Remote Staff Checklist to Improve Your New Remote Employee Onboarding Process
How do you perfect your remote work onboarding process to create a lasting impact on your remote employees? You might want to review your onboarding checklist.
After offshore talent acquisition, your employee onboarding process will play a crucial role in ensuring that your new hires will have a positive experience in your organization. Onboarding is particularly important for remote employees, as they do not enjoy the same level of visibility and control as on-site employees. This makes it harder for them to integrate into your company’s culture and processes.
The Challenges of Onboarding Remote Employees
When it comes to promoting a positive work culture, onboarding plays a very significant role. This is the first look into your business, and it lays down the foundation of an employee’s commitment to the operations and processes of an organization. Companies that have perfected their onboarding process will see noticeable effects on the business scale, revenue growth. This also helps ensure that senior management can spend less time micromanaging and more time doing more “big picture” work. Companies that fail to invest in this process often see stagnation and bottlenecks in day-to-day operations, which can lead to a whole host of challenges. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Developing an efficient and effective onboarding experience can be very challenging, especially for remote teams. Remote work onboarding requires your recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) teams to deal with more documentation and requires time and resources. It involves carefully laying down each vital step in the process to ensure that your remote workers can find their way and won’t get buried under an avalanche of new information. Moreover, it is also critical to let your new hires know what channels they can use to find what they need, mainly if they work in different time zones.
Another challenge that remote employees face is the lack of an emotional connection with their new teams. They can feel isolated and unsure. This is why upper management must encourage informal meetings to reach out to their new remote workers. These little things can make a significant impact and can create a strong culture within an organization.
Onboarding Checklist for Your Remote Employees
An ideal onboarding process should last 90 days, at the very least. During this time, the employee should get all the materials and collaterals they need to get started and progress in their jobs. The process should involve going through a series of introduction meetings, training sessions, and strategic planning that should enable them to familiarize themselves with their key performance indicators (KPIs).
Here at MulitplyMii, our onboarding managers assist our clients by preparing an Onboarding Plan and Calendar. Our dedicated onboarding managers will help bridge the gap between employees and clients and break down any barriers to success as early into the process possible. By completing this onboarding checklist, we make the process of onboarding a whole lot easier:
- Going through a list of tasks that would allow the new hire to learn more about their roles, the team they will be working with, and the objectives and key results expected of them.
- Signing up accounts for communication channels and productivity tools.
- Introducing them to our team via our communication platforms.
- Scheduling a meeting with managers and other cross-functional partners to formally introduce them to all the people they would be directly working with.
- Setting up a communication window if working in different timezones.
Tips for Onboarding Your Remote Employees
As soon as you bring people on board, recruitment managers should make sure that each individual has access to everything they need to become a contributing member of your organization. How do you achieve this? Here are some tips:
Create a Two-Week Schedule
Remote workers are more challenging to onboard because of the distance and lack of face to face communication. As soon as you hire them, start developing a two-week plan. Use this to set up all the necessary meetings and training sessions. It will help new remote workers to feel less anxious. Plus, it also ensures that they are being introduced to all the right people. It also helps if they can access projects and processes that will be part of their jobs.
As much as possible, try to mix these sessions with an informal meet and greet. This practice can ease the new hire into your company culture.
Start Small
Organizations hire new employees to fill a role, but it doesn’t mean that you should unload all of these tasks to your new hires all at once. Have them start working on a smaller project. Provide them with a clear plan of what you want to achieve in the first 30 days. Afterwards, you can set expectations for the next 60 to 90 days so that it will be easier for the new employees to mentally align with your goals.
Onboard in Groups
One of the challenges of onboarding is that you want to provide a personalized onboarding process while making sure that your company eliminates redundancies. The best workaround is to group your new hires into similar groups. This way, it will be easier to present them with a personalized approach while allowing them to feel a sense of belonging. If possible, add them to a communication channel where new hires can access instructional collaterals and internal knowledge bases that they can check in case they feel lost. Assigning an orientation buddy can also help. In fact, it can even boost new employee proficiency.
Welcome Feedback
Never be afraid to listen to feedback. You should be actively seeking it out because that is the only way for organizations to determine what works and what doesn’t work. In a survey conducted by Gallup, only 12% of employees believe that their organization did well in the onboarding process. This data translates to an 88% improvement. Given that a solid onboarding process is critical in employee retention and organizational productivity, companies that do not invest in onboarding are losing out on a huge opportunity for improvement. Ask for feedback, and continue to improve your processes in response.
Encourage Personal Connections
Establishing relationships among old and new hires must be done within the first week. Setting up a remote-based coffee-break can help employees, regardless of their tenure, to enjoy some non-work-related time together.
You have to look at your new remote employees as people with the potential to become your organization’s future leaders. Don’t lose them to other companies just because your organization did not have an onboarding checklist.
Learn how MulitplMii’s remote work onboarding process can help you improve employee retention and increase productivity. Book a call now.
