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The first day of work at any new job can be intimidating. But when that job is fully remote, and joining a team means opening up your laptop at home, it becomes even more important for companies to consider how to thoughtfully welcome new team members. Set up remote employees for success by prioritizing remote onboarding.
Remote onboarding is the process of welcoming remote employees to your company, familiarizing them with your team culture and processes, and providing them with the resources and knowledge to succeed long-term in a distributed environment.
Here’s why a structured remote onboarding is important for your startup or small business:
Since the start of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, remote work has risen and become a mainstream operating structure for businesses. According to a study from Pew Research, as of January 2022, 69% of workers whose jobs can be done remotely are working from home all or most of the time. For your new remote team members, this may be the first time they’re starting a remote role at a distributed company. Provide them with a world-class welcome by following remote onboarding best practices.
An effective onboarding process starts before an employee ever logs on for their first day. Prior to their start date, take care of the important details that will make the onboarding process feel seamless.
Whether you’re a startup onboarding a single employee or a larger company welcoming an entire cohort of new hires at once, set up an onboarding orientation that guides new employees through the ins and outs of the company starting on day one. Being truly onboarded—having a full understanding of one’s role and the ins and outs of a company—realistically takes weeks, or even months. But an onboarding orientation, the first step towards being fully onboarded, should take anywhere from a 4-hour half-day to two full 8-hour days. Leave plenty of time for taking breaks and asking questions.
Creating an onboarding orientation from scratch can be an arduous exercise, but will pay dividends as you repeat these sessions with each new employee and add to them over time as your company evolves. Avoid having new employees simply sift through documentation and your internal wiki by themselves on day one. Instead, prepare presentations and workshops that provide an overview of your company, products and services, IT and security training, and role-specific context.
Use your onboarding orientation to educate new hires about your company and culture, providing background on what your business does.
While new hires will likely be familiar with what your company does, provide joining employees with a deep-dive into your products and services. Regardless of where in the organization a new employee sits—from design to customer support—developing a deep understanding of your product will be valuable in their role.
Here’s a checklist of areas of your business to cover:
Ensure the cybersecurity of your remote company and the integrity of your data by providing new hires with training on how to properly set up their devices and any necessary software.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of areas to cover in your IT and security training:
An organized and itemized onboarding checklist ensures that a new employee completes everything they need to, while also providing them with concrete tasks to complete and feel like they’re making progress. Provide relevant links and information to each task so that new hires have access to all the details they need.
Consider dividing your onboarding checklist into multiple sections like the following:
Without the shared space of an office and teammates a few feet away, onboarding as a new remote employee can be isolating. Assign each new employee an onboarding mentor that they can lean on during their initial months at the company. This person might simply be their hiring manager or another senior (and long-tenured) member on their direct team…
A remote onboarding mentor will have the following responsibilities:
While there’s general information that every new hire should know about your business, onboarding should eventually diverge depending on what team your new employee is joining. This portion of onboarding is one of the most important and will likely extend into weeks or months into a new hire’s tenure.
Ask your company’s team leads to create role-specific onboarding that provides more targeted training for their specific area of the business:
Role-specific training is also a good opportunity to determine the availability and robustness of your team’s documentation. Lacking resources to point your new team member towards might indicate that your documentation processes require review.
Everyone who joins your company will need to collaborate with others and embed themselves as part of your wider team. Encourage new employees to meet with fellow team members in the company—face to face—that they’ll work with across projects. They should be provided with a list of people they should meet, or their hiring manager can directly organize these calls and introductions. Encourage your wider team to prioritize calls with new team members and be welcoming and supportive to newcomers.
When possible, consider having new hires meet senior leaders at your company—from Directors and VPs, all the way to the C-Suite. Lucy Kahn, a People Operations Associate at DigitalOcean, has supported remote onboarding at the company for years. Despite the company being over 1,400 team members strong, onboarding still includes an opportunity for new team members to join a presentation and Q&A with the CEO, Yancey Spruill.
“At DigitalOcean we are big on transparency and connectivity and giving new hires the chance to meet with Yancey is a huge part of this mission,” says Kahn. “We strive to keep ‘love at our core’ and many employees have voiced how much this is reflected in having Yancey go through DO’s mission and values as well as answer their questions in real time.”
New employees don’t know what they don’t know. Make the unknown clear by covering areas around professional expectations and how to thrive at the company.
Teams are often eager for new employees to hit the ground running and fill a gap, while new employees often want to quickly make an impact and establish their value to the team. But ramping up too quickly can be a mistake that leads to confusion, disappointment, and burnout. Allow recent remote hires to ramp up over time, and expect the full onboarding process to take months, not days.
Remote onboarding is a process that companies can improve on over time. After onboarding is complete, ask each employee to complete a survey and/or provide feedback on their onboarding experience. Don’t provide a survey too early; instead, invite newer employees to provide feedback after their first 30-60 days of joining the company. For honest and candid feedback, allow survey participants to submit their feedback anonymously.
Here are a few scaled statements (“1 to 5” or “strongly disagree to strongly agree”) to consider including when asking for remote onboarding feedback:
Here are a few open-ended questions worth asking in your remote onboarding feedback survey:
By asking for feedback on your remote onboarding process, you’ll provide each new employee with an experience that’s better than the last, building a distributed team that’s well equipped to do their best work.
Creating an ideal onboarding process for your remote employees is only one of many steps in building a world-class distributed company. Check out all of DigitalOcean’s resources for startups and SMBs in The Wave, our startup resource hub, for more company-building advice. Also, sign up for a DigitalOcean account to start building your product on DigitalOcean’s virtual servers, databases, and more.
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