The number of remote employees has drastically increased over the past few years. It is now an essential part of the working environment to onboard and train employees which work fully remotely. That is why it is so important to understand how to best maximize the first part of the work process onboarding people. It is already known that effective onboarding increases the chances of an employee staying in the company longer. The hire retention increases by 82 percent and productivity increases by 70 percent. Finding out how to structure the onboarding process for remote employees may bring a lot of success in the future and become a good standard of how to show the most care for people who work remotely.
A good way to start would be to welcome the new employee to the company and the culture ahead of time. You could create a digital welcome package that may include an invitation to a meeting with the employees, a personalized message, the employee handbook and a digital organization chart. This may help the new employee prepare better and start working with an efficient, productive and happy mind.
The second thing that you would do is connect the employee to the digital workspace in which he or she will be working. A week before create the email address that would be used for all platform logins and be logged in to everything. A good way to help the employee would be to create a video tutorial where the main steps would be explained of the tools that will be needed.
A really efficient way to keep the employee motivated to start working in the company is to create an individualized remote onboarding plan that would include specific goals and videos. The employee will be more productive when he will have specific goals to go for in the work, will have motivation to everyday be ready for work and having meetings with the manager will make everything clearer as well as show support from the company’s side while still being in the initial stage of figuring out everything. It is best to have a long-term concrete plan that will change as the situation changes and the goals of the employee change.
Another way to make the employee get started faster in the job and have a better well-being is to offer work-related courses or training online. This is a good way for the employee to become more useful by expanding knowledge in the field of the work and integrating into the remote working place easier. Online courses will offer a lot of guidance and eventually develop an employee that has a personal growth mindset and is both himself happy and will make the company better. Just don’t forget to give some kind of stipend to the employee for working on courses since this would be very useful for the company and such benefit will greatly satisfy the employee himself.
A fun way to make onboarding overall a better experience for future hires and the company is to create a survey that could be given to current employees to fill out. You could do it through an interview or just by sending a survey which would include multiple-choice questions and open answers to give more elaborate feedback. The questions could be about the most and least successful steps of the onboarding process, when the employee felt excited and when frustrated, the length and the interactions with people in the company. All of this information should be saved digitally, analyzed and used to make future onboarding better.
Lastly, as a creative piece, the onboarding could include interactive and social activities. The company could create videos explaining what it does and include product descriptions, client interviews. A good idea would be to use TikTok for this as there would then be a whole profile that would be shared with the employee. Also, the CEO could record a podcast explaining the story of the company, its services or product, given personal employee stories. You could also make the new employee use his creative skills to create a short introduction video with some photos and share with the colleagues. This would create communication from both sides.
Onboarding is the first step for the employee in the company. It is important to create the best process possible to leave the employee satisfied and the company successful. Even in the time of remote work, it is possible to restructure old practices and to apply them to the online world, making the remote employee happy and motivated.