It’s 2024; remote working is here to stay.
Yet despite over two-fifths (42%) of employees in the Jefferson Frank Careers and Hiring Guide: AWS Edition working from home a full five days a week, many employers still haven’t quite nailed their remote onboarding process. In fact, nearly a fifth (17%) of employers report that managing remote employees is a top staffing challenge for them this year. So, it’s perhaps unsurprising that some of these difficulties start from day one.
But this isn’t something employers can afford to brush under the carpet. Figures show that up to 20% of employee turnover happens within the first 45 days of employment, whereas 69% of employees are more likely to stay with an employer for three years if they experience a positive onboarding process.
It’s important to understand that remote working isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In our Careers and Hiring Guide survey, the majority (42%) of professionals said they’d prefer to work fully remotely—a significant 6% uplift from the previous year in which hybrid working was the most favored arrangement, suggesting that the popularity of remote working has only continued to rise.
So, what does this all mean?
Well, remote working can no longer be considered ‘the future of work’; it’s today’s way of working, and while only 25% of employers are using remote working as a strategy to stay competitive in attracting talent, that quarter appears to be reaping the rewards.
In our Careers and Hiring Guide, a mammoth 92% of employers offering remote work consider it an advantage in hiring new staff, and with candidates listing home working as the second highest factor that entices them to accept a role, it’s easy to see why.
But you should never wax lyrical about your remote working policies to attract talent without perfecting a well-oiled work-from-home process first. That’s certainly one way to boost your attrition rate.
This all starts with getting your remote onboarding right and setting up your remote employees for success by ensuring they have all the information, access, and support they need.
But this can be easier said than done. It takes time to become accustomed to the company culture, systems, and processes, and while active onboarding like inductions and training may only last a couple of weeks, passive onboarding may be required for many more months to fully embed a new remote hire into their new role.
But how do you onboard remote employees, so they settle socially and professionally as effectively as their peers?
Remote onboarding: 5 biggest challenges
To get your remote onboarding process right, you first need to know what challenges you’re going to face—that way, you can proactively plan how you’re going to overcome them. That’s Strategy 101.
The biggest challenges you’re likely to face when onboarding remote employees are:
- Making new hires feel welcome and part of the team
- Being visible and available for support
- Avoiding ‘onboarding fatigue’
- Integrating new hires into company culture and processes effectively
- Ensuring your remote training is engaging
Your approach to remote onboarding should strategically tackle each of these obstacles (don’t worry, we’ll give you a hand with that later in this post), and this starts with evaluating how your current approach matches up.
How much of your office-based onboarding strategy is transferrable to remote onboarding? And how many of the aforementioned challenges do you come across in your current remote onboarding process? The answer to these questions will dictate just how much change is needed in your approach, and indicate how great of a culture shift is needed across your hiring, HR, and management departments.
How to onboard remote employees in 6 steps
So, we know what we need to do and why we need to do it, but how do you put it all into action and create a successful remote onboarding process?
Here are 6 steps to onboarding remote employees in a way that makes them feel settled, supported, and empowered to perform at their best:
- Touch base before day one
- Get your documentation in order
- Be the first to say hello
- Introduce them to the team
- Kick off your training
- Keep communication lines open
Unmissable insights into hiring AWS talent in 2024
Touch base before day one
First things first, let’s get the housekeeping out of the way.
Your new hire is going to need equipment—obviously—but this requires a little bit more proactivity and organization when they’re working remotely.
Arrange to have any key equipment and tools delivered to the employee’s work-from-home address ahead of their start date. Not only does this ensure they’re ready to hit the ground running on their first day, but it also helps settle some nerves and minimize anxieties in your new hire. Nobody likes feeling unprepared when starting a new role!
Remember that your remote hire doesn’t have access to on-site tech support like your office-based employees, so be proactive in ensuring they have everything they need. This means thinking beyond basic equipment necessities like laptops and leads—ensure they have all the right system access, VPN availability, and software installation from the get-go.
