Onboarding New Hires with a Remote Team
In these times where entire offices are remote spread out across the cities, regions, or the whole country, how should companies approach onboarding remote workers in Bulgaria?
How can businesses ensure that new recruits feel prepared, informed, and well-trained to do their job when in-person meetings are not taking place?
Remote working has gone from being the exception to becoming a major part of the workforce. Statistics show that the number of people working remotely has increased by 159% since 2005. With a larger population working remotely, there’s been a change in how companies onboard new employees. Remote work allows employers to benefit from greater productivity, lower absenteeism and decreased turnover but they have different needs than office based workers.
Effective onboarding improves employee retention, and many employees feel that companies focus too much on paperwork and not enough on preparing them for their new job.
This article looks at the best practices for onboarding of remote workers.
The Onboarding Process
Good remote onboarding processes will ease the transition of an employee joining a new team and will improve their support and camaraderie.
It is unlikely that a new employee joining your organisation has ever experienced a fully virtual onboarding process, since companies with remote workforces often opted to do their onboarding in-person before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Whether a company is small and onboards new employees individually, or is a larger firm that brings in larger groups of new hires that go through onboarding together, the following recommendations will help onboarding programs succeed:
Review Existing Process for Onboarding remote workers in Bulgaria
The first step is to review your existing onboarding process. Each step of the process should be looked at to determine which parts of the existing onboarding process can be converted to a virtual process.
Be Transparent
When a recruit starts, explain the onboarding process, and leave plenty of time for questions as this will be essential for success.
Identify, appoint, and communicate a dedicated onboarding liaison officer, who will be different from the persons manager, and create a 90 day plan with action items and goals for each milestone.
Start Early
Add new employees to team Slack groups and send them information about company culture and projects that they will be working on prior to their start date.
Set up the required technology before the start date and provide each new employee a training session with IT to show him or her to use the company’s internal IT systems.
Explain The Company Culture
A new employee must learn about the company’s culture from the start and this process needs more time than it would in an office environment.
Set Clear Expectations
A new hire should have a clear picture of what success looks like for the first 90 days and should recognise how their responsibilities fit into the overall success of the company.
Provide A List of Key Stakeholders
Hiring managers should create a list of the people the person will be working with within their new role and explain to them the context of their work.
Cater to All Learning Types
Different people learn in different ways, so provide onboarding information by reading, hearing, and doing.
Meeting Colleagues and Key Stakeholders
During the initial working week introductions to the team will take place over Zoom, Skype Microsoft teams or other meeting software.
Locate and provide online training sessions, either live or in person, for tools or software needed for the job.
Handovers and Other Important Documents
Import all handover and training documents onto a cloud-based file sharing platform, so they are easily accessible. Ensure they can be updated by multiple people, making teamwork easier.
Ongoing Communication
To help onboarding remote workers in Bulgaria ensure that the new employee has regular meetups with their direct manager, and a clear line of communication for the entire team.
Team Building
Schedule hangouts, lunches or virtual happy hours over Zoom or other meeting software so the new hire will better understand the culture of the team.
