The Ultimate Employee Onboarding Guide For Remote Workers

Most traditional organizations view the employee onboarding process as mundane tasks involving completing new hire documents and explaining job-specific processes. However, this approach mainly benefits the needs of the employers and secures compliance so they won’t have to pay regulatory fees. If modern companies adopt this perspective during the transition period of their new employees, they might have a higher turnover, poor staff performance, and lower employee engagement.

With the tough competition in eCommerce industries, employers must provide their new hires with staff-centric training and onboarding to establish relationships with their workforce. However, assisting these employees in keeping up with organizations is challenging, especially when they have to welcome them virtually. Thus, modern companies must be flexible during their employee onboarding processes without causing interruptions and significant changes in their business procedures.

This article provides the ultimate remote workers onboarding guide to deliver the best experiences to your new hires.

Recruiting Remote Staff

Before providing your new hires with excellent experience working for your company, you must ensure that you leave them with a positive impression. This strategy will help you become on top of their minds as these candidates look for an online job on various listing sites. Thus, you must improve how you recruit your remote staff so you can encourage top talent to work for your organization willingly.

To ensure the success of your remote recruitment process and discover the best candidates, you must first determine why you want to work with your prospective employees remotely. You may find that you want to outsource a remote workforce so you won’t have to implement and pay for costly commercial space utilities. After that, you have to determine the recruiting budget, including costs for outsourced services, best communication tools subscription, and in-depth background checks.

Negotiating A Remote Work Arrangement

After selecting the best talents in the market, you have to set clear expectations to give them firm standards for their task performance. As you outline work logistics and demands, you must include all relevant work information in the offer letter to prevent unwanted surprises before these new hires officially join your remote team. The details you should provide may be onsite requirements, schedule specifications, sick policies, remote employee reporting, and vacation and time-off guidelines.

Once you successfully outline work logistics and expectations for your new hires, you must make them fill out all the confidential documents. You can work with your human resources team to digitalize each document, including elements like job description, employee handbook, employee information form, and applicable legal forms. After collecting these details, you should consider building an organizational intranet to manage and protect these insiders-only data effectively.

Welcoming New Employees

After these new hires accept your remote job offer, you should prioritize welcoming these individuals to your company. Since they’re unfamiliar with your organization’s internal operations and systems, you have to provide them with a clear image of your business before they start working. Therefore, you have to support these employees during their first few weeks so they can learn how your teams operate daily to make them feel productive.

As you introduce your new remote staff to your organization, you have to make them feel like they’re part of the team so you can inspire them to contribute to the organization’s success. One of the fun ways to welcome new employees virtually may include starting a video call with an interactive icebreaker activity rather than performing a strict schedule to increase their productivity. After going through this enjoyable process, you can pair them up with a work buddy and an extrovert work buddy so they can overcome their fear of the unknown as they work in your company.

Providing Role-Based Training

Once you introduce your new remote hires to your organization by carrying out a fun virtual game, you may now go through a more business-focused process to ensure their success in their tasks. Thus, you need to provide them with role-based training to improve their problem-solving skills, engagement, and job satisfaction. After running this activity, you won’t have to spend your budget on redundant training that doesn’t contribute to their work productivity.

Some of the best practices for providing your new remote staff with practical role-based training include using a variety of training formats like webinars, downloadable worksheets, audio, presentations, and video. Before adopting this virtual training, you must ensure that this activity is mobile-responsive and can be easily accessed, so you must use remote training software. During and after the training, you have to measure its effectiveness to determine whether your virtual employees are all absorbing the material so you can improve the process.

Continuing Virtual Team Building Activities

Most remote workers face challenges in establishing meaningful connections with their colleagues, which affects their desire to stay within the organization. If companies ignore the importance of building valuable relationships within their virtual workforce, they might receive a higher employee turnover. As a result, hiring teams must repeat the onboarding process to welcome new hires without retaining them in the long run. 

Since solid work relationships can increase staff retention and employee satisfaction, managers must run successful virtual team-building activities. To achieve the success of this onboarding strategy, they have to develop a volunteer remote team-building committee to ensure plenty of exciting activities can happen.

After the event, you have to celebrate the completion of the onboarding process and give your new remote employees enough time to thank the team and the company. Then, you may consider delivering tokens of appreciation like virtual discount codes for specific products or services from your organization. If possible, you may consider throwing an in-person party with your nearby staff while having a live video chat with your other remote team.

Key Takeaway

As a business owner, you must make a remarkable impression on your ideal job candidates by creating an exciting virtual onboarding process. With that, you must consider incorporating these five-step employee onboarding guides to provide your remote workers with memorable experiences as they start working with your company. Once you adopt these steps, you might increase employee retention rates, reduce turnover, and sustain the loyalty of top-tier talent.