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Ever since the COVID-19 outbreak, companies across the world have started to adopt remote work, making complete virtual employee onboarding a requirement. But providing a great remote onboarding experience to both HR and employees is still a challenge for many enterprises. 

What is remote onboarding?

Remote onboarding is a practice of introducing your new employees, who will be working remotely, to the company’s culture, principles, tools, and process. Onboarding remote employees are different from onboarding an onsite workforce. An excellent onboarding is crucial for employees. As per the statistics of ‘Happeo,’ creating a great onboarding experience for the remote employees is significant as 69% of employees stay with the company for at least three years. 

Tips for onboarding remote employees

The hiring managers are the frontline of remote onboarding processes. It is their responsibility to ensure that they have offered efficient and well-structured onboarding experiences. A focused remote onboarding process is a key factor for the success of every new hire. 

Read these best tips for onboarding your remote employees successfully and secure quick wins for them. 

1. Begin with pre-boarding 

If you are onboarding employees remotely, you must begin with the best possible pre-boarding. Pre-boarding is the process that starts from contract signing. Ensure that your new employee has access to your systems, email or chat, project management, learning modules, and everything else they use daily. With remote onboarding, communication is even more relevant as you want your new employee to feel connected to their remote workplace. Great pre-boarding makes your new hire think that his/her decision to work with your company was right. 

2. Provide all essential equipment. 

You should provide all essential equipment like laptops to your remote workforce before their joining date. It will help your workers to feel relieved. Once you send the equipment, verify that your new hires have received all equipment to start their work. Hiring managers should also organize a meeting with the IT Support team if your remote employees find it difficult to set up backup software, file sharing apps, and password management tools. 

3. Provide insight about communication tools 

Once pre-boarding is done, the hiring managers should make sure that they have introduced everything a new hire must know to perform their jobs. 

Build a real communication process between the company and the new hire. Make sure that the employee has understood how to set up internal communication tools like email, group messaging tools, and video conference apps. 

4. Make Collaborative Onboarding Process 

The new hires cannot make their job an essential part of their life without establishing an authentic and mutual exchange. A collaborative online role-specific training platform is the one-such best way to set up that. Interactions and collaboration during the remote onboarding process help a new employee learn the corporate processes and give an idea of community. HR managers should also provide product demo videos, user-friendly games, and quizzes to effectively boost engagement and train the remote employees. 

5. Set up introduction meetings. 

Setting meetings/calls with the head of each department is critical to gain better knowledge about the company. It can be conducted one-on-one or as a group call. When joined, the remote employees should get introduced to their co-workers, the managers, direct reports, and workforce from other departments with whom they work together. 

6. Assign a mentor 

A mentor at the workplace will help the new employee get introduced to the work culture, job role, and diverse teams inside the company. Throughout the whole remote onboarding process, workers can be assigned a co-worker whom they can trust and ask questions. 

7. Seek regular feedback 

When an employee is onboarded remotely, the hiring manager should take feedback from him about the experience. It will help you gain insight to enhance the process in the future. You can also conduct a remote onboarding survey among the newly hired employees. 

8. Keep a remote employees onboarding checklist. 

Use these essential tips to help your new remote employees accelerate their job roles, your ROI, and key policies. There are so many excellent and important tips to be followed while onboarding a remote employee. If you don’t want to miss any of these tips, make a remote onboarding checklist and keep track of it. 

Conclusion: The best way to onboard employees remotely 

Onboarding remote employees should be experience-driven. Whatever the situation is, the onboarding process must go on. The traditional way of onboarding is a time-consuming process where the HR managers have to put a lot of effort. 

The two smartest ways that ensure the best onboarding experience for employees, as well as the HR managers, are: 

1) Automating the complete onboarding process makes it fast and reliable. It reduces the efforts of the HR managers and lets them focus on other essential tasks. 

2) Channel- Collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams to manage the entire onboarding process. This is the modern and future workplace. Today, employees spend up to 80% of their time on communication and collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams, to be in constant touch with their colleagues. Thus, it would be easy for them to automate the entire onboarding process. 

Want to ensure a flexible and agile employee onboarding process then automate the entire onboarding process with the Rezolve.ai.