Your Guide for Remote Onboarding in 2023 + Free Checklist

When you invest in your new employees by helping them set up comfortable places to work with all the equipment that best suits their needs, you are setting them up for success. And while the onboarding process is not just a checklist, a checklist or template is crucial to make sure you don’t overlook anything important in helping new hires get settled in. HR is the first point of contact for each new employee during their first days on the job. And proactively check up on remote workers to keep them in the loop.

The GitLab team handbook is the central repository for how we run the company. It consists of over 2,000 webpages of text, all searchable https://remotemode.net/blog/10-best-remote-onboarding-practices-to-adopt/ of course. Our handbook serves as a single source of truth that all team members can reference and depend on for answers about GitLab.

Visualize the onboarding process

The point of remote onboarding is to make it as seamless a process as regular onboarding. This is especially true in a hybrid work context when you want to make sure that every new employee has a similar, exceptional, and efficient experience. Give them useful resources they can revisit to refresh their memory about who is who. For example, you can provide new remote hires with a user-friendly document (with photos!) that lays out the organizational structure and reporting lines. You can even include contact details, like Skype addresses, for each person in the organizational chart. Try to arrange your onboarding assets in the most intuitive way possible, and give new hires a detailed onboarding plan with clear and actionable goals.

A typical rule of thumb is that onboarding should take between two weeks and three months, and it all depends on an employee’s role, responsibilities, and seniority. That said, there needs to be a distinction between active onboarding and more passive onboarding. Try to be proactive and share an onboarding plan in advance, so they know what to expect. Because he responds promptly, Kate keeps using WhatsApp to check in on other projects. Soon, their messages become hard to track, instructions start to look less professional, and their conversations are challenging to share with other team members who need to be brought into tasks. Besides, inadequate training combined with physical distance makes it harder for employees to engage with your company.

Find Tools to Make It Virtual

Other research suggests that extending the onboarding process for up to a year could help to improve employee retention and help new hires feel like part of the team. Onboarding is often seen as just another box to tick in the hiring process. But when it specifically comes to onboarding remote employees, it makes even more sense to treat the process with the importance that it deserves.

The rules still apply to remote employees, but the game is a bit different. Inspiration can come in many different forms and the best leaders know that. Understanding what your newly hired remote employee needs from you to motivate them will help to maximize work productivity and build virtual team engagement. Clear expectations give them solid benchmarks for their performance, even when they’re https://remotemode.net/ not receiving the casual feedback (smiles, high fives, and “nice jobs” in passing) we take for granted in office environments. New employees can quickly get the hang of using the systems and processes you have in place with a “practice run” task list which also accomplishes necessary onboarding objectives. They can also complete some parts of the onboarding process on their own initiative.