That being said, this is also a good time to let your new hire know who they need to seek out (and where to find them) if they do need any additional set-up support. This might be a specific contact to message on your in-house messenger system or an email address for your IT and HR teams. Ideally, however, this support should be accessible through a remote service desk. These systems are an integral part of embracing the remote working culture by ensuring employees can request and receive the support they need when and where they need it—a factor particularly important in a new hire’s first few weeks in a role.
Of course, the first time you touch base with your new team member doesn’t have to be all admin and logistics, and nor should it be! In fact, this first contact is the ideal time to add a personalized touch and welcome them to the team.
,.Send a welcome package before the employee’s first day to help them feel included and settle some first-day nerves. This could be as simple as a friendly message and some company-branded swag, or for extra brownie points, have their new teammates record video messages welcoming them onboard. Being able to put a face to the name is great for helping new hires feel settled, but can be significantly more challenging when an employee is working remotely.
Get your documentation in order
OK, we know we said we were getting the housekeeping out of the way early, but documentation is a crucial part of your onboarding process—meaning it’s imperative you don’t make any remote onboarding faux pas.
Get your documentation in order by ensuring that everything has been digitalized, from employment contracts to employee handbooks. This doesn’t just mean making them available somewhere online; key documentation should be easily accessible for remote employees, and simple to engage with.
The trick is not to overcomplicate the process. Remote hires shouldn’t have to click around aimlessly to find the answers to their questions—organize documents in logical and easily-to-access files, and optimize documents for digital use. This includes using links when referring to regulations and resources, leveraging multimedia to share information most effectively and engagingly, and perhaps even using dedicated employee handbook software to streamline where necessary.
(We’re done with the admin now, we promise…)
Be the first to say hello
On the morning your remote hire begins their new role, schedule a one-to-one and be the first face they see on day one.
This is a great opportunity to say hello and get to know each other better on a personal level, as well as the perfect time to introduce them to their role and their place within the wider team, while telling them a little more about your company culture.
Don’t get caught up in reciting your organization’s ‘About Us’ page, however. Sure, it’s important to communicate your brand story and values, but this should be covered effectively in your onboarding documentation. Instead, use this initial call to get your new hire up to speed on the nuances in your ways of doing things to help them assimilate faster, covering topics such as camera on or off for calls?; what time does everyone take lunch?; what’s the messaging etiquette between employees?
In this initial one-to-one, your new hire needs to understand that it’s a safe space to ask questions or request any support they might need, so be sure to communicate this with friendliness and assurance. Adopting the mantra ‘there’s no such thing as a stupid question’ is particularly important when onboarding remote employees—not only is it harder to notice when they need assistance but aren’t asking for help, but you’d be surprised at just how much we pick up subconsciously from being in an office environment!
Before you wrap up the first call, ensure you’ve covered the basics of:
- Workplace culture and organizational structure
- Fundamental responsibilities
- Preferred communication methods/channels
- Working hours and time zone considerations
- Admin/project management tools
- Expectations around productivity and results
Establishing the ground rules around these elements early ensures your new hire isn’t left with important unanswered questions they’re too nervous to ask, and is empowered with the knowledge they need to get the ball rolling in their new role.
Introduce them to the team
Now it’s time for your new hire to meet the gang!
We don’t need to outline the benefits of having a team that gets along. But making friends as a new member of the team is hard enough in the office, so it’s unsurprising that, as we’ve entered the remote work revolution, many managers have found it particularly challenging to socially integrate remote hires with their new team mates.
This can have a huge impact on a remote worker’s job satisfaction and mental wellbeing, so putting measures in place to overcome this is non-negotiable. Remember that these employees aren’t coming into an office full of smiling faces each morning, having a catch-up at the water cooler, or nipping out for lunch with their peers.
To help authentic relationships form, try not to force it. Sure, one-to-one virtual meet-and-greets with each team member might sound like a good way of letting everyone say hello, but for some, these can feel awkward and uncomfortable—two things you should be striving to avoid on anyone’s first day!
Instead, keep the one-to-one meetings professional with the team members they’ll be closely working with, and keep things fun and informal with the wider team. Coffee breaks, lunches, and even after-work drinks can all be hosted virtually to encourage participation, while team bonding activities and virtual team games can be fun ways to break the ice.
