I’m going to show you how to build a fantastic remote onboarding experience. This works whether you’re onboarding your first remote freelancer, or you’re looking to refresh your company’s entire onboarding process.
Employees are at their peak motivation during the first few weeks in a new role. They want to make an excellent first impression. Investing in onboarding keeps that motivation and morale high for the long term. This means a happier, more productive team that sticks with you through the highs and lows.
Unfortunately, remote onboarding is still nascent.
There aren’t defined best practices.
At best, companies try to “port over” their IRL onboarding experience but don’t account for working remotely.
Over the last 10+ years, I’ve worked 7 remote work roles. That’s 7 different remote onboardings.
Here are the 6 things that separate good onboarding experiences from poor ones:
1/ Prioritize clarity over production value
When creating your onboarding content, clarity is king. What that means in practice:
- A Notion doc is better than a glossy PDF bursting with yogababble
- An annotated Miro flow chart is better than an Infographic oozing with marketese
- A 3-min Loom video from the CEO is better than a Hollywood sizzler reel about the company’s values
It’s not that you should avoid production value. Production value never hurts! But get the priority right:
- Create clear content
- Create a simple directory of where this content lives, so anyone can self-serve
- Then repeat your talking points… Again and again
When you get sick of saying it, employees will start to hear it. Don’t underestimate how often you’ll need to repeat the basics and retrain. When it comes to remote teams, you maintain a high standard of performance by regularly sharing why you do what you do, and how you do it.
Clear message. Repeated often. In multiple ways.
2/ Invest in multiple mediums
Everyone absorbs information in a variety of ways. Some employees need more handholding, some learn fast, and others need more repetitions.
The best thing you can do is spend time with the team and learn how they want to be supported. If you don’t know, ask. Then meet them where they are.
The simplest place to start?
When creating your onboarding material, invest in all three communication mediums:
- Words
- Images
- Video
Again, focus on clarity, not production value. You don’t need fancy tools or a big budget. All the tools mentioned above (Notion, Miro, and Loom) can be used for free.
3/ Set clear expectations
Here’s what clear expectations look like:
- 8 hours to respond to a Slack message
- 24 hours to respond to an email
- No expectation of responses on weekend
- Regular feedback should be given/received, but always be kind
The particulars around the what and how of expectations are up to you.
When it comes to getting others to follow expectations, be patient. On a remote team, expectations take time to set in. Continue to communicate them often (see point 1 above) but default to trust. Rather than micro-manage, assume your employees are following the expectations until they show otherwise. Then gently course correct.
The most crucial of these is expectations around feedback. So much so that it deserves its own section:
4/ Create feedback channels
One thing kills team morale fast: not feeling heard or listened to. On a remote team, you have to double your efforts to both speak up and listen to stay aligned. Remember: if you’re hiring smart, ambitious team members, they could work elsewhere but they chose to work with you. They deserve to be heard.
Offer multiple channels for employees to give feedback:
- During daily stand-ups
- In weekly 1:1 meetings
- In a monthly survey that specifically gauges morale and workplace satisfaction
Feedback can occur as formally or informally as you’d like, as long as there are multiple modes for it to occur at a given time. When giving or receiving feedback, it’s always about the work, not the person. In other words, be direct but be kind.
Finally, your job is to evaluate the feedback honestly and offer reasonable solutions and optimizations that will help your team perform better.
Bonus: Immediately after onboarding is complete, request specific feedback on their onboarding experience. Then roll these learnings into the existing onboarding content to create a tight flywheel on your onboarding process.
5/ Build strong ties
It’s nice to have a good relationship with the team.
But it’s critical they have good relationships with one another.
Nurture these relationships. When it’s crunch time, they’ll be in the trenches together, hammering out details.
Deep relationships are created with a mixture of required interaction and serendipity. You can’t control serendipity, so focus on the required interaction part:
- Include icebreaker questions to start your weekly sync (hokey, but they work). Weekly short icebreaker, e.g. before a team sync
- Schedule monthly fun team events or hangouts
- When adhoc questions get directed to you, encourage them to connect with a teammate who can respond better than you can
If possible, invest in getting people together IRL, 1-2x per year. I’ve found a meal or drinks together can be the equivalent of 1,000 Slack messages.
6/ Paired onboarding
Whenever possible, pair an employee with an “onboarding buddy”. This person should be someone other than their manager or skip-level. An onboarding buddy solves several issues:
- Reduces friction and increases the speed of answering questions
- Democratizes the responsibility of onboarding teammates
- Makes it easier to ask the “stupid” question, which we might refrain from asking our manager because want to look smart and confident
A short (10-15m) daily cadence is the ideal structure when syncing with an onboarding buddy. The early days are about “drinking from the firehose” but there’s usually course correction needed. Best to course correct daily. Naturally, adhoc questions can be asked async, outside of the scheduled time.
TL;DR: By investing in onboarding, you maintain higher motivation and morale across the team. This is true whether you’re onboarding your first freelancer, or you’re updating your IRL onboarding process for a remote one.
6 steps to create a fantastic onboarding experience:
- Prioritize clarity over production value
- Invest in multiple mediums
- Set clear expectations
- Create feedback channels
- Build strong ties
- Paired onboarding
Hope this helps you create an onboarding experience your employees love.
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