10 Remote Onboarding Tips

HR leaders play an essential role when introducing a company to a new employee. It is fundamental to brief about the organization’s culture, values, processes and expectations to ensure that the new team member proceeds comfortably in its role.

Welcoming starters in person brings a higher sense of interaction. However, with most people working from their homes because of the recent COVID-19 situation, companies felt forced to embrace remote work and the onboarding process.

Many companies have been hiring remote workers even before the coronavirus situation started. Obviously, this brings us one question: How can I onboard my new employee remotely and efficiently?

We’ve decided to share 10 tips to have a powerful remote onboarding process:

1. A warm welcome – Make the new team member feel welcome!
2. Delegate – Name a contact person responsible for the onboarding. This person will be the main contact, responsible for the induction process, sharing files, links, videos and will be open to future questions
3. Test – Refine your onboarding process. We have 3 words: Test! Test! And Test! It’s all about the user experience. Ensure that you have an efficient process, everything is working properly, all the links are connected and the expected results are set in terms of what you want to achieve with each action
4. Improvement – Embrace automation. If you have to onboard several workers this will definitely save you some time and training cost. Create videos linked to actions that allow the new employee to navigate and learn by himself
5. Share values – Introduce the company’s culture. Make the new employee get familiar with your organisation’s shared values
6. Goal-oriented – Have clear goals for the first week. Set expectations, so they know exactly what to work on during their first week
7. Communication – Choose a good video chat channel with a shared screen to be used when necessary. Most commonly used are Zoom, Whereby, Google Hangouts, and others
8. Videos – Create short videos with shared screens. A great tool to teach a process, not even for new employees but also for veterans that haven’t done any particular task yet. You can also leave it available in your internal system as Intranet, for example, so all the employees may access it whenever they feel like some learning and development
9. Awareness – Be mindful that not everyone had previous remote working experience. It’s important to provide proper support to cover eventual challenges faced by this starter
10. Open mind – Be open to feedback. This is important to improve your onboarding process for future hirings

Remember, it’s crucial to make the new employee feel welcome, getting familiar with the organisation culture, and also comfortable knowing exactly what is expected from them. Working remotely can be challenging especially for those who are new to this and are used to the physical working space itself. It is your role to ensure that you make a positive first impression, adopting dynamic systems, keeping a healthy connection with other employees and be genuine supportive in order to maintain the new member’s motivation and performing favourably.

If you are interested in learning more, please start the conversation with the best IT recruitment consultants in Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Brisbane by emailing office@redwolfrosch.com.au or calling 1300 544 652.