Don’t Miss These 2 Key Aspects of Onboarding Employees Working From Home

Work from Home (WFH) culture is still going strong, even as the lockdowns and restrictions that once imposed it on so many fade into memory.. In fact, many have decided it’s the only way forward. As WFH continues to be an expected option for employees, it’s important for companies to develop practices for onboarding new people remotely.

Successful remote onboarding includes two key aspects:

1. Teaching the actual mechanics of the job
2. Integrating the new employee into the culture of the organization.

Let’s take a closer look at both aspects.

Teaching the Mechanics of Your Job to Remote Employees

Teaching remote employees the mechanics of their new job is best done in a standard, repeatable way—and the best way to do that is using a Learning Management System (LMS). Using an LMS, you can set up a course one time and then have each new employee you onboard complete the course. Critically, this ensures that everyone gets a consistent set of information, that they can review again and again as they start becoming more familiar with the organization. Providing an LMS for training also saves you from repeating the same information over and over again.

Using the LMS, you can deliver links to documents, pre-recorded videos, interactive lessons, and quizzes to measure retention of new knowledge. This will help you as a trainer understand if your new employee is catching on. It also gives you something to point back to later if needed to ensure they did receive full and complete onboarding.

Integrating Remote Employees Into Your Culture

Integrating a new employee into a culture, can be challenging if they are not physically in the same place as other employees. However, if your organization has a strong WFH culture—or is prepared to build one—this can be a lot easier to do than you may have expected.

• Make sure you get plenty of video call time with the employee.
• Schedule new employees to meet as many of their teammates as possible.
• Shadowing other employees is a great way to both build knowledge and culture—Encourage the employees being shadowed to include a little chatter in the session so they can get to know each other.
• Add the new employee to group calls and be sure to introduce them and the other attendees.

On your calls, you should take a moment to talk about something non-work related. On one call recently, we shared our favorite guilty-pleasure TV show, and now we have employees regularly chatting about what happened last night on their show. This is a perfect way to invite new team members in and make them feel at home.

Using an LMS for remote onboarding is a great way to work smarter, not harder - and who doesn’t want to do that right now?!