Best Practices For Onboarding Employees Virtually
Here are some virtual onboarding practices to set up your new hires to succeed at work and help make them feel like a team member more quickly. A clearly defined onboarding plan makes standardising the virtual onboarding practices for each new team member in your company easier. These best practices for onboarding remotely help ensure that new employees feel just as welcomed, valued, and ready to start working as they would have had they been working on-site their first day with the company.
Start Your Onboarding Process Early
First impressions count, and nothing is more important than the first impression your employees have of your workplace. The onboarding process begins as soon as your employee accepts your job offer. As the hiring manager, you are accountable for this first impression. They are not only assessing you, but everyone they interact with.
This first impression will set the tone for their employment tenure, so start your onboarding process early!
Create And Share An Onboarding Schedule/Agenda
New employees are constantly assessing their new workplace. They want to know where they are going, where they are working, and what their first few weeks will look like. You could even share a staff handbook with your new remote employees and their managers that details each process step. Suppose your organisation is new to onboarding remote workers. In that case, this is an excellent time to build a set of short videos about onboarding topics that you can send out each day to the new employees as a supplement to their in-person sessions.
Assign Easy Tasks To Build Confidence And Ease
You should start new employees off with relatively easy things to do. Doing so will ensure that your current new hires get the best possible experience and gain invaluable insights into what is working and still needs polishing.
Schedule Virtual Training
Even when it is virtual, using videos (rather than email or phone calls only) to onboard new employees and get them familiar with a company’s culture, benefits, and systems is essential for getting people quickly on board. Organise virtual training sessions to ensure new employees are up to speed on company best practices and delve deeper into their roles and responsibilities.
Set Virtual Group And One-On-O
One of the most common HR tips for onboarding remote employees is setting up a buddy system for new hires. Group onboarding provides a simple way for new team members to get to know their coworkers quickly and is usually less intimidating than meeting people one-on-one. When new employees are expected to work in groups on a case study or a group project while they are onboarding, this builds bonds and introduces the team members, but it can also be a chance for cross-training teams.
Onboarding may also involve scheduled training sessions, one-on-one meetings with a new employee-manager and an onboarding buddy, a whole-team presentation, and virtual happy hours with the team to meet colleagues in more casual settings.
The onboarding process helps to integrate new employees into the company and often makes memorable first impressions that can impact their decision to stay with the company or leave. Online onboarding requires a little more care and planning since you cannot expect your recruits to pick up on what is being done by their colleagues around the office.
