Remote Onboarding

One of the side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is the acceleration of change. For the past 40 years, we have had video conferencing in business, and for the past 25 years, we have had desktop video conferencing, and for the past 15 years we have had personal video calling from laptop computers and mobile phones. The technology is not new, but the business environment has changed, driving the adoption of the technology in areas where, previously, its use would have been unthinkable. Video job interviews are now common place, and therefore remote onboarding is a logical next step. However, as much as the technology enables us to still operate a business and bring new staff on board, we still have other challenges to overcome around the psychological and social aspects of work.

I’m going to cover all three of these areas, and give you some practical ideas to consider when you’re integrating new hires into your workplace.

Technical Considerations

Firstly, let’s consider the technical challenges. We might expect that, for you to be even considering remote onboarding means that you’re hiring people who can perform their jobs remotely, and are therefore comfortable with remote video communication. However, as these practices become more commonplace, they also reveal some other benefits. For example, we might have remote or field based staff in areas such as retail, logistics or hospitality where it makes sense to have centralised management of the onboarding and induction process, for reasons of scalability or consistency. When we want a uniform customer experience, we need a uniform selection and onboarding process.

The technical challenge that this raises is that the staff you’re talking to might have a nice home office with a large screen and good lighting, and they might only have a mobile phone in a noisy home environment. When your onboarding process brought everyone into a classroom, you could control the delivery environment. You could give them a tour of the facilities, they could meet people from different departments, they could get a ‘feel’ for the organisational culture. With remote onboarding, their exposure to your environment is limited by the size of the screen. Everything else that they can see is in their room, their space, their environment and with their distractions. Therefore, we need to ask them, as much as possible, to set aside proper time and space to focus on the onboarding session, and that means we need to accommodate their needs. For example, we might need to plan the timing for when their children are in bed, or their partner is available to take over the home schooling duties. When you have people come into an office, you might expect them to leave their personal lives at the door. With remote working, you’re extending the workplace into their homes, and you can’t have the same expectations. You could imagine that you’re actually going to their home to deliver the onboarding session, so be respectful of their needs and their privacy.

If, in the past, you brought people into an office, you might have shown them videos, for example an introduction to the company or a message from the CEO, or a health and safety primer. Remote working technologies obviously allow you to do this very easily, though it does present a risk that the viewer will become distracted. Instead, you might ask them to view pre-recorded videos prior to the session, and then have an interactive Q&A discussion during the onboarding session itself. Making this a fun quiz can take the pressure off them and make it seem less like you’re checking that they were paying attention.

Purpose

Let’s take a step back for a moment and consider what the purpose of an onboarding or induction session is. The UK’s professional body for HR and people development, the CIPD, has this to say:

“Induction ensures that employees integrate well into and across the organisation. Research demonstrates that induction programmes benefit both employers and employees. For employers, these include reducing turnover and absenteeism, and increasing employee commitment and job satisfaction. For employees, starting a new role in a new organisation can be an anxious time and an induction programme enables them to understand more about the organisation, their role, ways of working and to meet new colleagues.

New recruits need to understand the organisation, the culture, the people, and what’s expected of them in their role, so an effective programme will contain multiple, integrated elements. These include health and safety information required by law and practical information on the working environment and facilities. The programme should also familiarise the new employee with the company culture and values and provide information specific to their role.”

It’s important to note that the induction or onboarding process actually begins with the job advert, because this is the moment when you set expectations about the role and the working environment. These expectations are reinforced during the interview and selection process, and then again in the onboarding session. If your recruitment process tells people that you are a flexible and inclusive employer, for example, then you have to demonstrate that throughout.

If you’re hiring people who will be working from home then presumably you are providing them with the resources to do that, such as IT equipment and furniture. They might have to set this all up themselves, so it’s important that they are given clear instructions along with the details for someone they can call for help. Giving them a number for a generic helpdesk isn’t very welcoming, so you might consider allocating a named person to support them, and creating a personal connection. Consider the difference, if you imagine yourself starting a new job, and a big box arrives one day with your new computer and other supplies. Imagine that you can’t get connected to the network, and you have to call a helpdesk who can’t log a fault because you don’t have a cost centre number. Now imagine that, in the box, there’s a card which says, if you need any help, call Tom. Imagine calling Tom, and Tom knowing who you are, and where you are, and what you’re trying to do. If that was your very first point of contact with your new employer, how would that make you feel?

