Powwownow Blog

Last week we read about Mashable’s Digital Career Series and were bowled over by the amount of advice on everything from ‘considerations for creating remote policies’ to articles on how to ‘better communicate with remote start-up employees’. However, the article that we found most useful and interesting, was the piece titled ‘5 Tips For Onboarding Remote Workers’. In it, Sharlyn Lauby detailed a series of smart and savvy tips for recruiting, initiating, and developing a long-term relationship with remote workers. Below, we’ve included a copy of that article along with just a few of our thoughts which we hope you might find equally interesting. If you have had experience in ‘onboarding’ remote staff then we’d also love to hear what you think.

 The Digital Careers Series is supported by Elance, the world’s leading site for online work. Check out Startup Cloud for tips on how to build a remote team.

There might be an assumption that recruiting is easier when unemployment is high, but that’s simply not true. According to Manpower Group, 52% of employers reported having a difficult time finding qualified employees to fill jobs. Employers cast a wide net when it comes to finding candidates, and remote workers can be attractive to companies because they can fill an opening that’s difficult to place with a local.

It’s more important than ever to ensure that new hires become engaged immediately upon entering their new place of employment through a well-designed onboarding process. Successful onboarding programs aren’t just a paperwork-filled orientation: They create a connection between employees, their work and the goals of the organization. Here are a few best practices from companies that effectively onboard remote workers.

1. Bring the Office to Them

In a traditional office environment, it’s easy to forget what it’s like for a remote employee. Sometimes we take for granted the ability to walk around the corner and ask a quick question. David Lewis, president and CEO of OperationsInc, a human resources outsourcing and consulting firm, has several employees who work virtually. He says the key to a successful workplace is creating a way for new hires to experience the office regardless of where they’re located.

“We get them connected with the team, make sure they know who does what and bring the office to them,” Lewis says. “Slides with pictures. Organizational charts. All geared to paint a picture.”

“This is an absolute must” says Powwownow joint-CEO, Andrew Pearce. “It’s something many companies overlook but it is imperative you ensure happens. You want to make all employees feel equal, otherwise going forward, at some point; you will encounter issues in your company culture. Small or medium size businesses in particular should bare this in mind. When companies grow, especially if they grow quickly, there is leeway for a company to lose its personality which is often a defining factor for any new business that wants to stand out from competition. SMEs should have an all for one and one for all mentality, and if your remote workers have not even seen the office then it’s impossible to move forward with that ethos.”

2. Connect Face-to-Face

The ability to connect a face with a voice is an essential part of building relationships. For Cheezburger, the online humor publisher behind the wildly popular I Can Has Cheezburger?, the key to success is in building a team culture despite having employees all over the country.

Cheezeburger’s CTO, Scott Porad says they typically bring remote employees to headquarters for the first week, but sometimes that isn’t possible. “We have onboarded several employees remotely,” Porad adds. “We use pair-programming through voice and video conferencing and screen-sharing tools to make this happen.”

Video conferencing also eliminates the stress associated with travel, especially if you’re working for a new company. Alison Sheehan, senior vice president of human resources at virtual meetings developer PGi, says it was a no-brainer to embrace remote onboarding: “As a collaboration company that provides virtual meeting tools to business, we took what we know to be effective in face-to-face meetings and applied it to remote onboarding and other HR processes.”

PGi uses a combination of email, video meetings and learning management system (LMS) tools to connect with and onboard remote workers. The cornerstone of its program is a proprietary video conferencing tool,iMeet. “Using iMeet’s group video capabilities is a great way for us to meet face-to-face in a virtual setting to connect with new hires,” Sheehan explains. “You can make eye contact (or note when others are not), you can observe body language, and you can even use the social media tools within iMeet to learn more about the people with whom you are meeting. This personal interaction strengthens their bond and enhances the synergy of the group — all without ever leaving their home offices.”

“In theory I agree with everything that is said here,” says our I.T Director, Conor Maguire. “Although, on a personal level I much prefer using Vidyo. It’s much easier to set up and use, and the real time file/application sharing facility in Vidyo allows for more lifelike interactions, the sort that might happen around an actual meeting room. When recruiting new members of staff it’s a real advantage to be able to see their face in a first stage interview. With technologies such as these, as appose to the days of old when we had to make do with a crackly land line, it’s much easier to gage a sense of the person you’re speaking to. Despite the recession, or perhaps as a result, interest in video conferencing has never been higher, with vendors reporting growing sales, and growing interest from customers looking to use video conferencing to either replace travel, or improve collaboration for distributed workgroups. There are so many uses for video conferencing and it’s something I’m personally very passionate about the future of. I’d love to hear from you if you use video conferencing or if you know of any interesting news/developments regarding video right now.”

