Can you successfully onboard a new employee remotely?

Summary: with the shift to remote working being more common Talkr offers some advice on what to look out for to successfully onboard a new employee to your company without the benefits of being in the office. 

There is definitely a point of view that says that it is impossible to do as good a job onboarding someone remotely as you would be able to do face to face in an office.  This may or may not be right but I think it’s certainly not true to say that you can’t give someone a good onboarding experience remotely.  The reason that so many people have a bad experience of remote onboarding is almost always due to a lack of planning and thought being put into the plan. 

The point I guess is that you can get away with a badly planned on boarding in a face to face office environment because much of what the new employee needs can be got organically just by being in the office. Without this organic back up to help out the poorly planned induction a remote employee can often end up feeling a bit isolated and lost if there hasn’t been proper consideration put into what they need to get out of their first few weeks and months in a new business. 

Things which are quite important in a face to face onboarding become much more important when you are working with remote employees. 

1. Learning processes and tools for actually doing your job 

Even more when doing this remotely it is really important to make sessions as interactive as possible and also to keep sessions brief and to the point 

2. Meeting your team and understanding your role within your business area 

The people that you will be working most closely with should still be your core group even when you are remote, starting to foster a team mentality early on will help create strong co-working bonds 

3. Understanding the company’s culture, goals and strategy and how you fit into this 

Having a remote cup of coffee with the CEO or similarly senior person who can explain the company goals and strategy really helps to get your new hire bought into the mission 

4. Meeting and understanding the other areas of the business, even the ones that might never directly interface with you in your everyday role 

Contact with people in other teams and areas of the business is great for bringing perspective to work and gives new hires a network to help them resolve issues and raise questions that reach outside of their direct business area 

Making sure that the new starter has a work network and is not isolated is very important right at the start.  People also feel generally more engaged when they can see how the work they do fits into the bigger picture and how the rest of the organisation works. 

There are of course some advantages to remote onboarding.  On a scorching hot day in an un air conditioned office I once had a training session where the business director bought us all cornettos, a seemingly very kind gesture. Quite quickly, taking notes, asking questions and eating a rapidly melting cornetto (to my horror I looked around the room and there was no bin to dispose of my problem) it all got to be a bit much and both me and my notebook were covered in melted ice cream. Not the first impression I was hoping to make... 

To avoid being covered in Cornetto Talkr shares its best practices for onboarding remote employees with all new clients!