Health and Safety

The employer’s health and safety requirements extend into the home office, and this can be difficult to monitor and manage to ensure compliance, which is for the remote employee’s benefit. It’s important, therefore, to not only provide the right equipment, but also to create very clear setup instructions in order to keep your new hire, and their family, safe. No doubt you already use e-learning services to deliver this type of training, and this allows your new hires to work through a learning process which is consistently delivered and centrally managed. If you’re not currently using e-learning then there are many free or low cost systems which have significant advantages over simply sending someone a presentation or video to watch. Most importantly, with an e-learning system, you can track engagement and progress, and have interactive tests to demonstrate comprehension and understanding. You can then have refresher sessions to ensure the application of that knowledge. Again, having a named, personal point of contact for support will greatly increase the new hire’s confidence and reduce the time needed for them to settle in.

Psychological Considerations

This brings us onto the psychological and social aspects of the onboarding process. Imagine you’ve accepted a new job, and the only people you’ve spoken to or met online are the recruiter and the hiring manager. Your job involves working with many more people. You’re wondering what they’re like, how they will treat you, what they will think of you, if you will be welcomed and accepted. This is the same as any new environment, whether you’re starting a new job, or joining a new school, or even going to a networking event or party. It’s entirely natural, and the important difference is that, as the employer organising the onboarding activity, you know that this is how new hires will be feeling, and therefore you can put some effort into creating a sense that they are welcome and accepted.

I’m sure you’ve seen posts on social media where people have shared their welcome packs for new jobs. When you arrive at your new desk and there are handy bits of stationery and treats, it feels like a nice, personal touch. How do you replicate that with remote onboarding? I’ve seen people share photos of boxes that they’ve received, but I don’t think it’s important to send people cakes and branded pens, but what is important is to act like you were actually expecting the person to start work. Maybe you can think of a job where you arrived on your first day and it seemed that no-one knew who you were, and your new line manager was in meetings until lunchtime. If you’ve experienced that, how did it make you feel? Now imagine that you’re sitting at home with your new laptop, wondering what to do with yourself. One of the limitations of remote collaboration is that people will tend to talk in a more constrained way, keeping to agenda items and only communicating when they need to. The general social background chatter of an office is missing, and in turn that makes it much more difficult for a new hire to get a sense of the office dynamic and ‘tune in’ to the conversation. Even if the line manager spends the first hour of the first day on a video call, walking the new hire through the induction process, answering their questions, helping them to settle in, at the end of that call that person is potentially back to an empty room with another 7 hours to fill.

Let me share a horror story about the last corporate job I started back in 2001. On my first day, my new manager had called a team meeting at a central office, starting at 9:00 on the first working day after Christmas. The office was quite a long way from where most of the team were based, and for me the journey should have taken 90 minutes or so, and I left home at 6:00am to allow 3 hours to be sure I would be there early. As I reached the motorway, thick fog had caused a number of major accidents and by 8:00, it was clear I was not going to arrive on time. I called my manager who said, “Don’t worry Peter, don’t rush, just get here when you can”. I thought that this was very nice, understanding, helpful and I felt relieved. When I arrived, at 9:25, I walked into the meeting room and all of my new colleagues turned to look at me. Our manager said, “Peter, if you’re late for another team meeting, you’re fired”. Just imagine for a moment how I felt. My main concern was for what my new colleagues must have thought of me. After the meeting, my manager had me wait until 4:00 in the afternoon to have a catch up with me, during which he warned me about my unprofessional attitude. It was certainly the most memorable onboarding session I’ve had. Some months later, the company held its annual induction session for all new staff where they showed a commercial customer service training video which encouraged us to have fun at work. I’m sure that you’re thinking that there are many things in that story which you would never do! I hope so. What we have to bear in mind is the psychological need for belonging, to feel that I belong here, to feel that I am meant to be here, that I am accepted by the people who are already here. An annual onboarding session definitely won’t achieve that!

Making Time

The message which I’m sure you’re getting is that the line manager has to make time for a thorough onboarding conversation at the moment the new hire starts work. This is the most important opportunity that you have to make a positive and lasting impression of life in this new workplace. Yes, there are lots of ways that you can manage and partly deliver the onboarding process centrally to ensure consistency and scalability, however the line manager relationship is the most important relationship that a new hire will develop, and you need to get that off to a solid and positive start. When employers lean completely towards centralised onboarding, you might hear employees saying, “I didn’t even know who my manager was for the first six weeks”. This delay in forming this important relationship means that the new hire will bond with, and lean on, whoever is most helpful and approachable in their first few days and weeks, and that person may or may not support the organisational culture that you want to create. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of someone saying to you, “Forget what the boss says, let me show you how things really work around here. Stick with me and I’ll show you what to do.” and hopefully, the thought of someone doing this would make you feel very worried. This type of relationship can undermine the line manager and the organisational culture, especially when your new hires are younger or less experienced and are looking for someone to keep them safe in this uncertain new environment. Your line managers are undoubtedly busy with their own work, but if they don’t make time to establish these important new working relationships, you can expect higher staff turnover as a result.

