5 Insights on Remote Onboarding (During a Pandemic)

At the height of the Corona crisis I was in a unique situation of starting a new job. This meant being mostly onboarded remotely, never having met most of my colleagues and not having a real life impressions of processes, daily office routines and the company culture. (I guess it doesn’t get more “VUCA” than this…)

I was fortunate enough to start at Workpath, a learning organization that is eager to treat their employees just like internal customers and puts a lot of effort into a great onboarding experience. Here we were faced with an unprecedented situation for everyone involved, which required inspecting and adapting the process on the go.

One thing I can tell you right away: what makes a successful onboarding for the new remote hires is empathy for their special situation, a willingness to receive feedback from them, to pivot and learn from their experiences.

I wanted to share a couple of insights that we and I learned during my first months at Workpath through recurring exchanges with the entire team. Many of the learnings I will outline are of course dependent on the personality, role and cultural expectations of the new employees and stem from my subjective experience. However, I’m hoping that they can contribute to an improved remote onboarding experience of new employees at other companies in my network.

Insight 0) Provide guidance every step of the way and learn as you go

It almost seems unnecessary to point this out, but give the new employee an onboarding buddy and agree on a regular meeting schedule for onboarding sessions, Q&A sessions and Retrospectives on the process. Remember: the new hire cannot possibly know what they don’t know yet. The better you structure this process beforehand, the faster and more efficient the onboarding will be.

Try putting yourself in their shoes: Think about which aspects of working at your company the new employee will not automatically experience due to the remote onboarding situation and make them explicit. Also, as mentioned, for most companies this is a new and unique situation which requires everyone involved to be open for feedback and to learn from insights gathered as we go in order to improve the process for those who come after us. None of us can pretend we know which is the right way from the get go. We need to formulate hypotheses and test them with the user — in this case: the new employee.

Insight 1) Point out the value they are creating as soon as possible

There is nothing more frustrating than wanting to create value and not being able to do so. I was once told at a job interview that I would only in 2(!) years be able to provide “real value” to the company. Needless to say I decided not to take that job. New hires, especially in this economy, are eager to prove themselves so they want and need to create value as soon as possible. This is why efficient and effective onboarding is so important, as it has the potential to kickstart the engagement and set the pace of an employee’s value creation for the remainder of the time working there.

Especially when being onboarded remotely the purpose of your own work and how you create value for the overall company might get lost or never fully surface. This is why it needs to be made explicit and be constantly reviewed.

Tips:

• Give them an overview of your company’s value stream and customer journey, show them how they fit in, how their work relates to the work of other teams
• Draft a small roadmap together, finding quick-wins for them, and thus facilitate that first important win and most of all make them see how it is contributing to the “big picture”
• Try mock-OKRs! During my first weeks I was tasked with drafting a set of mock-OKRs that were horizontally and vertically aligned with our Workpath OKRs. This helped me see exactly which value I can create in my new role and how it links to the overall goals of the company

Insight 2) Manage and address corona- or remote-work related friction

This is a very stressful time for everybody. Despite the fact that many countries at least are partially reopening, the strain of the past few months is still present. Whether you were balancing kids and work or worrying about friends and family or were just troubled about the state the world is in right now, it will influence how you behave at work.

A skilled servant leader knows how much this state of mind can influence the interactions within the teams, with small disputes turning into full-grown conflicts and minor discomfort being uttered more frequently than usual. Coming into this highly tense environment can impede a good onboarding experience, especially since there is no way for the new hire to know if people are just tense because of the circumstances or if it is a more hostile environment in general.

Tip: These issues not only need to be openly addressed in 1-on-1s and Team Retrospectives, it also helped me that my team pointed them out and labeled them as what they are: temporary issues which are not at all supposed to set the tone for interactions within the team

Insight 3) Don’t underestimate actual face-to-face conversations:

Video calls do a lot of things for us. They make us see the person we are talking to, their posture, facial expressions and we can hear them at the same time. Sounds great right? The problem is that despite the best efforts of our high speed internet providers, they do not do that in real time — not really.

Think about it: even if the connection is working well it can’t compare to real life conversations. We behave differently during video calls: we usually don’t nod to signal our understanding, so we don’t listen mindfully and we are on our phones much more instead. Then we can’t directly see if someone is looking us in the eye or at their own picture or at something else on their screen while we are talking. We wouldn’t do most of these things that much in a real life conversation, so we don’t get the social cues we are used to.

