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Conduct pre-boarding
This step can sometimes be missed, but is ever-more important when onboarding someone remotely. It all comes down to one key question: what do you want your new employee to do on their first day? A welcome email should be sent to your new starter a week or two before they begin their new role to tell them just this. It should set out the itinerary for the first few weeks, day one to five, grouped into morning and afternoon. This will give the employee a mental prep about what to expect once they commence their employment.
The email should also provide details for a point of contact, their line manager or HR, in case the new starter has any initial questions. Also, guide them through your digital learning platform if you have one. And, if possible, assign a work buddy or mentor to the new starter to help them through those early stages of their tenure. As well as providing a wealth of knowledge, mentors can play a key part in aiding a new starter’s personal and professional growth. Work buddies will be fundamental to new starter’s support network when learning to navigate their way around their new environment, so it’s worth arranging this at this stage.
Send your company handbook, or provide links to key areas of the business, preferably ones that are directly related to the role. This will help them to become immersed within the business culture, vision, and values.
Set up tech
With the pre-boarding phase complete, make sure that your new employee is set up to work remotely. Are you going to provide them with a work laptop and phone or will they need to source this themselves? It is important to be clear on details like this from the outset. You should also check that they have a suitable workspace and access to a reliable internet connection. If possible, let them have access to a team or an individual within IT that can offer dedicated support during the early part of the onboarding process. This can be structured as a set of meetings or in the shape of a dedicated online portal. Finally, company security is a necessity, so make sure the new starter is clear with the IT policies and logs on through a secured VPN network.
Establish clear lines of communication
Some new starters may be working in their environment alone and feel cut off without regular
communication. This is especially pertinent given they are unlikely to have met many of their colleagues in person, other than perhaps during the hiring process. For this reason, it is essential to set up a series of video/phone calls with key people in the business in their first few days. There are a range of good tools to use from Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Skype, to name a few. This will help the new starter get a better understanding of how their role fits into the wider business strategy and help them build stronger relationships.
communication. This is especially pertinent given they are unlikely to have met many of their colleagues in person, other than perhaps during the hiring process. For this reason, it is essential to set up a series of video/phone calls with key people in the business in their first few days. There are a range of good tools to use from Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Skype, to name a few. This will help the new starter get a better understanding of how their role fits into the wider business strategy and help them build stronger relationships.
Schedule regular check-ins
It is always good practice to check in with a new starter regularly, but this is even more pertinent when onboarding someone remotely. In fact, it may well be that these will need to be even more frequent than if you were inducting someone in a physical location with other team members present. It is important to strike a balance between creating clear lines of open communication and making someone feel like they are being micro-managed, even from a distance. For the first week or so, a check-in once a day is a must, but this can be reduced over the following weeks, particularly as your new employee gets to know their colleagues and opens further lines of communication over projects and priorities.
Reinforce your video call or phone chats with clear actions over email – this will also give you something to refer to in your next catch up. It is also important that induction training is varied. Endless days of compliance training, for example, will not be motivating. Ensure that your company’s employee value proposition (EVP) is central to your training – and do your best to bring it to life and make it relevant to the individual.
Provide feedback on performance
Although this is a unique scenario, the probation process still performs the same function in terms of allowing both sides to decide whether the role is a good fit and that the new starter is meeting expectations.
However, you may need to temper some expectations or make allowances around certain elements of the role given the unusual remote set up and that fact that training or shadowing can be made more difficult through being remote. It is also a good idea to get feedback on the onboarding programme overall from your new recruit – you can then feed any learnings back into the process when you onboard your next new starter remotely.
Are you currently onboarding candidates remotely? Download our free eBook "Running your recruitment process remotely: A complete guide" now to get more practical tips for both online recruitment and onboarding.
