Onboarding, i.e. introducing a new employee to work in a company, may turn out to be crucial for future cooperation. During remote work it can be much more difficult.
What does the onboarding process actually consist of? In a nutshell: the goal is to familiarize the new employee with the culture and customs prevailing in the workplace. Before the coronavirus pandemic, it usually also took place a tour of the facility and handing over necessary equipment and required login data (for example to the company e-mail box). In addition, the employee then had time to get to know his co-workers, on whose help he could always count. Thanks to this, he quickly integrated with the team, which had a significant impact on the quality of work
You can see, therefore, how important the process of onboarding new employees is for the functioning of the company. Studies show that a properly conducted implementation can retain about 91% of employees for a minimum of three years. This in turn reduces employee turnover and thus reduces the cost of training them. So this is something that no employer can ignore, as it directly translates into the company’s profit and loss balance. In the era of remote working and learning, implementation is also often done online. It can be done effectively, you just need to know the right tools.
It would be silly to bring an employee to the office without a company computer, and to answer his question “what should I do then?” with “er… well, work”. The same logistics need to be taken care of with remote deployment. The employee should have all the necessary items, such as a company computer or phone, on the first day. You also need to make sure that they will be delivered to him in a safe manner. For this purpose, you can, of course, bring the equipment yourself; ask him to pick it up from the company headquarters in advance (if he has such a possibility) or use the services of one of the courier companies. In this case, it is important to label the package properly. Next, make sure that the employee has access to all necessary digital services. This is, among others, a company e-mail box, but also accounts on communicators or videoconferencing programs used by the company. It is best to prepare a plan of the whole implementation in advance, specifying the used tools. There is a great number of such tools available and to a large extent they are free software. We can also think about preparing a so-called welcome package for the employee. It is a package of small company gadgets, which are to strengthen the sense of belonging to the team.
As it has already been mentioned, entrepreneurs have at their disposal a whole range of software. You can also find a large number of free tools. Probably when working remotely there will come a need to organize a video meeting with employees. For this purpose, you can use programs such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype or Google Meet. In addition to regular meetings, it is also worth setting up a company chat room. This will allow employees to stay in touch all the time in case of any questions. Popular applications such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Google Chat can be used for this purpose. For multi-person projects, a cloud-based drive service will also come in handy. Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive are two of the most popular platforms.
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