Forging ahead in life and commencing your career in the Information and technology industry is the best feeling ever as this makes you independent and gives you self-confidence. But along with being exciting, the job also comes with lots of stress and anxiety issues.
The anxiety and stress double up when it is a remote role. Onboarding remote employees and onsite employees are both different things and entirely different experiences. Every one or the other organization is favoring this remote onboarding trend but have you ever wondered the reason for the same?
It is none other than the covid-19 pandemic which led to the remote onboarding culture in organizations and companies. After the pandemic was over, the companies continued to maintain this culture only.
But with remote onboarding, many candidates and organizations have plenty of doubts in their minds concerning the same. Thanks to the remote management tools which make it easy. Let us learn some of the crucial things regarding remote onboarding in the post outlined below.
Steps for Successful Remote Onboarding
Both the organizations and the employees are facing numerous challenges while onboarding the remote candidates. Besides this, there are also myths centered around remote vs in house team. If you also belong to them, then we have a way out for you. Here are some of the best practices to adhere to for successful remote onboarding.
Have a pre-boarding program
The first step towards remote onboarding is having a pre-boarding program. It refers to all the things taking place before asking the new joiner to sign a contract. The program should assist the employees with all the paperwork, work samples, guides, assignments, and guidelines regarding the first day at work.
Ensure to establish clear communication with the new joinee before onboarding them as this will take off the excess pressure from them and make it easy for them to adapt to the new environment.
Establish relations with employees
The remote work culture has somewhere made employee relations suffer due to the lack of meetings and in-person communications. The best way out of this is to establish early relations with the employees to make them feel good.
The businesses should implement the building one on one relationships and assist build a broad word network. The things which can help in creating such a relationship include informal meetings, team-building activities, and happy hour.
Have the required technology
Setting up the required technology for remote employees is also necessary for successful remote onboarding. The technology over here means setting up emails, mobile apps, slack or other channels of internal communication.
The businesses might know this or not but accessing everything on their own can get frustrating for the employees and that too on the very first day. The best way to deal with the same is to provide them with the technologies such as laptops or phones before onboarding them remotely and assigning them the new work.
Also, set up training for them which will include the knowledge of the organization’s diverse platforms such as slack or zoom and guidelines for the other systems which make the work easy.
Tell them about the company culture
Making the employees familiar with the company’s work and other cultures is extremely important for remote onboarding. The company’s culture includes messaging norms, remote working etiquettes, virtual team meetings, social media conduct, and many more things.
The best way to let the employees know this is by posting this in your about us section on your website or Linkedin profile. The measures like this assist the employees in developing a quick connection with the company and also perform their best.
Set realistic expectations
Hiring new and remote employees does not mean overburdening them with work and having high expectations from them. Instead of this, businesses and organizations should set realistic expectations as this helps them to perform better.
Moreover, with this, the employees come to know about their roles and responsibilities which in turn can assist them in prioritizing their work and improving their work performance. Also, ensure to make the remote employee familiar with the long-term goal of the company so that he can also contribute to the company’s growth.
Get feedback
The company’s role does not end by getting the new candidate enrolled but also in knowing what the new employee has been feeling in their company and whether they are liking the work culture over there or not.
With regular feedback from the employees, the companies can check their employees and ask about their experience so far. Try to get detailed feedback from them by asking several questions and accordingly improving your company.
Have checklist templates for the employees
Another thing that can help the successful remote onboarding is to have a checklist for engaging the new candidates. There is likely a possibility that the candidates can get distracted in the middle of the hiring process because of the lack of in-person communication.
Fortunately, you can have a checklist for your employees to help them stay focused and engaged during the process. The main purpose of the checklist is to track the progress and ensure that the employees do not miss out on the task.
Another way which you can try is to send them continuous reminders regarding the onboarding tasks and ask them to finish those off within the allocated time.
Make use of onboarding metrics
Now whether remote onboarding has turned out to be successful for you or not has to be tracked right? But how to do so? The answer is by making use of the onboarding metrics. With the help of the onboarding metrics, it becomes easy for the employees to understand what’s expected from them in remote work.
For gaining actionable insights into the employee onboarding data, try to use measurable and time-bound metrics. Above all, you can also ask the employees to rate their satisfaction with your remote onboarding program.
Benefits of Remote Onboarding Program
Whether the remote onboarding program is helpful or not, let us know in the sections mentioned below.
Increases learning
The foremost benefit of remote onboarding is that it increases learning. Due to the customizable nature of the programs, there comes increased learning flexibility. With the help of the series of video calls, new remote employees can easily get to learn their work and do justice to it.
You can also customize the learning process for the employees by providing them with self-guided learning resources and documents. Consequently, remote onboarding benefits the employees in terms of increased learning flexibility.
Retains the employees
Remote onboarding is also well known for retaining the employees for a longer time than on-site work. The biggest challenges businesses face these days is the lack of talent and high employee turnover.
This is what makes it highly significant to retain the employees. The research conducted on the remote onboarding process reveals that 70% of the employees remain in a company and feel good.
Increases productivity
The most significant benefit of remote onboarding is that it aids in increasing employee productivity. Ensure to implement the right remote onboarding plan so that your new hires can work comfortably and tackle their responsibilities with minimum guidance.
There are numerous companies and businesses which have witnessed a drastic change in their employee productivity post implementation of the remote onboarding program. There was a notable 60% increase in revenue for the companies when they had the remote onboarding program.
Wrapping Up
Without any doubt, the future of the IT and corporate industry lies in successful remote onboarding. If you want to take your organization towards success, then remote onboarding is the best way forward for you. No doubt it can turn out to be challenging for the organizations to implement it initially but it is for sure going to give you greater returns in the long term.