Three ways to make an impact with your remote onboarding programme

Published by Lily Winslow on August 2, 2022August 2, 2022

Three ways to make an impact with your remote onboarding

Three in five employers have seen an increase in hybrid working since the pandemic. That’s a rise in people choosing to spend some of their work time at home and some in an office environment. This shift in working habits means that organisations are adapting their processes and systems to better suit the needs of their employees and to better utilise technology. As part of this shift, many onboarding programmes are switching from a face-to-face experience to a remote one.

Although this shift may need to be fairly rapid, remote onboarding doesn’t have to be a watered-down version of a face-to-face onboarding experience. As long as careful design consideration is taken, you can create an impactful onboarding programme that is remote, effective and enjoyable.

Designing remote onboarding programmes is part of what we do here at BAD. Based on our wealth of experience and the latest research, we present three things you can do to make an impact with your remote onboarding programme.

#1 Define your success measures

Before you design and implement a new remote onboarding solution, think about the kind of success you’re hoping to achieve.

Are your success measures the same as they are for your face-to-face onboarding programme?

Do you need to adjust them to suit the new method of delivery?

You might be seeking to improve staff retention, reduce onboarding time, or even create onboarding-related behaviour change. Whatever you’re aiming to do, define your success criteria from the beginning. It keeps your design focused and sets you up to measure effectively the impact of your remote onboarding initiative after it has launched.

#2 Engage your managers

Regardless of the method of onboarding – face to face or remote – the role of your managers should not be overlooked when designing an onboarding programme.

A new hire’s manager is uniquely positioned and can have a huge impact on the success of your remote onboarding initiative.

They understand what’s required of their new starter and the connections they need to make in order to contribute towards the team and the wider organisation.

Be clear about what a manager needs to do in a new hire’s first day, first week, first month and first six months.

Create a checklist and provide resources to support your managers in their onboarding duties.

#3 Make it social

Going remote doesn’t mean removing the social element of onboarding. In fact, social connection between new hires and their colleagues plays a leading role in creating an impactful remote onboarding programme.

It’s not just about new hires making friends. New hire performance at your organisation could be negatively impacted if they are not socially integrated.

But how can you make social connection part of onboarding if your new hires are working from home? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Set up remote, informal meetings for new starters to get to know people. Start with their manager and expand to members of their team and eventually to those outside their team.
Create a digital ‘new hire community’ on your LMS or social platforms for new hires to connect with each other.
Encourage new hires to share their experiences during their onboarding programme via online forums and group chats.

Social implementations like these could be the difference between your new hire feeling isolated or connected.

A great start

These three elements – measurement, managers and social connection – are not the only things you need for effective remote onboarding. Great content, technology and systems are important, too.

But they are all crucial in creating impact and ensuring your new hires get off to a great start, whether they’re working from the boardroom or their bedroom.

Get in touch with BAD if you want to create impactful, remote onboarding at your organisation.

Time to change…

Why do we behave the way we do? It can be hard to change our less desirable behaviours when they are highly ingrained and have become habits we perform automatically without thinking.

Richenda Sabine April 15, 2024