As an increasing number of companies are moving towards a hybrid virtual model — where some employees work from company premises and some from their homes — the role of HR has evolved even more. Hybrid virtual model along with a completely remote work setup is the new normal, and demands an onboarding system that perfectly captures the need for this.
A new employee is often filled with questions about: (a) products/services of the org (b) people/points of contact (c) rules/work culture (d) IT and systems setup (e) Company holidays & calendar (f) relevant documents etc. So, HR teams need to make the onboarding seamless for new employees, so that they can ramp up quickly and become productive members of the organization in the least possible time.
An efficient employee onboarding helps new employees get familiar with the office culture and ease into their responsibilities. The onboarding process becomes more important when hiring remote employees because the HR team no longer has the opportunity to conduct in-person orientation sessions. New employees do not have the advantage of building interpersonal relationships with co-workers easily, and hence have a hard time grasping the office culture and semantics of the new organization.
So, how does a remote onboarding process work?
Normally, a remote onboarding process often includes but is not limited to the following processes:
- New employee onboarding documents created by HR (for HR related matters) and individual teams (such as IT, Help Desk)
- Manually curated FAQs on Company Wikis such as Github Wiki, Confluence etc.
- Ad-hoc documents and presentations that are passed along on request
- Word of mouth knowledge transfer (Hey! What is the link to our Workday page?)
- Meetings with managers and team members
- Adding the new employee to all project management and communication channels
The main goal of employee onboarding is transferring information to the new employee such that the information helps them better understand the company and their role. Hence, effective communication and information sharing is a key factor in remote onboarding.
And while the intention of the above-mentioned processes is good, there are certain factors that make the process tiring and sometimes, useless.
Challenges in remote employee onboarding & steps to overcome them
- Setting up the necessary equipment for the remote employee
As your new hire will have to set up all the required equipment by themselves, ensure that the remote workers have all the required hardware well ahead of the first day. If your company provides employees with the required equipment, order them well in advance and have them delivered to the employee ahead of the start date. Inform your IT department to assist the new employee, if necessary. - Introducing the new employee to all team members
A major part of onboarding is introducing the new employees to managers and team members. However, most companies fail to acknowledge this step when onboarding remote workers. Whereas, it’s even more important here to introduce remote workers to all team members so that they feel welcomed and comfortable among their peers. A good way to introduce remote employees is to do so over video calls, instead of just mails and chats. - Getting all the paperwork signed
Seemingly a small task, getting all the paperwork signed may take a lot of your time if you don’t give proper instructions to the new employee. Run the documents through the employee and let them know of any tools that may come in handy when signing the paperwork. - Helping with company tools and the responsibilities of the new role
Structures and processes are vital for effective project management and for enhancing productivity. The sooner you help your new employee get familiar with the tools, the easier it is to maintain good communication and information flow. It is also important to help your new hire understand their roles and responsibilities.
Short tutorials and videos explaining how to use the tools and job responsibilities is a good way to start. - Sharing company-related information with the new employee
Most HR teams share articles, company wiki pages, and other tools such as Confluence to help new employees understand the company better. However, proprietary knowledge locked within so many fragmented sources creates unnecessary hassle to both the new employees, HR & individual teams. It’s extremely difficult for new employees to find information and also for HR & team members to keep in sync and updated. In fact, updating the wiki pages and Confluence end up becoming an additional chore on the HR team’s task list. This often results in stale wikis and broken links on Confluence or other similar knowledge bases, drastically diminishing the utilitarian value of such expensive systems that seem to serve no one.
So, how can you resolve this critical flaw in information sharing with new remote employees? Well, Telescope is here for exactly that.
Reduce Friction in Information Flow for Remote Employee Onboarding with Telescope
Telescope makes it super easy for the HR team to build an up to date knowledge base by collecting information from existing sources. The sources range from conversations already happening on Slack channels to existing documents belonging to the HR team, IT team, and other individual teams within the organization.
With Telescope, you no longer have to keep updating your company wikis or rely on broken links for sharing information.
Just add Telescope to your organization’s Slack workspace or any of our other upcoming integrations. It will automatically index the latest information from Slack channels — from chats, documents and media shared on the channels with Telescope. What’s more? The new employees can get the latest information, on demand and in seconds without breaking a sweat.
Telescope becomes like their personal onboarding pal.
Ready to amp up your onboarding process?
Try Telescope for Free (no credit card required)
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