What are the best practices for measuring remote onboarding success?

1 Define your objectives

Before you start measuring your remote onboarding success, you need to define what you want to achieve with your program. What are the specific outcomes and expectations for your new hires in terms of performance, productivity, engagement, retention, and satisfaction? How do they align with your organizational objectives and strategy? You can use the SMART framework to set clear and realistic goals for your remote onboarding program.

2 Choose your metrics

Once you have your objectives, you need to choose the metrics that will help you track and evaluate your progress. Combining quantitative and qualitative data is one way to measure the success of your remote onboarding. Common metrics include time to productivity, quality of work, engagement and satisfaction, retention and turnover, as well as feedback and testimonials from new hires, managers, mentors, and peers. These metrics can provide insight into how long it takes for new hires to reach their expected level of performance, how well they meet standards and expectations, how happy and motivated they are with their work environment, culture, and support, how long they stay with the organization, and what their opinions and experiences are.

4 Report and communicate results

To report and communicate your results, you need to present your data in a clear and concise manner that highlights the key findings and insights. You can utilize various formats and channels, such as dashboards and charts to display your data and show the trends, patterns, and comparisons of your remote onboarding success. Written or oral reports can be used to summarize the data and explain the implications, recommendations, and action plans for your remote onboarding program. Additionally, meetings and discussions can be held to share the results with stakeholders and involve them in the feedback and improvement process of your remote onboarding program.

5 Review and improve your program

To review and improve your program, you need to use your results to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your remote onboarding program and implement the necessary changes. Guiding your continuous improvement process can be done using the PDCA cycle; first, plan based on data and feedback, defining the areas and actions for improvement, setting the timeline and resources for implementation. Then, execute the improvement actions while monitoring progress and impact. After that, evaluate the results and outcomes of the improvement actions against expected goals and metrics. Finally, adjust and refine the improvement actions based on evaluation and feedback, repeating the cycle until desired results are achieved.