Best Practices for Welcoming New Remote Hires
The paperwork is done—thanks to Onboard—and now a new employee is setup for their first day.
Here’s where the real work begins!
Thanks to 25 years of remote work ourselves, we’ve come up with a strategic framework that can help ensure a successful onboarding journey. It involves 4 C’s that are critical to a healthy remote workplace in general—Culture, Communication, Collaboration and Coordination. Focusing on these can be the foundation for a thriving, high-performing, team-oriented remote team.
Here’s a glimpse at each of these tenets.
Culture
The foundation of any healthy remote team is Culture. Or, perhaps I should say a values-driven culture, and that has to be made clear even before someone is brought onto your team.
Culture is built on your core values and your shared belief system. Hopefully those don’t need physical walls to exist.
Get crystal clear on your purpose and principles—since that’s what’s the foundation of your unsaid beliefs and norms.
Your company needs to celebrate and live by its purpose—and you don’t want to neglect that with anyone new joining your team. That purpose has to be for an existence bigger than just work itself.
It can’t just be the founder or CEO who celebrates this vision and purpose; make sure the company purpose is shared and lived out by all team members. This may feel like over-communication when you’re remote, but trust me, it isn’!
Culture can be hard to define, but the following questions can help you to shed light on your current culture with new hires:
What are a few of the top, common beliefs across employees? How can those be shared with a new hire so they know these common beliefs (and resulting behaviors)?
What do we all stand for and believe in? How does the business advance that cause? How can the new hire learn more?
How do we respond to clients typically? What’s the norm for communicating with them? How can a new hire see this modeled out?
What’s the norm for communicating with each other? What are any stories you have related to this that can be shared with the new hire as examples?
What’s our priority as a company? What’s the new hire’s priorities as it relates to that?
What do people consider a “win” or positive outcome?
How do we support our own people, partners, clients, and community? How can the new hire see that in-action?
How does information flow within our company?
As a reminder, this all starts BEFORE someone is hired. That’s why we recruit and hire people who are truly energized and inspired by Edoc’s purpose. If there’s any doubt people aren’t aligned with your company purpose and core values, don’t rush to hire them. In fact, be sure not to hire them!
If you have current employees who aren’t aligned with these beliefs, help them find another opportunity.
This likeminded team is going to be the glue that unites your remote team, so be as intentional as possible when looking for new candidates and hiring. People will either add to your culture, positively, or they will take away from it.
Remember that the criteria for “great work” may change with remote work, depending on your company culture today. If it matters when people clock in or how much time it takes to get tasks done in your company today, you may have to revisit these expectations with remote workers. After all, “great work” for remote teams is not dependent on a certain amount of time worked each day or when you clock in and out.
If you are a fully remote team, recognize the culture where the new hire came from. Have they worked remotely before? Or were they on a team that was partially remote? For some new hires, this idea may be a mindset shift, but it’s an extra edge you have the ability to create for your business.
Communication
The second critical component of any healthy remote culture is Communication, and so you need to focus on communication when it comes to your new hire. We inherently know communication is critical in any business, but take a step back and think about communication in another light.
Communication really, at the end of the day, is about trust.
So how do you build trust and effectively communicate with a new hire from day one?
Especially with new hires, be sure to define—and then make—proactive communication the norm within your company and with clients, too. In fact, at Edoc, always default to being proactive when it comes to communication with clients and with each other!
Be sure to call or get back in touch with people (within the company and outside) in a timely manner. People, including partners, may have the misconception you are away, or just not as available when you are working virtually. Work against this misconception by being as responsive as you can be.
We can’t emphasize this one enough: At first, that may feel like it’s over-communicating, but I can tell you, in a remote environment, you can rarely over-communicate! Use different formats to get your message across, too. You can never underestimate the value of communicating a message in different formats.
People absorb information in different ways, after all. The trust will build naturally from there.
At Edoc, we use Slack for updates, direct messaging, and group messaging; text message for appropriate urgent messages; a shared calendar to help with coordination; Zoom for video conferences and one-on-one meetings; Dropbox and ShareFile for file sharing; and phone calls for other conversations. While we minimize the use of email thanks to Slack, we know it can be a useful tool that has its place in business, too, especially for communication outside our company.
For our version of a “virtual water cooler,” we use Slack, where we’re able to create a sense of camaraderie, connection, and community. As a real-time chatroom, Slack allows us to send and update others on non-work related topics that we enjoy talking about with each other. Out of town for a week? No problem, because you can easily catch up in all Slack’s channels. Every company is going to have its norms and desired way of communicating, so find the tools that best support how you work and enjoy communicating.
Next, be sure you work on listening. (As a team at Edoc, we’ve worked on this together to help us grow in this arena.) We can all work to improve our ability to actively listen, and the power of active listening is only heightened in a remote environment. It may even take a course or investment to grow your listening skills so you can truly hear feedback from a new hire.
Look to suspend judgement as someone as talks to you; in other words, as difficult as it may be, we try not to plan what we’re going to say as they talk since that takes away from our ability to fully listen. Allow them to finish and try not to interrupt (an area I can certainly work on.) Another key point we aim for: repeat back what someone has said to you, in your words, to show your understanding. That kind of reflection may sound something like: “So what I’m hearing you say is…”
Then, that person you’re talking to has the opportunity to continue to explain themselves or they can add clarity if you didn’t get their message or issue right. Paraphrasing and repeating what you’re hearing back to someone is an empowering way you can help people and teams, together, to arrive at better solutions.
Another key point about virtual work that we’ve learned: if a new hire is waiting around waiting for you to tell them what to do next, there’s a problem! And let’s face it, that’s a problem whether or not your team is remote.
Request a Demo of Onboard
Onboard makes new hire paperwork painless—so you can focus elsewhere. Review the status of new employee paperwork and mark it as accepted after seeing uploaded I-9 verification documents. Plus, the Onboard platform guides everyone involved through all the forms, helping to ensure they get filled out as intended.