Since we do most of our “talking” through body language, eye contact and gestures, simple conversations can be misinterpreted, or the culture of a workplace gets lost in these imperfections of the video call experience. It is hard to learn to size up your new colleague or manager when you do not have a direct line to these communication signals and their reactions. Imagine having these kind of (socially excruciating) conversations with so many people you have never seen before.

Now remember new hires also don’t have a repertoire of experiences with their colleagues and the company culture they can consciously or subconsciously compare a situation to. In the ones described above they might think: “Did they hear what I just said?”, “Did I say something wrong?”, “Was the connection bad?”, “Was my joke inappropriate?” or “Do we not express feedback this directly here?”. There is no way to tell which one of these is the cause of a reaction or lack of, so there is no feedback provided to us. Also, there is no way to “read the room” and e.g. understand when a good time is to ask critical questions without experiencing a backlash.

Of course these are things that can be learned over time, but it takes longer without a certain frame of reference. From my experience it can be unsettling and prolongs the process of feeling comfortable to engage, give feedback and actively contribute.

Tips :

• Try to give employees the opportunity of meeting at least their closest team members in person in the beginning (of course respecting social distancing rules as well as personal boundaries)
• If the first suggestion is not an option: be aware of how the new hire might feel, show empathy to their situation, and what helped me most: actively integrate them in meetings, ask their opinions and try to interact with them also non-verbally from time to time — a little nod goes a long way

Insight 4) Actively work against (mental) silos

Only working with your own team, especially during remote work, can make it seem to the new hires like there are silos where there actually are none. Especially when there is no structured exchange, such as the Check-ins we do at Workpath, between the teams. The new employees don’t see people running into a colleague from another department while getting a coffee or popping by the office and aligning with them on something. This might become a problem, since they might think: “Well I guess we don’t talk to Sales that much so I’m not expected to reach out or inform them.”

If communication between departments is not facilitated and integrated into the routine of a team in the remote working mode, valuable synergies and insights might be lost. Since communication between departments could become invisible, as it remains hidden in private Slack messages or emails, this state could be enforced by new people not being aware of the synergies and expectations to leverage them in the first place.

Tips:

• If you’re not already doing regular Check-ins between teams, explain what the expectations are and when cross-functional communication should take place
• Facilitate the first contact with other teams as soon as possible, give them one specific person to talk to (start at the direct interfaces with the teams you are creating value for or that create value for you)
• Ideally give them a cheat sheet which topics they need to ask that team about. Remember, the hardest part of onboarding is not knowing what you don’t know. Also: have the new hire add new topics they learned about to that list and try to learn from their experience for the next person you are onboarding

Insight 5) Don’t underestimate informal interactions and implicit knowledge:

The relevance of the so-called “water cooler talk” is far from being a secret. Informal social interactions do not only give us psychological safety they also teach us informal patterns of socially acceptable behavior. The benefits in this very special situation are many.

One thing it does is it fosters communication in general. You want your new employee to ask for help, know their way around and who to ask for explanations when needed. I would rather ask someone who I had an informal virtual coffee with for help than someone I only know from a crowded virtual town hall meeting. So make informal meetings that are not outcome oriented an intricate part of your onboarding routines.

Onboarding remotely can feel like driving in a social snowstorm — these meetings might provide the new hire with some form of headlights. For instance, it can teach you about internal politics as well as pet peeves or sore spots of people; whether it’s your sales manager who hates typos in emails or your CTO who is involved in a political struggle with the Head of Product. None of these things are likely to be contained in your HR onboarding packages — you learn them through talking to other people and all of those things will make the onboarding experience a bit smoother.

Some of this implicit knowledge about the company and the people might seem trivial to you, but knowing about it requires less trial and error from the new employee. Which means less negative experiences that could have been prevented. Informal interactions will also integrate the new hire into the social webs of the company which fosters loyalty and engagement. (Also: just a quick reminder that gossip works as a social glue and can foster team spirit)

Tips:

• By having the new employee schedule informal 1-on-1s, you will break down barriers that are invisible to you but very much present for the new employee
• Give them a list of people that are easy to talk to first and represent the spirit and culture of your company. Even if they formally do not have the most influential position, they might informally set a positive tone for the new hire, despite the unusual situation

Together with my team at Workpath we learned how an unprecedented situation like this can be tackled with the principles of empathy, transparency and feedback as well as a willingness to question yourself and continuously adapt in the process. Too often they are only seen as crucial aspects of working with external customers. I am sure the companies that will be successful in the future will be the ones that extend the same courtesy to their employees — especially the new ones, helping them to create value and reach their full potential as soon as possible.