3. Teach the Job in Steps

Companies also have to figure out how to show remote workers the technical aspects of the work they will be doing. In a traditional office environment, employees might attend a class or be a part of on-the-job training, but neither are practical choices with remote workers.

Tracy Brisson, founder and CEO of The Opportunities Project encourages “scaffolding” as an effective learning process. In short, you break up the content into building blocks that are taught in chunks. “When students demonstrate they’ve learned the material and can do it independently, you teach the next step and build upon prior skills and knowledge,” she says.

In an office, a manager can see a new team member performing and provide immediate feedback. Brisson shares the process for virtual workers, too. “You have to know that they can do it on their own without that instant feedback loop,” Brisson explains. “It helps to create a learning plan before the person starts, where job responsibilities are introduced at a slower pace, but the result is faster overall mastery and a great work product.”

“Once again, nobody would disagree with what is being said. Though it is equally important to know which tools to use so to make this process as seamless as possible,” says our Marketing Manager, Casey Williams. “For both brainstorming with and training new staff I personally use Dropbox to initially transfer or store files both parties might need. In case you haven’t come across this yet, this is a great service for sharing files between say your desktop PC and your laptop without having to copy from your PC to a flashdrive, and then from the flashdrive to your laptop. You can transfer up to 2Gig for free which is more than enough in my experience. I also use Yuuguu web conferencing on occasions as it allows me and the member of staff in question, to not only screen share, but also take control of one another’s computer. This is of fantastic benefit when wanting to carry out demonstrations or work collaboratively on a project.”

4. Evaluate the Process

Any time you create and actively use a process, it’s necessary to evaluate its effectiveness. Brendon Schrader, founder and CEO of strategic marketing consultancy Antenna, says his company’s onboarding assessment “is based on one metric: employee satisfaction.”

Antenna worked with enterprise social network Yammer to create a new onboarding process, largely due to that fact that the platform provides tools to measure each stage of hiring. When asked how employees respond to the remote onboarding experience, Schrader indicated the feedback has been one of their best sources of information. “Our consultants have time and time again expressed their happiness with our process and how the platform helps them stay connected with their colleagues,” Schrader explains. “We may not be sitting across a desk from our employees, but the Yammer platform allows us to redefine how we work together.”

“Yammer really is a fantastic tool and something we’ve considered rolling out within Powwownow,” says joint-CEO Paul Lees. “The ability to have what is essentially an in-house Facebook is appealing to many companies. As companies grow it is advisable to have a central hub which all employees can access, pool resources within, and stay connected via. Tools such as Yammer improve companies’ communication channels by making everything transparent. If you want companywide consensus on an issue, or to crowdsource advice from another area of the company, Yammer speeds up this process too. Multinationals benefit by being able to feel part of a ‘big team’, where everyone can understand fellow employees that may not simply be working in a different city, but a different country and timezone. ENGAGE and Cubetree are also worth checking out. They’re microblogging platforms that go a further than the others in so much as they allow linking outside your secure network to other programs like Twitter, Webex, Tripit and Salesforce.”

5. Constantly Refine the Process

For many of us, working remotely isn’t a new concept, but the responsibility of onboarding a remote team is. That was the situation for Sara Sutton Fell, CEO and founder of telework job service FlexJobs. Fell figured out what worked best for her company through a combination of instinct, trial and error, and feedback from colleagues who already had experience hiring remote workers.

Fell says the most important step when adding a new technology to the onboarding process is test first, then implement. “The more we test a particular technology to see if it meets our needs, the better chance we’ll have of selecting the most appropriate and useful technology,” Fell explains. “And we’re sure to avoid headaches down the road!”

As more organizations recognize the value in telework arrangements, we’ll see more remote workers move from the status of occasional freelancer to full-time employee. Creating an effective, efficient onboarding process will benefit both the new hire and the company.

What advice do you have for companies looking to onboard remote employees? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

Have you had experience in ‘onboarding’ remote workers? Or are you thinking about rolling out the process any time soon? If so, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Please leave a comment below.