5 Obstacles to your New Employees' Remote Onboarding Experience (and How we can Help Fix them)

Remote working is becoming an increasingly important tool in the modern world, with new systems and platforms appearing in the tech world to help you and your employees secure a comfortable and productive working from home environment. Remote working can be an excellent opportunity for the right employee to gain a good work/life balance and all the conveniences of a flexible work schedule, as well as presenting an excellent opportunity for business to reduce overheads and gain access to a wider and deeper pool of talent across the world.

However, whilst transitioning existing employees into home working can be a relatively smooth process, it can be very difficult to achieve a successful Onboarding process for new hires joining the team remotely. This can often result in new employees feeling isolated and disengaged from their new colleagues or without an understanding of the expectations they are being held to. Understanding the main obstacles that new hires come up against in the Onboarding process is an important first step to fixing these problems, after which, making use of dedicated software such as Konsolute’s Onboard is an excellent way to provide and manage a personalised Onboarding experience to each and every one of your new hires. Let us show you how our Onboard platform can revolutionise your remote Onboarding experience.

When Onboarding a new employee from home, some organisations can neglect to properly run their new hires through the technology, tools, and working protocols used by their workforce. In the same way you would ensure new members of the workforce have everything they need at their desks, it is important to ensure that employees are fully equipped to work from home and, crucially, that they know how to use the tools at their disposal. Team members who are new to home working can often feel left behind, feeling pressured to know how to use technology such as video conferencing tools as well as cloud document editing and sharing. As fresh employees into an organisation, new hires can often feel embarrassed or nervous to ask about basic working from home technologies that every other member of the team appear to be confident using.

Konsolute’s Onboard enables managers and administrators to select specific induction sessions and introduction videos for each new employee to complete, based on which department, office, or manager each new hire is responsible to. This customisable platform allows you to provide new hires with personally tailored entry-level introductions to the software they will be expected to use on a regular basis, ensuring that every member of the workforce is confident and up to speed. Onboard’s dashboard feature allows you to monitor your new hires’ progress, ensuring that they have completed every required element of their induction properly. Making sure that your team members have adequate access and are properly prepared to use the right tools will also reduce the risk of mistakes and potential security breaches to your business.

Whilst working from home can offer great benefits such as flexible working hours and the comfort of one’s own home, it can also come with downsides. One of the most common negatives of working from home as far as new hires are concerned is feeling lonely without a busy office atmosphere and colleagues around them on a daily basis. Once team members begin to feel isolated, the less likely they are to feel a strong connection to the company and want to remain with you for a long time. For this reason, it’s crucial to begin establishing relationships between new and existing colleagues as a priority.

Onboard mitigates these feelings of isolation by enabling you, as an organisation, to introduce your new hire to the relevant people and communities through Microsoft 365 services such as Microsoft Teams and Yammer. Hiring managers can refine this process by suggesting their own communities, and, beyond just department team members, Onboard intelligently recommends and suggest communities, including social groups, based on a new hire’s profile information such as their role, skills, interests, and location.

A common trap for employers is taking shortcuts, providing every employee with the same Onboarding process and making it a tedious process. New employees quickly become bored of reading through PDF after PDF of company rules, regulations, and process, often resulting in them moving straight into working without properly reading through crucial information. Providing employees with a more engaging Onboarding experience can therefore make a huge difference to a new hire’s understanding of your business’s model and processes, which will help them long into their term of employment.

Onboard’s Dashboard feature allows you, as an administrator, to closely monitor your new hires’ progress through mandatory training procedures, ensuring that they have spent an adequate amount of time engaging with and understanding your business’s critical processes and modes of operation. Onboard also enables you to provide your employees with new information in various multimedia forms, combating a lack of engagement through boredom. Assign new employees videos, articles, and even quizzes to ensure that they have consumed and fully understood each aspect of their induction to your organisation.

A lack of understanding of one’s new role can be an enormous issue for new hires in a company and can be very disruptive for the onboarding process. Many new hires find after a number weeks in their new role, that they are still struggling to come to grips with their new position and defining their day to day tasks and responsibilities. This can become a great obstacle in the Onboarding process, as new employees can become disheartened or frustrated when it is unclear to them whether their idea of the new role aligns with that which the organisation is presenting to them.

Konsolute’s Onboard can be used to help maintain clarity between a new hire and their organisation by regularly presenting employees with comprehensive onboarding materials such as role descriptions and example tasks. By allowing an administrator to follow and manage each stage of new hires’ remote Onboarding process, Onboard enables you to ensure that new employees are content and clear throughout their induction period.

With many company offices shut or operating with strict regulations, many of us are no longer able to talk to colleagues around water coolers or in break rooms, making it more difficult to feel a consistent sense of company culture. There is, however, much more to company culture than just regularly talking to colleagues, such as the processes that drive tasks and the values by which employees are guided. When bringing new colleagues into your team, it is important that they know everything about the company, its vision, and its values. Helping your employee understand how their work and success is going to be measured and what they can do to behave in a manner in keeping with the company ethos is crucial in their smooth transition into your organisation.

Let Konsolute’s Onboard help you manage your employees understanding and engagement with company culture through sharing documents and videos expanding your companies vision and monitoring their interest and engagement, allowing you to understand in which areas your new hires are struggling to understand their new professional environment.