Tips for Onboarding Remote Employees (With Real Life Examples)
When it comes to remote hiring and onboarding, I get asked a lot of questions about how we do it at Edoc.
I understand why people are so curious about this area of remote work: it's because leaders are hoping to do their best to welcome, integrate, and support new team members as much as possible during the onboarding journey.
With that in mind, here are a few tips that can help you when onboarding (remote) employees.
Hire For Culture First
The short answer is that remote onboarding all comes down to culture. To that end, the experience a new hire has with your organization starts before they are officially hired, and that’s true whether you are remote-first or not. Companies can get into a rush to hire once they decide they are ready to bring a new team member on, but we do our best to create a well-written, accurate job description.
First and foremost, we make sure to include our company purpose in that job description, too; we aim to communicate from the start how important our purpose is to any potential candidate. Plus, this can help to attract the right kind of person to add to our team. We also encourage them to read some of our blog posts, to see if our culture resonates with them.
Team Structure is Key
Another key piece of the picture is our team, and we want to keep our team cohesive, healthy, and working towards the same goals.
What that looks like in action with hiring is that we get as clear as we can about the role and responsibilities, and how those fit into our current team and structure. As straightforward as this may seem, we’ve learned the value in taking the time to describe the role as accurately as we can. If we’re unable to do so, it’s likely time to pause before hiring anyone.
Command & Control Is Out the Window
With our latest hire, we used OGSM to help clarify expectations and stay on track when it came to their first 6 months. OGSM—standing for Objective, Goals, Strategies and Measures–is a business planning framework that can be used in a variety of ways, and we applied it here with onboarding.
The Objective made it clear what the underlying objective of the position would be. The Goals were designed to be as tangible as possible—but without overthinking it.
It’s not about control here, it’s about giving someone autonomy and freedom, but also giving them support along the way.
Examples of objective statements from one of our latest hires included the following:
· Fluent in demonstrating and training users on our software
· Become an expert practitioner for our eSign and Onboard products
· Proficient in diagnosing and handling incoming customer support inquiries
· Familiar with Edoc processes, team members, and familiar with the way we operate
· Familiar with Edoc’s culture (our purpose, values, and more)
There were more on the list for this individual, but this gives a few examples of what we came up with. (Arguably, you could put timeframes on all those goals, but our objective statement had a 6-month timeframe attached to it.)
Besides the objectives and goals defined, we also came up with strategies tied to key milestones. An example of what a strategy could be for a business development role would be: “develop personal relationships and rapport with key company contacts.” Then the milestones would be meetings with a list of contacts, for example.
All in all, for our last hire, this ended up being a simplistic, two-page document—and that was by design. Then, on a week-to-week basis, that document came to life in Trello, which we were using at the time.
People love to learn and grow
When we bring someone on, we do our best to have them “shadow” and meet with key team members. This was not only to continue to welcome the new team member, but this allows this person to get to know the other team members more in that time. This is also another important way where new team members can also become more familiar with our culture.
At Buffer, a totally remote team, they implement a similar concept and call it a “culture buddy.” They say that this person “is typically on a different team and selected to help guide the new hire through culture-related discussions and provide additional context on company history and norms. This buddy will chat weekly with the new hire for the first six weeks, and as needed thereafter.”
Coaching and supporting
With any new job, there’s the actual operational nature of your job, and your responsibilities, but there is also all the cultural components. As we see it, culture is the glue that holds the company together (not my words!).
To that end, coaching and supporting a new hire is critical in that process. For our last hire, that meant making sure to have check-ins at the beginning of the week, and end of the week, and often in between.
We strive to create a safe place for asking questions, since someone needs to be comfortable with reaching out in a remote environment, so we want to encourage that behavior as much as we can.
Don’t forget about the overall experience…having a life!
Although having structure helps support accountability for everyone involved, on a day-to-day basis, we don’t overly focus on things like milestones and “outcomes” alone. What we focus on is more about the overall experience a new team member has at Edoc. After all, we see someone in the entirety of their life. We want that hiring and onboarding experience to be a welcoming and positive one, full of support and lots of learning. Imagine that: you can hire someone, have them in the right seat, allow them to contribute meaningfully to the organization, and they can enjoy their life, too.
This isn’t a comprehensive list of all the ways we’re intentional about bringing on new team members, but this does give you a look at some of what we do. We’re always looking to improve this process, too.