10 Remote Work Best Practices for Maintaining Team Collaboration

Members of Forbes Human Resources Council offer advice on creating an effective onboarding process for remote employees. Make sure that you provide remote employees with enough opportunities to learn from each other. Others assign either a mentor or a peer « orientation buddy » who they can go to with any questions and grow and learn together. Keep in mind, disconnection and isolation are some of the key challenges that new remote hires experience. Therefore, a comprehensive and successful remote onboarding plan should include measures for addressing such issues to create a sense of belonging and integration in new hires. Remote onboarding best practices can be a challenge to navigate when hiring new employees you never meet in-person.

How to Make Remote Onboarding More Effective

Change the prompt every so slightly to get different results or ask it to get inspired by a piece of text or an author you admire. Onboarding, as opposed to orientation, is a procedure that takes place during the course of a team member’s first year on the job. This mentor can answer questions, provide guidance, and facilitate social integration, helping the newcomer feel connected. This roadmap guides your new hire’s journey and ensures they don’t miss essential steps. For a more in-depth exploration of these metrics and others, check out our article on onboarding metrics.

Continuous Support

Spend more time than you generally would in a face-to-face environment talking about what is typical and atypical across various cultural dimensions. Create the space for your new colleagues to ask about the way things are done as well. Ensure your onboarding software is set up in a way that it speaks with your applicant tracking system, learning management system, payroll solution, and more.

Setting Remote Work Policies: Creating Guidelines for a Successful Remote Work Culture

Those early anxieties are amplified for remote workers who are isolated from the hustle and bustle of the company. With Deel, you don’t have to worry about gathering tax information from your new employees or generating their employment contracts. The employment process gets handled by remote hiring experts, so you can focus on building your best business. Remote employee onboarding is an involved process that must be done well if you want to keep your new hire around for more than 45 days. Encourage your virtual employees to use Slack channels, Zoom, or other remote tools to foster collaboration and promote communication throughout the company. Make sure to include a link to a video tutorial for each platform, program, or tool so they know how to get started.

Foster a Collaborative Culture

A great best practices guide to download and use when planning your virtual onboarding process. The five Cs of employee onboarding can make new hires feel welcome, valued and comfortable at their new jobs. These include compliance, clarification, confidence, connection and culture. Companies that incorporate them tend to enjoy greater onboarding success than those that do not. While a structured, well-planned onboarding strategy is a good idea, it should allow for some flexibility.

Share a personalized onboarding plan

There are guides available online on how to create an onboarding survey. Make sure to collect the feedback so that you can review and implement any changes you find useful. In today’s digital age, onboarding remote employees has become the new norm with the rise of remote work. The integration of the metaverse, a collective virtual shared space, is reshaping the onboarding landscape for remote employees. The goal of the remote onboarding process is to make new employees feel welcome and included in the company. It is thus vital to customize the remote employee experience and ensure that everyone in the company is openly and freely embodying the fundamental values you advocate.

Encourage Work-Life Balance

We love the idea of sending remote hires a gift card for a food delivery service so they can enjoy a first day lunch with their team over a video call. According to Growmotely, 97% of employees and entrepreneurs want to keep working remotely some part of the time after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides. These practices are a game changer for teams that want to be successful in the digital world.

Its platform enables you to conduct virtual interviews and team meetings and introduce prospective employees to potential collaborators. It can also set up a virtual team happy hour and include a live video presentation from a LinkedIn executive. To truly benefit from the onboarding process, it is essential that people teams and HR managers prepare and organize accordingly. However, the initial administrative processes and paperwork can be overwhelming for any team. Many professionals choose to use HR onboarding software in order to eliminate paperwork, stay compliant, and ensure a smooth remote onboarding experience from start to finish.

1. As we navigate the evolving work landscape in 2024, a set of key statistics shed light on the current state and future trends of remote work.
2. Each session should begin with a solid 15 minutes of prep time, followed by a few hours for individuals to process the information.
3. Newcomers can find information about GitLab’s TaNewKi call, a preboarding call where they can meet future colleagues, socialize, and ask questions.
4. This colorful flow diagram template can help to relieve stress by displaying the critical milestones that must be completed before the onboarding process can be completed.
5. Also, regularly update these guidelines as your team evolves to maintain smooth operations.

During this call, don’t just skim through the company’s mission, ethos, and vision. Take the time to discuss what they mean in everyday operations and how each employee, including them, contributes to these goals. Remote onboarding is the digital process of integrating new hires into the company without in-person interactions. As a best practice, group onboarding allows new hires to know each other quickly. Additionally, it’s less agitating than one-on-one encounters, which some employees might not be comfortable with. If you can’t onboard in groups, you can schedule a conference or group session and invite all employees who joined you in the past three months.

Positive feedback and recognition for accomplishments motivate your new remote employee and boost morale. Assign an experienced employee as a mentor or buddy to your new remote employee. Introduce them to immediate colleagues through virtual meetings, fostering a sense of belonging right from the start.

This can go a long way toward fostering a stronger company culture as well. And remember, you need to be sure your office has the right setup in both the virtual and physical workplace. Just because remote employees don’t come into the office doesn’t mean you don’t need to outfit it with the right video conferencing hardware.

Understanding how a company operates is critical to any employee’s success. Having this information in an easy-to-access location can be helpful for both in-office and remote employees alike. So, you should also implement virtual team-building activities to strengthen relationships and enhance trust among team members. Activities like online trivia, virtual coffee breaks, or team challenges will break the ice and create a sense of camaraderie, which is essential for effective collaboration. Regular check-ins are a vital component of effective remote collaboration strategies. You can plan weekly or bi-weekly team meetings to maintain personal connection and provide opportunities for team members to discuss their progress, challenges, and any support they need.

This might mean adjusting meeting times to accommodate different time zones or being understanding when unforeseen circumstances arise. Flexibility helps maintain team morale and keeps the team functioning smoothly. Schedule these activities regularly to keep the team connected and engaged. Plus, tailor the activities to your team’s interests https://remotemode.net/ and preferences and be open to feedback on the most effective activities. The goal is to create fun and meaningful interactions that build trust and rapport. Platforms like Asana or Trello for project management, Google Workspace for document collaboration, and Zight screen recorder or screenshot app for visual communication are invaluable.

Be sure to list out the steps new hires need to take to complete the process to ensure they don’t get confused along the way. Also, strive to create remote onboarding best practices informal moments to ensure employees don’t feel isolated. Some researchers recommend extending the onboarding process to at least a year.

This person will serve as their go-to for any queries, providing guidance during their initial days. On the other hand, companies with weak onboarding programs lose the confidence of their candidates and are more likely to lose these individuals in the first year. In today’s remote work era, welcoming new employees isn’t about firm handshakes and office tours. The process should help them quickly adjust to the performance and social aspects of the job to become productive members of your organization. Instead, create a guided process that takes into account every aspect of the job and company.

Factorial’s employee onboarding feature enables a personalized onboarding process for each and every contracted remote employee. It guarantees your employees a quality onboarding experience through structured task flows, increasing the efficiency of how quickly you obtain results. Informing all employees of their pending tasks and of their scheduled completion date. Just like how physical onboarding is a process, so too is remote onboarding.