Five Common Missteps in Remote Onboarding
Five Common Missteps in Remote Onboarding
If you’re planning on growing your team, there’s a high likelihood you’ll overlook something important. According to a recent study by Sapling, 88% of companies do not do enough work when it comes to properly onboarding new employees and, as a result, new hires are twice as likely to look for other opportunities.
What we found interesting from the finding is common onboarding issues persisted amongst companies, no matter the job field or industry. Employee attrition is a waste of resources and can leave team members feeling discouraged and unmotivated.
Our team at Plus10 spoke with software development teams, new hires and engineering managers, to explore how they were managing remote onboarding throughout COVID. What we found were some common themes shared by many voices. Listed below are the five we heard most often, with the context and practitioner tips to help you prepare better.
Rushing To Launch
Assuming Everything Is Okay
(Not) Celebrating
Keeping Pace in Mind
Forgetting The Water Cooler
1. Rushing To Launch
You’ve heard it everywhere, and you’ve definitely heard it more than once; rushing to complete any task is going to poorly impact and potentially damage your brand and its reputation – the same goes for onboarding your staff. Especially when you’re onboarding remotely. We often hear from hiring managers they want the new hire to hit the ground running. That makes sense, since your team resources feel strained, which is why you’re likely hiring in the first place. However, this sense of urgency won’t pay off.
For a new hire to get up to speed, the learning required will be done one way or another. If there is no plan establish with consideration for BOTH the new hire and your team members that will support, unwelcome disruption to workflow will become a regular and frequent occurrence (and annoyance).
Attempting to speed up the process more than what’s manageable will further lower employee retention rates, negatively impact productivity and lead to gaps in projects.
Justine Chiu, a Frontend Developer with Loblaw Digital who started her role at the start of the pandemic, mentioned, “an important factor to selecting my employer was management’s focused on my long and healthy career at the company.” Chiu’s manager proved that early on by being responsive and supportive throughout her onboarding process. Chiu feels her on-the-job experience has been exactly what she expected from the interview process, a signal of reassurance she joined the right company.
"An important factor to selecting her employer was management’s focused on my long and healthy career at the company."
Justine Chiu, Frontend Developer at Loblaw Digital
Solution: Develop and communicate an onboarding plan. Use feedback from the new hire to allow for accommodations. If you’re starting a plan from a blank slate, we suggest asking the person that was last hired to help create a list of what they had to learn.
2. Assuming Everything Is Okay
One out of five new hires are unlikely to recommend their employer because they received insufficient guidance when they were remotely onboarded; specifically, they felt abandoned.
In the Forbes article by Ankur Modi, the CEO of a global people analytics company, he references a 2-year remote work study that states “Loneliness and isolation are the largest reported concern amongst remote workers and its effects can go further than affecting just the individual. Some symptoms of isolation include increased stress levels and bad decision making. For an employer, these are concerning characteristics for someone who has crucial responsibility. Unfortunately, being isolated also means these symptoms are difficult for employers to detect.”
This issue was identified in many of our conversations. “There was lots of independent research and unaccompanied learning solely because my manager had too much on her plate and couldn’t video chat with me.” said one unnamed new hire. When we asked what informal interactions did they have with their team members, we were told, “Not a lot outside the first few minutes of a conference call.”
Loneliness and isolation are the largest reported concern amongst remote workers and its effects can go further than affecting just the individual.
Solution: Remote work can often feel isolating and, while there are various ways you can provide support. Make the time to authentically listen to your team members’ needs. The best way to understand what resources are missing can be as simple as directly asking.
3. (Not) Celebrating
In our conversations with hiring managers and new hires – they all spoke about celebrations in their workplace, or sometimes lack thereof. James Cheung, a Senior Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft said “I focus on celebrating even the smallest wins with our team. In the current climate, those little gestures go a long way to help our staff know we care and that they’re valued.”
Results from a poll conducted in May 2020 by TerryBerry, a global employees recognition firm that was established in 1918, found “Loneliness and isolation are the largest reported concern amongst remote workers and its effects can go further than affecting just the individual.”
