Avoiding a Flurry During Remote Employee Onboarding
Remote employee onboarding doesn’t have to be a chore.
We all know the onboarding process is crucial to a new hire’s success on your team. As we built our distributed team, we focused on how to ensure they feel connected and supported when they join up. The best part? Now you can build on our tested approach with your own team.
A successful remote employee onboarding experience can make all the difference as a follow-up to a thoughtful interview and hiring process. It ensures that your new hire:
Feels welcomed
Is properly trained
Knows when and where to ask questions
Gains a solid foundation to do their job well
Is empowered to try things on their own, learning the good kinds of risks to take to help them grow in their career.
In 2022, we hired eight new people to our team of 10 and were immediately hit with a big question. How do we give all these new hires, across various levels of experience, the time and attention their onboarding deserves with a team that’s already overloaded (hence, the new people)? Sound familiar?
We knew we needed to plan for a streamlined and supportive onboarding process; one that would be as clear and concise as possible. Our aim was to leave our new hires with clear goals and expectations as early as possible, while lightening the onboarding load for our existing team.
Enter, our very own remote employee onboarding Notion template⤤ (pressure tested by yours truly). Some key benefits of this template:
It offers clear goals and expectations, including timestamps.
Like any other project you might kick off, a roadmap of the weeks ahead is incredibly important. What do you want your new hire to accomplish within week one? Week two? How will they know they’ve had a successful first month? What wins can they celebrate? Giving them a clear roadmap paves the way for them to hit the ground running with as little oversight as possible while feeling confident once the onboarding process is over.
It’s adaptable to new hires across all levels of experience.
A junior is not going to require the same kind of training as a senior employee, and vice versa. We intentionally made our onboarding template modular so we could plug and play with the duration and content of our new hires’ training—no matter their experience level.
It holds all the resources that the new hire might need.
We made a point to ensure this template would provide a new hire with a “cheat sheet” for things they may frequently need. Who do they need to remember right off the bat (such as their manager and peer buddy)? What are the quick links they’ll need most often? Where is the team handbook and tools for work? It’s all there.
It easily keeps track of remote employee onboarding tasks for not just your new hire, but your onboarding team as well.
Onboarding is a two way street, and this template is meant to make the process smooth not just for your new hire, but also for the team that’s bringing them onboard (who can often be already overloaded).
Our junior engineer, Natasha Johnson, is one of the first to have tested out our onboarding template and process.
“It gave me a clear direction and answered the question that I’m sure everyone has on their first day: ‘What am I supposed to be doing?’ The onboarding plan not only gave me a general list of to dos, it was also broken up into categories like, what to do on your first day, first week, first month, first quarter and so on. It definitely made me feel like I wasn't fending for myself so to speak.”
Natasha has a great video series on YouTube⤤ about not just her experience joining Township, but her experience in general entering the world of engineering.
Why keep talking about it when you could check it, or even use it, for yourself?
Download our Remote Employee Onboarding Template here⤤, and let us know how it goes!
