Companies that rely on remote work naturally have to think about appropriate onboarding. This is because the usual processes - no matter how modern they may be - are largely ineffective at a distance.
That's why we want to name a few relevant parameters for effective remote onboarding below.
Onboarding is a process that has a significant impact on employee performance and job satisfaction. If they are thrown into the work process without clear information, many misunderstandings and errors can occur due to a lack of knowledge. These lead to suboptimal work results that quickly frustrate everyone involved. This increases the likelihood that those affected will leave the company prematurely. 26% of people who quit their job do so because they were not properly inducted or trained. And employees who have had a poor onboarding experience are twice as likely to look for a new job.
However, as competition for qualified talent increases, employee retention is particularly important. Not to mention the misinvested recruiting costs incurred up to that point, which accordingly do not create any value.
Onboarding should therefore:
It is best and fairest to your employees if you develop a clearly structured onboarding process.
Onboarding should begin before the first day of work, i.e. approximately when you have already reached a verbal agreement with the candidate. Technical questions need to be clarified at the beginning:
Some companies that are particularly kind to their new employees send them a welcome pack. It often contains things like a T-shirt or a coffee mug with the company logo, vouchers, work materials or a fun gadget for the home office.
It makes sense to send new employees their onboarding program and a digital employee handbook at this point. This allows them to prepare for their first time at the company.
It makes sense to plan onboarding for the first three months. The plan should name specific goals and deadlines as well as the people with whom you want to work together to achieve these goals.
The goals and activities of the first 30 days serve as an initial introduction to the company:
Days 31 to 60 are dedicated to working with colleagues and taking on more responsibility:
Goals and activities for day 61 to 90:
Overall, it is better to onboard new remote workers in groups where possible. This saves time in the synchronous video call to discuss topics that affect everyone at the same time.
Also promote exchange and joint learning within the group. After all, it's usually easier to learn when you're talking to people in the same situation.
Every onboarding process can be improved and made more effective. That's why you should ask your new remote workers to evaluate their onboarding experience at the end.
The answers to the following questions would certainly be interesting in any case:
Ideally, you have already created extensive onboarding material for your new remote employees. A company handbook is also highly desirable. Likewise, a kind of survival book as a resource for company-specific terms and designations that remote workers can refer to in cases of confusion.
If you are recruiting internationally, all of this should of course be in English.
If at all possible, produce webinars and training videos. You can use these again at any time for the onboarding of further remote workers. They have the advantage that they can be played at any time. This reduces the need for time coordination between learners and teachers.
Define and communicate guidelines, principles and expectations:
If you use a CMS or other company-specific backends, your IT department should offer training for new employees. It is also best to create a knowledge base on how to use it and make it accessible to your new remote employees. Dell, for example, has its onboarding materials on its own website with written documentation and videos.
A company-specific keyword list developed by employees with slang and abbreviations that are only used by employees can also be helpful here.
In this way, you proactively prevent requests from new employees that tie up the manpower of your core workforce.
It makes sense to provide new remote employees with an experienced contact person as an onboarding buddy/mentor during the onboarding period. This person can answer urgent questions and help with problems of all kinds. According to a US study, 87% of all organizations say that a buddy program promotes the performance level of new employees.
Hold regular one-to-one meetings with your remote employees! This will ensure a sense of belonging to the company. The online billing company Chargify, for example, has new remote employees hold regular video calls with their direct superiors.
Stack Overflow organizes several meetings for new remote employees. In these meetings, the company's management tells them the company story and is available to answer questions.
Set an agenda for such meetings, which you work through point by point. Plan this with the desired results in mind. Don't just focus on topics relating to professional development and performance. Talk about personal issues as well to get a clearer picture of the person in question.
Some companies also use software that connects two randomly selected employees to a video call at a set time. In this way, your remote employees get to know more colleagues than those they work with on projects. This allows remote workers and colleagues in the company to get to know each other on a broader basis.
As a general rule, you should be as patient, polite and courteous as possible when communicating with remote employees. After all, every discourtesy, every disadvantage weighs particularly heavily at a distance - simply because it is offset and outweighed by relatively few other positive impressions.
Often enough, cultural differences also come into play here, which can only be bridged by the highest degree of professionalism.
More often than not, cultural differences also come into play here, which can only be bridged by the highest degree of professionalism.
If you hire remote employees who live several time zones away, you need to learn how to deal with the time difference. A practical tool for this purpose is the world time feature of Google Calendar. It helps to plan synchronous onboarding meetings in such a way that everyone involved can attend at an acceptable time. Lunchtime is the best time for this
As long video calls are very tiring, breaks should always be scheduled. Few people manage to focus their attention for longer than 50 minutes.
Planning synchronous meetings always involves a lot of effort. It is therefore useful to use asynchronous videos and pre-produced training videos for a large part of the onboarding process. However, not all companies are equipped to produce videos. In this case, it may be worth commissioning an external media production company (such as metru).
Certainly, not all of the measures described above are feasible or necessary in every company. But for the sake of completeness, we have listed as many as possible. We hope that we have been able to provide a good overview of the range of options for effective onboarding.
Because employing remote employees is worthwhile, at metru we have also been working with them for years. We have of course searched for, found and hired them using our own video recruiting solution. If only to test the effectiveness of our product!
This post was published first in September 2021 in our previous Recruiter Blog.
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