How to Onboard New Employees Virtually

If you’re thinking about hiring new employees, one of the most crucial steps is the onboarding process. The right onboarding process can make an employee feel comfortable in the role, have clear goals and guidelines, and understand what’s required of them from the beginning. However, with an onboarding process that isn’t carefully calculated, a new employee may feel lost, not meet their goals or deadlines, and/or leave the role. To help avoid these mishaps, we’ve outlined a few tips on how to onboard new employees virtually. 

New hire onboarding has a crucial impact on company culture, employee productivity, and long-term employee retention. What is onboarding? Onboarding is the process of introducing your employees to your company’s expectations, skills, knowledge, and culture. According to Recruiting data, 1 in 4 new hires will leave within 180 days. So what steps can you take to make sure you’re doing your part when it comes to onboarding virtually?

Personality Test 

A new trending step in employee onboarding requires new hires to complete a personality test. This helps the teams and other employees better understand the new hires’ strengths and weaknesses as well as what motivates them. You can create a better team by using personality types. Additionally, knowing if someone is an introvert vs. an extrovert can change how you should manage each personality type. As someone responsible for onboarding, you should understand how introverts can make more of an impact at work and what tactics to use to help extroverts thrive when working from home. 

Video Conferences 

When it comes to onboarding, in-person connections, especially for extroverts, can be vital. Seeing their teammates and superiors create a bond more powerful than communicating via email. To make this possible during the pandemic, video conferring is the best virtual option. We have a few articles on video conferencing, including 7 tips for the perfect video interview and the 7 Best Video Interview Tools. 

Onboarding Tools 

Eloomi

Create the flow and frequency of training that works best for you and your new hires. New hires can onboard on-the-go whenever it suits them on any device. Increase employee retention and performance by allowing them to learn in their own time.

BambooHR

An award-winning core HR package that includes onboarding tools and applicant tracking to make hiring and employee transitions easier than ever. E-signature, time-off tracking, performance management, and reporting tools set HR free from spreadsheets to become more efficient, effective, and human. 

Trainual

Automate your onboarding and training with Trainual. Get new hires up to speed faster than ever, only assign what’s relevant to their role, build accountability into ongoing training, and ensure that no matter the manager or date of hire, training happens consistently every time. More than 30,000 users in 100+ countries use Trainual to document their processes, define step-by-step workflows, build searchable SOPs, enable teams to be more productive, and cut costs by speeding up onboarding.

OnboardCentric 

Onboarding software from ExactHire allows small and medium employers to make paperwork collection paperless, efficient, and pleasant for new employees. New hires are invited to enter data that automatically fills forms and documents which may be viewed and signed electronically from the web-based portal. OnboardCentric includes E-Verify integration and the ability to create a robust onboarding task workflow for your business.

WhatFix

Whatfix helps you seamlessly manage user onboarding for all of your software users, delivering a frictionless user experience and accelerating adoption at scale.

Lessonly

Lessonly is powerfully simple onboarding & enablement software that helps teams learn, practice, and do better work. Used by over 3 million learners at 900 leading companies, including Trunk Club, Ibotta, U.S. Cellular, and Zendesk, to share knowledge and reinforce best practices. Not to mention, increasing productivity and cutting onboarding time in half. Other features include easy-to-use lesson creation, insights to track metrics & coaching functionality to give feedback at scale.

Pipefy 

Onboarding software that helps teams provide the perfect onboarding experience by empowering them to automate manual activities without IT help, giving them full visibility over progress and ensuring every step and best practices of onboarding are followed every time. Visit our website and try Pipefy for free.

A-List Tools: 

In addition to the onboarding software listed above, there are additional tools that can really help with onboarding. Some of these tools and software options can be found here. 

Are you looking for additional steps to follow? Zenefits has created a create virtual onboarding checklist for remote employees. 

What are some of your favorite onboarding tips, tricks, or tools? Let us know in the comments below. All onboarding can be different, and processes should be created based on the company. However, you’ll want to make sure that when you’re considering how to onboard new employees virtually, you also consider the best tech products and software to make your life and your new hires’ easier.

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