Kick off your training
All new hires need some form of training—there’s bound to be more than one process or practice they’re unfamiliar with when starting a new role.
The problem is that long days packed with one training session after another training sessions are a one-way ticket to onboarding fatigue. Not only does it get booooring, but hires are less likely to retain information as a result.
One way to get around this is to ask your new hire what training they don’t need. Supply them with a list of the tools, software, and resources they’ll be using day-to-day, and ask them to identify the ones they’re already confident with.
Remember to include all the tools your teams use in this list, and don’t assume a baseline competency. Just because your new hire works remotely does not mean they’ve worked remotely before, so some employees may need demos of tools like Teams, Slack, and Google Hangouts.
No matter how much training your remote employee needs to hit the ground running, try to spread sessions out where possible and adopt various learning methods to keep the delivery engaging. One of the biggest advantages of remote training is that it can be tailored to the individual, so look to have enough diversity in your training resources to cater to different preferences.
Remote training across your onboarding process can be delivered through a variety of mediums, from webinars and resource hubs to quizzes and demonstrations. Visual learners, for example, would benefit more from video tutorials on how to resolve their issues, while self-learners prefer to follow training documentation that’s simple and engaging.
Consider how you’ll reinforce this training, too. In office environments, we’re able to rely on body language and verbal affirmations to assure us that we’ve been understood, but this isn’t always possible when working with remote employees.
As such, you and your team should adopt an ‘overcommunication policy’ until your new hire settles in, keeping a completely open channel of communication where tasks and decision-making is over-explained for clarity—like providing an update on deliverables or KPIs without it being asked for, for example. This helps to fill any contextual and technical knowledge gaps your new hire may have, creating a more enjoyable work experience that a new hire can actively engage with and feel involved in from day one.
Keep communication lines open
When it comes to remote onboarding, communication is key. We’re sure you’ve got that message by now. You should be regularly checking in with your remote hire, and your remote hire should feel confident in reaching out to you, so stress that the line of communication between you two is always open.
With this in mind, put steps in place to be available on-demand on your new hire’s first day. It’s easy to feel like a burden as a remote employee—you can’t get the same sense of a manager’s busyness and you never know when it’s the right (and wrong!) time to pop up a question, so be sure to emphasize that you’re free to offer support as and when needed early in the onboarding experience.
Of course, we appreciate that the life of a manager is a busy one, meaning it’s simply not possible to be available all the time. While you should always strive to be the first port of call for at least the first day or two of your remote employee’s onboarding, appointing a dedicated onboarding liaison can help to lighten your load throughout the process.
Your onboarding liaison should be a member of your team who can act as an informal mentor to your new hire, ensuring there’s always someone there to answer spontaneous questions as and when they arrive. Think of it as their desk buddy in the office—someone you can tap on the shoulder and ask a quick question, virtually.
Ideally, this onboarding liaison should reach out to your new hire proactively to introduce themselves, form the initial connection, and build rapport as they become the go-to person for problems no matter how small. Note that this isn’t simply a case of question and answer, however—your onboarding liaison has a job of their own to do, after all! Instead, the aim should be to point the new hire in the right direction, accelerating their onboarding by supporting their independence within their role.
We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but…that’s not to say your job is done. Keep communication lines open between you and your new hire by scheduling regular one-to-one check-ins. While this is of course standard practice for most management teams, making these more frequent across the first few weeks of your remote employee’s onboarding will ensure roadblocks can be identified and overcome efficiently—something that’s typically more challenging in a remote environment.
We recommend documenting these sessions to ensure they’re structured. Keep a collaborative document in which your new hire can spontaneously note down any questions or talking points they’d like to cover—not only does this help to keep the conversation on track, but it also makes it easier for you to spot any of those dreaded remote onboarding challenges before they start making an impact.
Remember that these communication lines are open both ways, so look to request feedback on what’s working in your remote onboarding process and what’s not. This will help you to better understand the unique needs of your remote employees, and embrace a remote working culture by tailoring your onboarding approach to work better for employees regardless of where they log in from.
