Online Onboarding: A-to-Z Checklist

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Remote work became a solution to the global unemployment problem during the quarantine. At the same time, this format brought new challenges. And we have already figured out how to look for employees in a huge online world and told IT specialists how to pass job interviews successfully.

Still, many HR managers wonder how they can improve the remote onboarding process. The problem is that new hires can’t join the work and team just as quickly and smoothly as office employees do. 

Keep calm and don’t panic! There is a way out! And today, we’ll teach you what to do! ?

Onboarding Basics

First of all, the basics remain unchanged. HR managers need to collect information about new hires, save their documents, contacts, and other details. Next, they should supply new employees with company handbooks, working instructions, rules, and other relevant information. A newcomer shouldn’t be lost in it. So, the data about their new job and teammates should be well-structured. It is great if you have a single place for managing this type of information. For example, many companies keep it in Confluence, while some of them have special solutions for online HR management and onboarding.

Getting Started

Hiring a superstar is only the start of the upcoming challenge. Next, you have to ensure that a newly hired person is as productive as they told you in the interview. And their productivity strongly depends on the quality of onboarding in which not only HRs take part. 

Create a To-Do List

To start creating your best onboarding program and involve other teams in it, answer these questions:

• When will it start? (Right after hiring, before hiring, etc.) 
• Which tools will you use during online onboarding? (Zoom, Skype, CRMs, task tracking managers, etc.)
• How long will onboarding last?
• What is the first-day goal for a new hire? What their impressions should be?
• What do new employees should learn about the company and its corporate culture?
• What do HRs, managers, and other colleagues should do?
• Which goals will be set for new team members?
• How will you collect feedback and measure new employees’ success?

Answering these questions will empower you to set a to-do list for a professional online onboarding. You’ll be sure who will be involved in the process and be responsible for each step.

Set the Pace for Onboarding

Scheduling gives you a chance to measure success. How else can you make sure that a person has gone through the whole process and is ready to work fruitfully?

Also, the more information one gets about the company and its rules during the first days, the smoother their start with the team is. Consequently, the results become better thanks to the high motivation boost.

The duration of the onboarding program depends on the company’s needs and expectations. Some of them may have a short 20-minute intro package, others offer several-week programs with constant involvement. So, it’s up to you to decide what suits your business goals.

Tune in Content Production

Your online onboarding package should contain lots of various content:

• Presentations.
• Intro texts.
• Infographics.
• Spreadsheets with necessary data.
• Some tasks to complete.

All this information must provide newcomers with an understanding of what is good and bad for the company, what ecosystem is there, who are all those people they will work with.

The most essential thing to keep in mind is constantly improving the set of onboarding materials. New employees often leave useful feedback about what’s clear and what should be improved. This will simplify the further onboarding process.

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What Should an Onboarding Program Include?

There are tons of templates on the web. Still, we can offer you a universal scheme to use for online onboarding:

#1 – Preparatory Stage: Do Your Homework

• Prepare equipment for new hires. These may be laptops, phones, monitors, mouses, etc. Decide on the way they will get their equipment (in the office, by courier, by mail).
• Your new colleagues will need corporate accounts. Contact admins regarding creating a personal email, corporate messaging account, and account in CRMs, task tracking software, and other software.
• Add new employees to common mailing lists and regular corporate events in the calendar.
• Prepare HR documents and forms. Sure, you’ll need to collect this data about new team members. Prepare a short questionnaire for them. This may be a common Google Form with a couple of short questions.

#2 – Intro Email to New Employees

Make newcomers comfortable in their new role:

• Welcome a new hire, note the date and time of their first working day.
• Describe the common schedule of remote working hours.
• Ask for scanned documents, if you need them.
• Ask new people to fill out a short questionnaire. 
• Attach to the email or link to a corporate handbook (or a file with the rules).
• Add some brief information about your company (this may be either presentation or a website or links to the articles in the media).
• Add information about working equipment (where and how new hires can get their laptops and other devices, if necessary)
• Point out one or more contact persons and specify who is responsible for HR, admin, and other tasks.