This approach is especially important with new hires. You may remember how it feels starting at a new company; it can be like diving head first into the deep end. Acknowledgment and recognition of their effort and small wins can be the life saver to guide new hires into the right direction.
Loneliness and isolation are the largest reported concern amongst remote workers and its effects can go further than affecting just the individual.
If you’re thinking of allocating budget, commemoration doesn’t have to be expensive either; what you would have spent on a quarterly could be spent on virtual happy-hours or neighbourhood meetups (socially distanced of course). Inevitably, these can act as team building exercises and will aid in company and employee success.
Solution: The team at Slack (who have experienced huge growth from companies using their solution during COVID) says “daily greetings and regular check-ins over shared communication channels are effective ways to acknowledge remote employees, but the biggest impact comes from celebrating contributions and achievements with specific, purposeful feedback and recognition.”
(To see what other companies are doing, check out this poll conducted by SHRM: Link)
4. Keeping Pace In Mind
The onboarding process can often cover varied areas of technical and organizational knowledge. Presenting new hires with all available resources at once can (and likely will) lead to information overload. Resulting confusion, potential adverse impact on motivation and lack of clarity over which pieces of the puzzle are most critical and which can be addressed later can lead to a slower overall onboarding experience.
Company should formulate an onboarding strategy that takes into account relevance of onboarding materials to the new hire’s specialization and come up with a knowledge progression that would maximize learning along the “critical path”.
Onboarding plans are intended to make new employees familiar with the overall goals of a company and support them as they embark on early projects all in an effort to achieve the perception of success (and productivity) quickly. The ultimate payoff is to reduce turnover and encourage workers to stay with an organization for a longer tenure.”
A more personal element to the process can engage new employees, giving them the ability to identify their personal goals with the overall success of the organization. Make sure a new team member understands how they can individually contribute to the company. Explain to the employee how your performance appraisal system works, so they won't waste time on things that don't matter, and can quickly begin to work on key objectives.
When you make a custom onboarding plan, you're leaving the individual with the impression that employees are very important assets to the organization, chosen from among many candidates, and that their talent and potential is recognized. You want to make sure you develop their career path within the organization.
Solution: There are lots of resources online that you can incorporate into the onboarding process to get to know the candidates better and understand how they fit with your culture. The Kolbe behaviour assessment is an example of a tool you can use to make it easier.
5. Forgetting The Water Cooler
We’ve all heard about the water cooler and the informal conversations that come from the communal space of an office. One of our interviewees referred to this as “the safety net” for office dynamics and allows you to judge if your new hire is a good fit for your company.
In an article published by the BBC, Paul Levy, author and Senior Researcher in Innovation Management says “These spaces also play an important role in the sharing of work-related information – sometimes referred to as ‘water-cooler learning’. Spaces like the coffee area are knowingly created by companies, because people share knowledge, stories of their experiences and talk about the problems they are facing in these spaces.”
Unfortunately, without this option, teams may struggle to bond. This is especially true for new hires, who strongly desire for some down-to-earth conversations away from the desk after an exhaustive swim in the work and world they’re familiarizing themselves with.
Spaces like the coffee area are knowingly created by companies, because people share knowledge, stories of their experiences and talk about the problems they are facing in these spaces.
Solution: Recreate the spontaneous, impromptu meeting space. Donut, an app that plugs into Slack, creates random virtual meetings between colleagues to foster connection and community. It randomly pairs co-workers through Slack and encourages them to have coffee together over a video call. Other apps such as Watercooler offer similar features.
Conclusion
Overall, in order to successfully onboard staff remotely, your company must recognize that it is deeply intertwined with work culture and reorganizing your internal structure to prioritize tasks that may not have been a focus previously.
Plus10 is a Canadian services firm specializing in IT recruitment and job-search coaching. We believe your employee’s are what makes your technology stand out, and our unique talent assessment, paired with our expertise in the digital age, means we provide the best candidates for your company. We strive to be the best when leading people towards a new position and our focus on quality means we get you the best results. Don’t believe us? We have a money-back guarantee if our candidate doesn’t work out.
