Welcoming a New Employee - 8 Tips for Onboarding and Training Remotely

Every employee needs a positive engaging welcome into your business, and this can be tricky to do from a distance. Remote onboarding is very different to face to face onboarding. One of the most important and often overlooked steps is pre-boarding. Not only does it increase new hires’ engagements, but it also fosters a relationship with them before their start.

Here are some pointers that should help smooth out this process:

Ensure that they have the necessary IT hardware on or prior to their start date. Couriers can be useful here. Make sure tech is set up correctly. You would not want all of their first day spent on the phone to technical support. Create a library of training videos and resources on a shared drive for everyone to access.

Introduce them to the team as soon as possible. Add them to the team WhatsApp group or encourage team members to pick up the phone to introduce themselves and build connections. If this is not possible, then arrange a meetup with a local employee.

Organise video calls where possible. They are more personal and allow you to explain things better face to face, preventing a breakdown in communication.

Have mentor and buddy systems to give new starters working their notice a person to speak to and ask questions to, other than their line manager.

If you can, try and onboard more than one person at a time. They can benefit from being on the call together and hearing each other questions.

Managers need to take an active role to measure how well employees are developing in their role. Have a plan with clear milestones to assess how well things are going.

Before they start, make them feel included by sending out a welcome pack with a ‘Congratulations on your New Job’ card, some branded merchandise like a notepad, pens, mug, internal phone list and include other important contact details i.e. Technical Support, HR etc.

When training, keep the group small, ideally no more than 8. Think of ways to make it interactive to keep people engaged, having a whiteboard session, focus groups etc.

Onboarding will be different for every company. The quality of the onboarding and training your staff receive is critical to retaining top talent. Businesses need to ensure they get this right and these tips should help with that.