Running a remote company isn’t easy. Especially when your business starts to grow. The main challenge about managing a remote company is that you don’t get to meet your team in person too often.
When you’re hiring for a remote job, you can rule out the geographical location of your employees and hire top talents from across the world. While this is one of the best things about remote work, the challenge comes in because of the difference in time zone of your employees.
So when a part of the team starts working another might be logging out after the day’s work. A lot of times this difference in timing creates communication barriers within the team.
As a result, their productivity declines, their efficiency gets affected, and a lot of times the team feels isolated and detached from the company. This can seriously affect the overall growth of your business in the long run.
To prevent that from happening you need to create a strong company culture that provides consistency and direction to your employees, guides their actions and decisions and supercharges them to maximize their productivity.
Having a strong work culture makes your employees feel connected with the organization, makes them feel secure, boosts their efficiency and offers a positive work environment for them. This in turn boosts employee satisfaction and increases your retention rate.
But creating such a culture is not a one day job. It takes time and effort. So you need to start working on it from the day you hire your employees. Onboarding them with company etiquettes is one of the first things to consider in this regard.
But how do you do that? In this post, we’ll discuss a few steps about how to get your remote employees onboarded with company etiquettes. So let’s get started.
Before we get started let’s first understand what the onboarding process is and why it is important.
What is Employee Onboarding and Why is it Important for Remote Employees?
In simple words, employee onboarding is the process in which a new hire is integrated with the organization. In doing so, the company helps the new employee acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to become an effective member of the organization.
It is the process in which the new hire learns about the company’s vision, mission, goals, objectives, values, and its overall working culture.
The onboarding process helps remote workers get acquainted with the existing company culture and understand their roles, responsibilities, expectations, policies, protocols and other important details that can help them become a strong member of the team.
Now let’s look at how to make your employee onboarding process an effective one.
Step 1 – Make it a Collaborative Effort
The first important step to onboard your remote employees with etiquettes is to make the entire process a collaborative one. For example, if you’re running a remote team you’ll definitely be using collaborative remote working software platforms like Slack to communicate with your team.
Before you add your new member in your Slack group, let your existing employees know about it and ask them to give the new joinee a warm welcome.
This will make the new employee feel while setting a good first impression of the company on him/her. You can also let your employees reach out to the new member personally and introduce themselves.
This will make the new hire feel more comfortable even if he/she is in a new environment and help them know that he/she can reach out to these employees anytime they want.
Step 2 – Personalize Each Onboarding Process
It’s important to know that each of your members will have different roles, responsibilities, duties and expectations. So it makes sense to personalize each onboarding process based on the requirements.
For example, if you have hired a technical writer, your onboarding document should look different from what it is for a developer or a support specialist. To make it more interesting for your new hires, consider making it colorful and engaging.
This helps your employees engage themselves better and prepares for their new role better in a more engaging way. Here’s a great example from Predictive Index.
Step 3 – Offer Help
Not every new employee feels confident to ask for help. As an employer it’s your duty to make them feel comfortable in their first few weeks and reach out to them offering help.
You may not offer anything specific. Simply reach out and try to understand how things are going for them. You should also proactively offer your help or suggestion to make things easier for them.
Step 4 – Keep Your New Hires Engaged
As a remote team, you often work from home or anywhere outside the office. So you don’t really get to see your team in person. But this doesn’t mean you can make your team feel misaligned or disconnected. One way to prevent that from happening is to keep them engaged while their onboarding process is on.
A very creative way of doing that is to ask them to share 10 things about them in the family channel on Slack. This way they will introduce themselves to the team and help the others know them better in an interesting way. They can also do it in the form of a video if they want.
Step 5 – Refine the Process
The final step is to refine your process. When you’re onboarding your remote team you may not be able to do it perfectly in the beginning.
Getting your employee’s feedback is one way of understanding the loopholes and limitations in the onboarding process. It will give you a better perspective of how you can make the process a more helpful one.
But don’t just limit yourself to getting feedback. Make sure you implement them too in refining your process.
Over to You
Your onboarding process is one process that can help you set a positive impression about the company. Through this process you let your employees understand your work environment and company culture. So making it a positive experience is extremely important.
About the Author
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.
