Onboarding remote employees: part 1
You’ve decided to bring someone new onto your startup team. Fantastic! Before this new hire can get into the day-to-day of driving growth or improving your product, you must first onboard this person.
They need to know more about your company, how it works, who’s involved, and what they’ll be doing in their role. Further, you’ve not only hired someone new, but they’re a remote employee — you can’t onboard them in the traditional manner of showing up for the first day “at the office”.
When you’re onboarding a new employee, especially a remote employee, there are certain tools and processes that are good to know about and to put into practice.
In this article, we talk to NewCampus’s Head of Product, Eddy, as he plays an integral role in onboarding new hires, and learn about tools and processes useful for onboarding remote hires.
First, can you tell us what onboarding is?
Onboarding is about getting the new hire comfortable with what they’re about to get into.
Before diving into understanding the specifics of their position, onboarding is about helping that person understand the company’s culture. For NewCampus, as a remote team, it’s around topics such as how we communicate, where everyone is based, everyone’s working hours and styles, etc.
It also includes things like tips on who to talk to if they have certain issues — if something is wrong with product, who do you go to? Who do you go to for setting up your payment account details?
It’s also about understanding the people you work with, like what do we do outside of work, and who to go to for certain recommendations. For example, this is the person to talk to if you want to travel in Southeast Asia, or this person can tell you about the best food in Shanghai.
The other part is about understanding the role. With most early stage startups, it’s hard to actually define their role in the startup. You can give a blanket statement, such as you’re doing business development, but at the end of the day, the role changes and evolves over time. In short, trying to explain someone’s role when joining an early stage startup is hard. You have to put in more effort. Break it down.
Do you have an onboarding process in place?
Definitely. Whether you’re hiring remotely or in-person, it’s important to have a process in place. You’re inviting someone to join your family — no matter how friendly you are in the interviewing process, that new person is still going feel like they’re an outsider in the beginning.
Having a process allows you to test ways on how to make someone comfortable with the team as quickly as possible. For example, you don’t want to dump everything on them all at once and “say figure it out”. Instead, you can test what information you share at which particular stage of the onboarding process.
What does your onboarding process look like?
We break it down into four steps.
Step 1: introducing the person to the company culture
Step 2: introducing them to their role
Step 3: setting up time for them to meet colleagues they’ll work most closely with
Step 4: introduce them to the rest of the company
Do you utilize any checklists in your onboarding process?
We do, but it’s a pretty simple checklist. It’s kind of broken down like this:
Invite to necessary tools: Slack, Google Calendar, Trello, set up the email and Google account, and invite them to all other tools that are immediately relevant. We try to keep this number of first day tools down so as not to overload them — we keep it to the key essentials of communication.
Understand the role: We give the new hire the Trello board that details their role, and walk through that board one on one so they understand their role.
Then we have two check-ins to make sure they’re on the right track.
14 day check in.
30 day check in.
It’s a high level checklist.
What tools do you use to onboard?
Since we’re a remote team, we rely heavily on Slack. It’s our digital office.
The first thing is the new hire is invited to Slack, as this is where daily communications take place. In Slack, we’ll announce who the new person is and what they’re doing in the company.
Trello is also a huge part of our onboarding process. We’ve created a Trello board that breaks down the most important information — all the tools we use and key information to know when joining the team. This Trello board also contains information about the way we work, where to submit bank details, how to apply for leave, which public holidays we follow, etc.
We have another Trello board which we use to break down their role — what they’re working on in the short term, and how their role will evolve in the longer term. This is a kind of role roadmap for them.
We also use Wunderlist and Sunsama, a great tool for managing personal to do lists, and it also allows you to collaborate with your team’s to do lists. This is helpful for new hires in tracking tasks in the first days of work, as well as later on in their day to day work.
We also use tools like Zoom or Skype. One of the key things with onboarding someone new is that must have video conversations. It’s so important to build the face time personal bond with the new person, and video chat makes it much friendlier, and more humanized.
Check back soon for part two of the remote onboarding process, where we’ll talk more about how to ensure your new hire is getting up to speed on how the company works, fitting into their new role, and fitting in with the company culture.
Have your own tips and tricks for onboarding remote employees? Let us know in the comment section below!
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