Onboard Remotely without Sacrificing Results

A company’s onboarding process sets the precedent for employees’ overall success, engagement, and relationships with their coworkers. The days of lunch meetings and morning coffee breaks have been replaced with zoom happy hours and catch ups via messenger. With the monumental changes to corporate environments, the onboarding process has had to adjust accordingly. In order to increase your retention metrics and boost overall company morale, it is critical to invest in your remote hiring protocols to ensure that your onboarding sets the employee, and the company up for success. Here are a few tips to do just that while adapting to the newly remote world.

  1. Assign an Informal Mentor
    The onboarding process can be overwhelming for a new employee. They are navigating various platforms, meetings, communication tools, and the overall day to day life. So, while the onboarding employee is working through the logistical components, it is beneficial for them to also work with an “informal mentor” as The Harvard Business Review notes, “It’s important that this informal mentor be a different person from the person’s manager, so that the new employee feels comfortable asking any question, large or small. Any new employee will and should have endless questions, and the last thing you want is having them feel uncertain about who to ask.” Think of this person as a substitute to leaning over your desk with a question or making small talk near the elevator. It can help remove any barriers to fully understanding the company culture.
  2. Set Intentional Onboarding Goals
    The term onboarding can feel a bit vague and often means something different for each company. In order to ensure a successful onboarding induction, the employee should have a clear understanding of the expectations broken down for the first month. You can outline the specifics and send them through before their first day so they have a clear idea of what each week’s intention should be, i.e. by end the end of your first day you will have completed paper work for human resources and had a one to one touch base with your manager. By the end of your first week, you will have familiarized yourself with necessary platforms and sent out introductory emails to external vendors. By the end of your first month, you will have led your first meeting and be familiarized with all aspects of your role. Be sure to include both qualitative and quantitative goals so that when reviewing their progress, you can reference benchmarks and specifics and provide them with tangible milestones.
  3. Over Explain
    In our new remote world, we cannot communicate under the assumption of anything. Especially when onboarding, your conversation style should be detailed and borderline over-communicative. During the first few weeks at a new job, the employee typically works off of the cues from those around them. In the office those cues can often be more distinctive. So, when walking them through instructions for systems or feedback for projects, it is important from the beginning to over communicate your thoughts. This way, the employee is clear on what you are looking for and how they can meet and exceed expectations without blurred lines.
  4. Solicit Feedback
    Once the onboarding is complete, your company should have a questionnaire ready to send to the employee to solicit feedback. The new age of remote hiring and onboarding is new to everyone, so there is always room for improvement. By requesting feedback, you can better improve the process for future employees as well as more immediately fill in the gaps for anything that was not one hundred percent clear to the employee providing the feedback.

Although the trajectory to online onboarding looks a bit different than we are used to, the end results should always meet the company standard. The standard of employees who feel informed, valued, and ready to effectively fulfill their roles and responsibilities. At Contemporary Staffing Solutions, we are able to help you find the best candidates who can thrive in a remote environment as well as fit harmoniously within your company culture. Click here to schedule a discovery call today!

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