote employees. It offers a centralized platform for scheduling, report generation, workflow automation, data and analytics, and data collection. Give your new employee all the training opportunities and tools they need as part of the remote onboarding program for them to succeed in their position.

  • A structured IT Onboarding will be set in motion as early as you sign your contract.
  • This helps you to identify any issues or shortfalls nice and early, increases new hire engagement and motivation.
  • Virtual events are also a great way to introduce new employees to your company culture and reinforce company values.
  • With a larger population working remotely, there’s been a change in how companies onboard new employees.

Encourage them to schedule video calls to know as many employees as possible, particularly those they’ll be working with every day. A tool like Zoom lets you have breakout remote onboarding best practices groups of three or four to encourage new hires to know each other. Also, Microsoft Teams allows you to add new hires to teams to promote interaction and participation.

What is remote onboarding?

Having a clear policy will help make the onboarding process smoother and ensure everyone is on the same page from the start. To learn even more about managing remote teams and keeping employees working at home highly engaged, download our ebook now. One way to space online paperwork out is to insert an engaging activity between online forms. As a best practice, group onboarding allows new hires to know each other quickly.

remote onboarding tips