Making remote onboarding a success

Onboarding new employees to the team is always a particular challenge and has been made even more difficult by the pandemic as most employees are working from home. This post outlines some steps that can be taken to make the remote onboarding of new team members a success.

When the pandemic started in 2020, many employees went into home office. This changed our working habits and many other things, and some companies published remote working guidelines to support their employees. This is all about remote working, but what happens if you change companies during the pandemic?

Joining a new company and learning the ropes can be quite difficult even in normal times. When you start a new job, you have to learn new skills and build new relationships within the company. When working from home, these issues are compounded by virtual barriers. It's not possible to walk up to someone and ask a question or introduce yourself to people you happen to meet in different situations.

Many companies have been faced with the challenge of expanding their teams from home. In this article, we try to describe how this challenge can be overcome to ensure that the new team members come on board quickly and feel welcome in this new environment.

Contact person for onboarding

Assign an onboarding buddy to each new team member. The onboarding buddy is the point of contact for the new team member for any questions or issues where support is needed, e.g. setting up the notebook. As some people may feel uncomfortable asking unknown people for help, especially remotely, daily 1:1 sessions have been set up to discuss the current status of onboarding, answer open questions or provide regular feedback. Over time, the frequency of 1:1 meetings will decrease as employees get used to working in a team.

Feedback

Regular feedback is the key to success during onboarding. It's to create this continuous feedback loop to let the new team members know how their contribution is seen, to get them used to the company's feedback culture and also to reflect on how onboarding is working and whether it needs to be optimized. To make sure you don't forget about feedback, you should set up monthly feedback meetings between the team and each new team member. This can be done in three different ways:

• An open round in which everyone can freely express their feedback.
• Feedback is given in short 1:1 meetings between each team member.
• The team collects the feedback and then presents a summarized view to the new team member.

Overall, it's hard to say which format is best. In the beginning, it might be intimidating to get feedback from the whole team in an open round, but later on, when the team knows each other better, it's fine. It depends on the situation and the people, so give your team the choice. As these feedback rounds are also meant for the new members to give feedback to the team, you should prepare some questions to collect the feedback.

• What do you think about onboarding so far?
• Is there any information that you missed or that you would have liked to have received earlier?
• Is your workload manageable for you? Are the tasks too easy/too difficult?
• Would you like to receive more/less support?
• Is there anything you would like to work on more?
• How comfortable would you feel if all the other team members fell ill and you were working alone on tasks and support requests?

The last question is probably the most important. It asks the new team members to reflect on themselves and check how confident they already are in their skills. This is an important indicator for the team to perhaps focus on certain areas that were previously neglected during onboarding. In this way, we found out that we need to better introduce the readiness and disruption process to our team, as we were completely missing out on this.

Technical onboarding

Onboarding naturally also includes technical onboarding, e.g. an introduction to the Scrum ceremonies. It is important not to overwhelm the new team members at the beginning. Much, if not most, of the information can be passed on later if necessary. It is better to focus on the basics at the beginning and give them time to internalize them. But at some point, the new team members will need to get their hands dirty and work on real tasks. To make it easier for them to get started, we use pair programming or even mob programming at the beginning. The idea behind this is that tasks must be completed by at least two people, unless other circumstances prevent this. Pair programming is even more important than usual when working remotely. Not only because it enables an easy exchange of knowledge "on the job", but also because the participants can get to know each other better. Pair programming is carried out with simple tools. The person programming can use the IDE of their choice and the screen can be shared over the call so that the other participants can observe the programming. Of course, there are other tools and IDE plugins that make it even better, but it can work well without them.

Relationships

The last part of onboarding relates to the relationships within the team. Teams are not just robots that come to work, but people with emotions, goals and sometimes problems. Trust is therefore an important prerequisite for efficient remote teams. It allows you to express your opinion freely, you can make mistakes and addressing conflicts leads to constructive discussions. And as a remote team, you miss out on many opportunities to get to know your new teammates because there are no lunches together, no short discussions at the coffee machine and no rounds of table tennis during breaks. This can quickly feel like you're being left alone with your problems. Therefore, introduce a recurring break session whose sole purpose is to create bonds within your team.

Every week you can come up with new ideas for the session. Sometimes you can present personal items from your home to each other, other times you can do a powerpoint karaoke or just play a game like Taboo. Some of these exercises may have goals, such as improving your presentation skills, but in the end it's always about the people and getting to know them. What drives your team members? What kind of humor do they have? What's keeping them up at night right now? Opening up really helps to create that bond and build trust with each other. Of course, if you're a mixed team, exercises like this can also be done in the office to maintain the bond between team members and aren't just valuable when you're working remotely.

Fazit

To summarize this article, it can be reduced to a few simple points. Take time for proper onboarding and be transparent with customers and prospects about potential delays in support requests or roadmaps. Remind yourself constantly that you are giving feedback to provide guidance and avoid unpleasant surprises. And don't forget the personal relationships that need to be built, as this will allow you to trust each other and feel safe even if you make mistakes. Following these rules takes a lot of time, but it pays off in the long run. Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for onboarding and different teams may have different needs.