Old legends tell us of a mythical creature – part IT geek, part HR – whose magic power is to fully understand the challenges of remote onboarding. They’re said to roam the lofty halls of capitalism, blessing those that worship them with onboarding excellence and super-committed new hires.
Unfortunately, legends are pure crap, so the next best thing is to dive headfirst into the dank crawl space of onboarding to anticipate and address those common first-day remote onboarding challenges.
Sure, But Why Are We Doing This?
People that have a hideous onboarding experience tend to leave quickly, and that’s a ton of your recruitment time and costs wasted as well as a drop in productivity because their work is still there to do, but they’re not there to do it.
Remote onboarding challenges can lead to grossness such as:
- An inability to collaborate and interact with other team members. This can lead to frustration, feeling isolated, and low morale.
- Problems in downloading files, accessing video conferencing tools, or role-specific software. Your new hire will enjoy yet more frustration and so will your IT helpdesk.
- A lack of timely end-user training and role-specific guidance. Your poor new person might feel mystified about what they’re supposed to do and how to do it.
- Slooooow onboarding involving enough paper to demolish a small forest in Bolivia. Delays evaporate your new person’s enthusiasm.
Remote onboarding means you can hire from anywhere – but it also means that your new hire can easily work for anyone else that isn’t you. Remote onboarding challenges may just be the reason they quit on you.
And, don’t worry, proper remote onboarding doesn’t just make a life of wine and butterflies for your new hire. It gives you and/or your IT leads a day job that might not require tears and a nightly glass of wine. Best practice onboarding is a systematic process that integrates new employees into every aspect of your business quickly so that they can get productive fast, but it also makes your life easier. We love that journey for you.
I’m In, But What Does Proper Onboarding Look Like?
Proper onboarding is:
- Fast: Getting your new person connected to the business, their team, and their job before they have time to regret their life choices.
- Easy: Guiding your new hire to set themselves up on day one, in a way that makes them feel that they’ve joined a company that actually knows what it’s doing.
- Hassle-free: Everything should work the first time, every time.
Engaged employees are happy employees. They feel valued and that they belong, so they’ll put in effort over and above what they’re contracted to do. So, how can you and your HR buddy make engagement happen?
Prep Your New Hire’s Team
Your HR pal should prep your new hire’s team (and your new hire’s manager) for their arrival, and we’re hoping that it’s a happy team to join. Maybe they’ve even assigned a work buddy who can become a cheerleader and go-to pal for your recruit if they feel confused or lost in their new position.
Sign Up for Zero-Touch Onboarding
Next, you need to connect your new hire with their new team and let the magic happen. This is where zero-touch onboarding is your new reason for living. Zero-touch onboarding is a methodology that works a bit like this:
Let’s say Melinda down in San Diego is your IT lead and Rafiq is your new hire. He’s a developer and he’s gonna be working from his awesome man cave in Bend. Zero-touch onboarding means that Melinda never even has to see Rafiq’s new computer, let alone dance the old unbox-provision-rebox-send ragtime two-step that IT leads were trained for back in IT Big School. Instead:
- Melinda knows from Nate (a secondary character in HR who never appears in this blog again) that Rafiq’s a developer, so she goes through her Checklist of Awesome to set Rafiq up with all the accounts that a new developer needs.
- Melinda arranges for the new computer (let’s call it a MacBook Pro) to be sent directly from the artisan computer store (let’s call it Apple) by courier (let’s not call it “UPS! I lost it”).
- Rafiq takes delivery of his spanking new MacBook, unboxes it, and boots it up. It phones home to Apple and whines, “Who’s my mommy?” Apple says, “Melinda’s company is your new mommy.” Through the black magic trickery of mobile device management, Rafiq is guided to set up his computer and, boom, he’s presented with a curated collection of all the apps and files he needs, configured especially for developers. All in the time it takes for him to make a latte.
Rafiq’s in. He can start exploring, checking in with his new colleagues, and, most importantly, tackling the horrors of New Person Admin.
But wait, there’s no horror here, because you’ve already thought of this.
Digitalize the HR Workflow
Your newbie now has to work the many layers of onboarding admin: employment contracts, legal docs, policies, benefits, and vacation stuff, just for starters. Making it into an automated digital workflow is a way to simplify, streamline, and speed it all up as well as give your new hire an anxiety-free and, heck, almost pleasurable first morning.
In the bad old days, your new hire would be up to their deltoids in printing, scanning, and copies in triplicate to whoever and their hamster. But, a digital onboarding workflow, with shared dashboards and progress indicators, will make the first day fun again. With some onboarding products, you can do a whole heap of things like auto-assign training, track newbie progress, and get useful feedback on how sucky or not your new hire’s experience is. But it’s all done through the magic of MDM, the security of cloud single sign-on, role provisioning, and IT and HR understanding each other like BFFs.
Overcoming First Day Remote Onboarding Challenges Is What We Do Most Thursdays
Transforming first days from awful to awesome is what we do the rest of the week, too. If you’re thinking of going remote, or if your office is just too ugly to work in, we’ll talk you down from the ledge with some sensible no-obligation chat about ways you can overcome the headache of remote onboarding challenges. Call us.
Ignition is Silicon Valley’s best (and friendliest) IT security, compliance, and support team. Call us now–chatting about IT support and cybersecurity is our favorite thing to do!