Social Considerations

Let’s turn to the final aspect of onboarding, the social aspect. Instead of looking at the onboarding process from the point of view of the new hire, let’s consider the team. You’re asking a group of people who have bonded and formed relationships, possibly in a shared office environment, to open themselves up to an outsider. Who is this person? What are they bringing to the team? How will their personality fit with the team dynamic? Are they more skilled and experienced than the existing team members? Do they pose a threat? Will they need a lot of support? A new team member represents change, and I’m sure you’ve been in the situation where a new person joined an existing team and there was a period of settling down, not only for the new hire but for everyone. Adding a new element into any system changes the balance of the entire system. Therefore, you might also consider how you handle onboarding from the point of view of the existing team. One obvious answer is to hold a team meeting as soon as possible. When you can hold a meeting in person, you automatically provide the opportunity for social conversation, allowing everyone to get to know each other, get a feel for how the team fits together and begin the process of rebuilding connections. With a remote meeting, the greatest risk is that the agenda constrains or even removes the social conversation altogether. If you were to attend a real, in person team meeting, would each team member enter the room silently, sit quietly and not say a word until the manager opens the meeting? Of course not - but that’s often what we expect people to do in online meetings. Having everyone mute themselves whilst the manager gives an update doesn’t help to build peer to peer relationships, and can create disengagement. One of the problems with video technology is that the camera is in a different place to the screen, with the effect that the person you see on screen is never quite making eye contact with you. Eye contact is one of the most critical elements in building trust, so encourage your managers to look directly into the camera, at least for the very first meeting or onboarding session. It might feel uncomfortable for the manager, but the effect for the person at the other end will be significant in helping them to relax and feel at ease.

The global pandemic has pushed many teams into remote working. The technical requirements to achieve this have been in place for decades, but the social dynamic of a team is hard to replicate. Many companies have set up social groups where team members can drop in and chat over lunch. Encouraging people to stop work and have a change of scenery, at least through their computer screens, has many positive mental health benefits, and this is an excellent way to both integrate new team members and strengthen existing teams.

Existing Role or New Role?

One other point to bear in mind is that the onboarding process will be slightly different for a new hire who is replacing someone who has vacated a position, versus someone who is joining in a new position that has recently been created. You might think that in both cases, you’re bringing a new hire into a job role and there’s no difference, but again let’s look from the point of view of the team and stakeholders for the role. When a person vacates a role, they leave behind all of the relationships that they created. No matter what the job description says the role and its communication channels and boundaries should be, that person will have changed those boundaries and created their own forms of communication. If you induct the new hire into the job description, they will then have to work out, by themselves, all of the changes they need to make in order to fit in and start doing their job. Therefore, an important part of any induction process is to introduce the new hire into their working relationships and information flows, and facilitate a series of conversations in which they can reset expectations to their own personality and way of working which is, after all, the reason why you hired them. Instead of expecting them to be a clone of the outgoing person, make it easy for them to create their own, new relationships. Often, the stakeholders will find it refreshing to have the opportunity to redefine their working relationships and expectations. To do this remotely, you will of course need to set up those meetings, and possibly facilitate them, depending on the complexity of the role. Everyone is busy of course, but you know that investing time early on in any relationship pays off later on with improved communication and mutual understanding.

Coming Together

At some point, when you can safely bring everyone into the office, you can add those final missing pieces of the puzzle - the real social dynamic, physical touch, smiles, eye contact, laughter and the tangible sense of belonging that is hard to recreate in anything other than a physical environment. Eventually, the technology for remote working will catch up and allow us to replicate the shared workplace in its entirety, but for now we have to work within the limitations and do the best we can. As the technology, and our familiarity and comfort with the technology evolves, ask teams to think of new ways to improve their working relationships. As part of your onboarding process, ask new hires to share their ideas and their experience of best practice in their previous workplace or university. New hires bring with them the potential for innovation, and it’s wise to use this within your onboarding process. It can give them an instant sense of being valued for what they bring with them, and as a fresh pair of eyes, they might well see a few things that you can do differently. The online workplace is evolving rapidly, and we are all learning to adapt, and so any new ideas can create a genuine advantage for your team and your business.

Ultimately, remote working does have some advantages for the employer and the employee, and even when workplaces are open as normal again, we can expect much of our interaction to be online. We’ve had to adapt quickly, but now is the time to step back and redesign your selection and onboarding processes to take advantage of what these developing technologies can offer.

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Peter Freeth is an author, speaker, executive coach and talent and leadership expert.

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