Diane L. Dee
It takes HR and Hiring Managers a lot of time and money sifting through resumes, conducting interviews, finding the person with the right skills who will also be a good cultural fit to narrow it down to one person. But you finally found the right person, made an offer, and it was accepted!
After all that time-consuming and expensive effort, you have your new hire ready to begin - excited and nervous on their first day of work. What you may not realize at this point is that your job is far from over. You now need to direct your efforts to “recruiting” your new hire through his or her critical first few months on the job. And today, this is never more important as employers hire greater numbers of remote employees.
Onboarding occurs in the period between offer acceptance and full integration into your organization. Your job is to have an effective virtual onboarding program in place to assist your new remote employees in acquiring the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective members of the organization. In addition to dotting all the compliance i’s and crossing all the paperwork t’s, virtual onboarding should also help new remote employees feel like a valuable member of the team. A warm welcome from teammates and a smooth introduction to the expectations of the new role can promote engagement and retention right from the start.
Traditional orientation programs usually consist of a data dump of information (policies and procedures, benefits information, safety information, etc.) on the new hire’s first or second day on the job. This one-stop, one-time approach results in an information overload problem for your new employee. Utilizing a phased-approach enables new employees to build relationships with co-workers and with those who will have a part in managing, coaching, mentoring and supporting them while working remotely.
Effective virtual and onsite onboarding leads to positive outcomes for the new employee in terms of higher job satisfaction, better job performance, greater organization commitment, and reduction in stress and intent to quit. Introducing a new onboarding program into your hiring process can mean the difference between retaining top new hires or watching them walk out the door after several months.
Diane L. Dee
President and Founder of Advantage HR Consulting, LLC