Working from home is a very interesting concept for both employers and employees, but onboarding work from home employees can be very challenging. There are some tips and steps that can help you to create effective and efficient onboarding strategy.
How to onboard a new employee who will work from home? The onboarding strategy should help your work from home employees adjust very quickly to all processes within the job. Your remote employees, through onboarding, will learn about the corporate culture, work environment, tasks, different tools they should be using, their coworkers etc.
When hiring an employee that will work from home you should create a formal onboarding strategy that will align with your corporate culture as you would with a regular employee that will work from your actual office.
This onboarding strategy should help your new work from home employees immediately fit in the new position and at the same time feel comfortable working with their coworkers, even though they are not in the same office. Their involvement and performance can be expected to be high right from the start. This is a very critical process since of course, you expect your new remote workers to become valuable assets to your team, to be productive, motivated and successful, regardless of the location where they work.
Here are some steps that will help you while onboarding work from home employee:
Set expectations and goals
Setting clear expectations and goals from day one is very important and critical when onboarding an employee that will work from home independently. Usually, people who are choosing remote arrangements are extremely hard working and self-sufficient. During the onboarding process, you can’t expect that your new employees will know every aspect of their job right away, no matter their experience. Especially if they are new to working from home, they might be still adjusting to telecommuting properly.
You should provide mentoring, detailed instructions and set the expected performance metrics to ensure that your new work from home employee understands what should be doing. Don’t just give your new employees goals and assume that they can accomplish them on their own without help.
Another helpful practice is to follow up with an explanation of the rules, goals, and practices verbally, and more in writing so that the new work from home employee can refer back to it whenever it’s needed. It is better if you host important documents, information and policies in one cloud-based location, that can be easily accessed by all employees including the work from home ones.
Paperwork
There are few services like DocuSign or HelloSign, an e-signature tools, that are legally and legitimately binding and are real lifesavers for signing paperwork remotely. Employees by simply adding their signatures digitally on the contracts and share them with their employer in a secure environment, save a lot of time and money for printing, scanning and sending the documents via mail or email.
Equipment
While onboarding the new work from home employee make sure they have all the tools and equipment like laptops and phones required for completing their tasks. Order the needed hardware well ahead of their starting date and make sure your employees receive them on time.
After receiving the equipment, organize a training session with your IT department in order to get your remote workers familiar with all applications for file-sharing, software for cloud backup (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.), needed computer security as well as setting up passwords and tools for data encryption to protect the devices they’ll be working on.
Also, make sure that the new work from home employees understand how to properly use all communication tools (Email account, group messaging app, video conferencing tool, etc.) and what are the best ways to contact their coworkers.
Communication
Work from home employees should not wait on their managers being online to ask questions or learn what are their new tasks. Ensure that you have developed and shared a task calendar with your work from home employees after the onboarding process and training, define their short-term and long-term goals.
Schedule meetings with their coworkers and employees from other departments that your new employees will work closely with as well as other key team members (managers, direct reports, etc.), whether is one-on-one or group meetings for all upcoming projects, current tasks progress and any potential issues.
Team meetings
Make sure that your new work from home employees understand that they should attend all meetings just like all other employees. Ensure that you have a proper video conferencing platform, through which they will have access and be part of the meetings.
Team meetings are important, since work from home employees are not in the office every day, and they are missing out on being part of the company’s culture. Having team meetings will help them to interact with their colleagues and not feel isolated.
One- on- one meeting
If you have regular one-on-one meetings with your regular employees, there should not be an exception for your work from home employees. Although there might be some communication challenges due to the time-zone differences and distance, all these challenges can be overcome using today’s online technologies.
These one-on-one meetings can help you understand if your employees have any questions or difficulties settling in their job positions. Also, you can use these meetings to ensure them that your virtual door is open and they can contact you freely at any time.
If your new work from home employee is living near your corporate office, invite them to work from the offices during their first weeks, in order to meet their colleagues in person.
Training process
It is very challenging when it comes to training the work from home employees, as the communication in real-time is often limited. For effective training, you can start by using user-friendly interactive courses, then recording videos of the products to help your remote employees better understand the features and boost their engagement. After the end of each training session follow up with your new employees to answer any questions that might come out.
Evaluate the process of hiring a work from home employee
Within a few weeks of hiring the work from home employee, have an open conversation with them about questions that arise from the working process, some suggestions, concerns, etc. Also, ask their coworkers for their feedback.
After gathering all the information, evaluate them and determine if there should be made some changes to improve the whole work from home process. Be aware that there may be some trial and error before getting this whole process right.
Make your work from home employees feel welcome
Your new work from home employee most likely will become a very valuable member of your team, but because of the remote nature of the work, they might feel a bit isolated. You can start by sending them a welcome package with some branded products, like a T-shirt or coffee mug, personalized gifts like headphones, gift cards from some particular store, etc.
Since the onboarding process is the time where your remote employee will have the most questions, make sure that you are there for them whenever they have issues. Also, encourage your other in-office employees to be as helpful as possible so that the new employees can get up to speed very quickly, otherwise if the new remote employee is left without guidance with the projects at this sensitive period, they might feel overwhelmed and quit.
How long does it take for a new employee to be fully productive?
Usually, it takes around 6 months to 1 year before a new work from home employee gets adapted to the new surroundings and is fully productive. It depends on how long and effective is the training period and how much the new remote employee will learn. Very few new employees are able to give their best right from the start.
How to manage your work from home employees effectively?
- Be transparent – If you want your employees to be open with you and share their opinion regarding projects, you have to be open with them;
- Hold meetings once a week – In order to get to know each other and create a friendly and safe environment whether is a self-mastery class or discussion on some topic;
- Try to organize your work – By creating some procedures and systems for project management, because otherwise having many people working on different projects can turn the work process into chaos;
- Use a tool for time tracking – This tool is a really efficient way of keeping your employees on track and reviewing their progress and performance;
- Create a strong culture – Ensure that everyone feels valued and appreciated, and is working towards completing the same goals by respecting each other.
How to reward new work from home employee after a job well done?
There are numerous ways of rewarding the new work from home employees, that will boost their motivation, and give them an incentive to work even harder:
- Send an email complimenting their work;
- Shout-out for their good work during a weekly company meeting;
- A little introduction in the company’s newsletter;
- Gift-card to their favorite shopping website.