Here’s What You Need to Know About Virtual Onboarding

What’s the difference between in-person and virtual onboarding? In concept, onboarding bears the same foundational purposes regardless of where it occurs, such as outlining your company values, highlighting business objectives, and starting the training process. But in execution, in-person and virtual onboarding prove to be very different experiences for new hires.

 

Virtual onboarding impacts not so much what your newest team members are learning, but instead how they are receiving this information. Without an on-site training and onboarding program, virtual sessions have to find creative workarounds to creating an equally immersive and engaging experience during those formative first days on the job.

 

And the stakes for successful onboarding are astonishingly high, as nearly 7 out of 10 employees are more inclined to stay with a company for 3 years if they had a great onboarding experience.

 

To understand how businesses successfully migrate to remote onboarding programs, you must also understand the digital technology that makes off-site work a reality. Let’s explore some of the primary facets of a virtual experience for new hires, as well as how you use remote tools to their best advantage.

 

Comprehensive communication

 

Think back to your favorite first day at a new job. What made that particular first day better than the rest? Likely, effective communication was one of the delineating factors. Great communication during onboarding — whether that comes in the form of clearly defining role expectations or carrying a great conversation with a deskmate — alleviates so much of the uncertainty that everyone feels during those crucial first weeks and can help you reach total proficiency more quickly.

 

At the same time, distributed work has a tenuous relationship with productive communication, with 20% of remote workers agreeing that it is the biggest obstacle that comes with working outside of the office. At least some of your onboardees will struggle to articulate their thoughts or process information due to a lack of face-to-face conversations.

 

Virtual onboarding, therefore, requires a collection of communication technologies to bridge the physical barriers of off-site working environments. Some of these appear more readily apparent than others — video conference meeting rooms emulate the experience of an in-person conference setting.

 

Furthermore, the visual component allows everyone in the room to better convey their thoughts through body language, facial expressions, and other physical gestures.

 

Social messaging apps often find their way into the virtual onboarding toolbox as well, as they provide onboarders with a space for fielding questions or developing personal connections with newly hired talent.

 

You might find it beneficial, however, to go beyond integrating just these traditional communication tools to better serve the particular needs of onboarding. Although you may not typically consider HR automation technology to be communicative in its functionality, this emerging tech can supply high-level visibility on the status of each new hire at every point in your onboarding program.

 

Similarly, an LMS with employee onboarding features allows organizations to communicate a single source of truth for their employees, which ensures that every individual receives the same level of training, certifications, and company history.

 

Immersive training

 

The best training protocol is not necessarily one that presents the greatest amount of information or features the largest follow-up assessments. The reality is that after one hour, people retain less than half of the information presented to them. After six days, they’ve already forgotten 75% of the course’s curriculum. When you have no choice but to provide your new-hire training over a screen, these numbers may look even more unfavorable.

 

The most effective remedy is to create a learning experience that is interesting, engaging, and interactive for the recipients. In a virtual setting, many training teams rely on innovative technologies that are designed to disperse information and immerse audiences in equal measure.

 

Compared to a pre-recorded video tutorial, which provides no opportunities for audience engagement, live virtual seminars deliver the dynamism of an in-person training event by providing chances for real-time engagement between professional trainers and employees.

 

Especially for required classes or certifications — whether it be OSHA regulations, employment law, or leadership skills for new managers — these online programs are the ideal method for yoking training technology with the human aspect of learning and development.

 

Another, less common example of training innovation is the integration of virtual reality in remote onboarding procedures. The use cases of VR expand far beyond recreational gaming, and several companies have wielded this fast-growing tech for a fully immersive look into your new hire’s position.

 

For some, it’s the ideal platform for safety training, where employees are exposed to simulated environments without any substantial risk, while others have used virtual reality landscapes to arrange meetings with colleagues who are also being onboarded for a digitized “water cooler” situation.

 

Translating your culture

 

One of the most substantial losses of working with others over a screen is the loss of a larger company culture or spirit, which does not easily translate into remote environments. It’s why 70% of managers with remote teams have expressed that preserving their company culture is a top concern.

 

In any organization, culture is the driving force behind purpose, direction, and personal drive—the reason why your employees care about the work they are doing. Great onboarding serves as the first impression of your corporate ethos and can drastically shape your new hires’ opinions of the business (as well as how long they plan to stay).

 

This is why it’s important to view remote onboarding as an evolution of your culture, not a total loss of it. Although you’ll find it impossible to precisely replicate the atmosphere of your physical headquarters, the most successful virtual onboarding programs find new opportunities to express the values and personalities that comprise their larger enterprise.

 

One strategy is to take full advantage of the flexibility that working from home provides for employees. Unlike a traditional, in-office onboarding schedule, you may be able to instead offer asynchronous onboarding classes, where individual team members are able to complete these assignments on their own time. This is especially valuable for teams working across multiple time zones.

 

Another method for expanding your company culture through a virtual onboarding experience is to actively gauge employee engagement levels, from their first day on the job and beyond.

 

As opposed to an in-person onboarding session, where your instructor may be able to visually assess engagement levels, new remote employees are typically harder to read. For this reason, you might expand your culture by integrating tools like employee survey software to measure engagement temperatures.   

 

Not only do these tools help remote employees feel heard and valued, but the feedback you receive can also help you further develop your onboarding process for future talent in the years to come.

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