How to do online onboarding?

With the increasing popularity of remote working, a lot of new questions start to rise. Are people productive at home? How do I check their work? How can I onboard people online when they barely see the office or their team?

These are all great questions and in this blog post we’ll thoroughly discuss how you should onboard your employees online.

First off all it’s important to be on the same page when it comes to onboarding your employees.

Online employee onboarding is the art of getting your newly hired employees up to speed in a short period of time. This usually involves a structured onboarding process to make sure that you don’t waste precious time.

The onboarding process is the make or break of your talent acquisition for quite a lot of reasons:

1. Without a structured online onboarding process your employees will hardly feel connected to your company and their teammates
2. A lot of studies showed that people that didn’t go through the onboarding process, are more likely to leave the company in the first year because of not enjoying the atmosphere
3. Other studies suggest that without an onboarding process it can take up to 12 months for your employees to “figure things out” on their own - we all know that this will cost the company a lot of money

So now that we know what onboarding is and why you can’t ignore it, let's talk about online onboarding.

Nowadays a lot of companies have employees that are working remotely - sometimes even complete teams - and it was a huge adjustment for the managers to ensure that the productivity would not suffer with remote work.

Besides the usual productivity issues, there was 1 specific issue that a lot of HR managers saw; “How will we onboard new employees from home?”

When it comes to online onboarding you can have a different number of challenges:

It can be incredibly hard to make people feel comfortable in your company, even without having the increased difficulty of online onboarding.

What we do at Sunday to make our team feel at home is really simple:

• We have a monthly KPI meeting where everyone has to present their work
• We make sure that every employee comes to the HQ once a week
• Maybe our best solution is our waterproof onboarding process.

It can be hard for employees to communicate with their manager if they don’t see each other regularly.
A quick fix for this is by having regular video calls where you enable your webcam to increase human interaction.

Also using default communication tools like Slack, Workplace,... can help a lot to increase the communication between employees and also increase productivity.

So, these are some of the challenges that we see with online onboarding.
But the real reason that you came here was to know exactly how to do online onboarding of course.

Online onboarding is a little more complicated than regular in-house onboarding.

Because of that we created a dedicated blog post where our commercial manager explains from A-Z how you should onboard your employees.

Click here to read the complete onboarding blog post (you’ll be mind blown!)

In the main blog post we will also be giving you a lot of free stuff:

• A 30 day onboarding calendar that shows you exactly what to do each day
• An onboarding canvas template that includes what questions you should ask before you start hiring employees
• The secret triangle of onboarding that we use in Sunday to ensure a successful onboarding