#3 – Intro Email to All Employees

Let the team learn about new people in the company:

• Tell others who are going to join the team – state their name, job title, and department.
• State the date of their start.
• If it’s possible, add a photo, so that people know who their new colleague is.
• Tell everyone more about their background, hobbies, skills, and so on. 

#4 – The First Day

• Contact a new employee in a corporate messenger in person and congratulate them with their first working day.
• Send greetings to the common chatroom and introduce a newcomer to the team once again (yes, you should do this separately in the corporate messenger and email).
• Send your new colleague IT instructions and a handbook once more in the messenger. Let them tune their working laptops.
• Answer their questions, if necessary. Although you should discuss everything concerning benefits, remuneration, and working conditions before sending an offer, still, some employees want to ensure they come to a great company. Be patient and friendly. It’s possible that you will have to explain security policies once again, and it’s okay.
• Tell newcomers about the company: its history, mission and vision, goals, traditions. Still, sometimes, team leaders handle this task, so decide with them who will do that. In some cases, new hires even have a small talk with the company CEO on their first day. It depends on company size and suits only small-sized enterprises. 
• Nevertheless, introducing your new colleague to their manager or team leader is vital. 
• Solve all documentation issues if there are left some. 

#5 – Setting Goals

This point can be fulfilled either on the first day if you have some free time left, or on the second day.

• Conduct a group call with a new hire and their manager.
• Show and explain the organizational chart of your company.
• Set goals and high-level tasks for the first week/month/quarter.
• Discuss the team’s expectations of the new hire.
• Find out their own expectations regarding the career in the company and develop a career plan. This is a strong motivation for millennials, so don’t omit this point!

Great! So, your new team member is ready to conquer new peaks. Now, you need to create a checklist to track his performance.

Controlling New Employees’ Performance

This may be a challenge, as the offline working format lets you meet everyone in person and discuss achievements and pain points daily. Online work lacks communication, so you have to focus on online meetings and discussions. Be ready to face lots of guessing works, as you never see emotions behind text messages. That’s why video-calls should become your main communication channel. 

Let’s start creating your checklist and find out how well the onboarding is going:

#1 – First Week

• Contact a new employee every day and ask them how they’re doing. Offer help, if necessary. Talk to them so they don’t feel abandoned in a new place.
• Schedule online meetings with the team or let their team leader do that. If you choose the latter, ask that team leader how everything is going. Make sure their communication is effective. 
• Tell a new hire about training and entertaining activities. Ask them whether they will take part in them. For example, that could be English classes for teams or quizzes after work.
• Recommend useful reading. It’d be great if every department had a list of recommended books (even with e-books attached, if that’s possible).

#2 – First, Second and Third Month

• Conduct an onboarding survey to find out whether everything is clear or there are some issues.
• Check the employee’s progress with a brief review with their team leader or manager. The frequency of these meetings may vary from a week to a month, depending on the company. The more often you discuss success and issues, the more loyal and professional they will become.
• Organize online trainings and social online activities for newcomers. Engage them in entertaining games after working hours. Some companies organize quizzes for teambuilding. 

That’s it! And always remember to control how your onboarding is going. Otherwise, this will be a game without a goal.

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Key Takeaways

Finally, let’s consider why online beats offline, as you might consider online onboarding a huge challenge. It only seems so at the start. In fact, onboarding people online can bring better results! 

If you didn’t have a structure before, you’ll develop it now. You’ll always keep track of what is actual and what has already become outdated. That’s brilliant especially for large corporations that have old onboarding traditions and methods haven’t changed ever since.

Creating and enhancing your onboarding processes takes time, sometimes lots of time. Still, it helps people become productive and highly motivated, and feel as a single team.

The only thing to keep in mind after creating your own onboarding checklist is reviewing success. This is like coding – better bugs be fixed before the client sees it. So, better you take care of your colleagues’ success before they get desperate. ?