Virtual onboarding: How to create a great new-hire experience from a distance

Onboarding a new hire in a virtual setting involves extra planning. This article delves into what goes into onboarding a new employee from afar. Check out the downloadable checklist for virtual onboarding below.

The first day at a job can be overwhelming under the best of circumstances. Not only are recruits meeting new people and learning new things, but they are also absorbing all kinds of visual data and environmental stimuli in unfamiliar surroundings. Observing everything from the physical workspace to how loud (or quiet) it is to the way team members interact, new hires have so much information influencing their experience. 

So what happens when all the information typically gleaned from body language, subtle social cues and the physical environment are unmistakably absent? 

Start with the interactions that make a face-to-face onboarding process successful. What is most likely to be lost in translation to a virtual environment, and how can you recreate those elements from a distance? The solution lies in a well-planned onboarding experience, which combines a clear learning agenda with deliberate time and space for social interactions. 

Plan spontaneity 

Informal coffee chats, encounters at the elevator and minutes spent waiting for a boardroom to clear provide important information for new hires. The spontaneity of those moments can be difficult to replicate virtually, but managers can plan intentional alternatives to deliver the social context and subtle cues that say so much. 

Keep it simple while continuing to find opportunities for your new hire to interact with a cross-section of the team. One easy way to insert social time into an onboarding plan is to start every meeting with a check-in or icebreaker. This could involve asking each participant to share their best work-from-home hack or a place they would love to travel. Once you get to know your new teammate a little better, you can begin to ask focused questions at check-ins, which will provide opportunities for them to share their experiences and add value to the meeting ahead. Take this a step further by scheduling one-on-ones with extended team members and facilitating a group check-in exercise. And don’t forget to insert some intentional fun! Put social events on the calendar, and take a break from shoptalk to take the conversation in a new direction. 

Go wide 

To get a true sense of workplace culture, norms and diversity, new hires need broad exposure to teams and the contributions being made. Involve a wide variety of people in the orientation and training sessions, and schedule virtual social one-on-ones and team activities to enable new hires to meet with people from across your organization, not just those they will be working closely with. 

You might pick a couple of team members from your social committee or your go-to culture ambassador to give your recruit an overview of current social initiatives. Ask a tenured employee to walk your new hire through the history of the company, or engage a few folks to conduct a virtual work shadow. Your recruit can shadow a teammate for a full day or different people for task-specific learning over the course of their first few days. The goal is to ensure that your new employee experiences a “day in the life” of a colleague and engages with a variety of teams across the business quickly, rather than waiting for more formal opportunities. 

Value vibes

Hiring decisions include culture and value alignment on both sides, so on-boarding is the time to ensure your new hire has reason to trust the organization and personally experience what was promised in the interview process. Figuring out how new remote employees will observe those values in action should be a critical part of your thinking during remote on-boarding. 

Act as the director of the on-boarding experience and have a clearly defined start and end. Thoughtfully plan the first few days and weeks to deliver the right content in the right sequence. Ensure your new hire is enabled to interact with employees from diverse teams and levels of seniority in your organization. Last, make sure you know what success looks like at key milestones. 

Your onboarding plan should provide helpful social cues and enable your new hire to absorb the digital work environment in meaningful ways. Accounting for the in-person elements that contribute to effective working relationships will make your virtual on-boarding experience more impactful and contribute to long-term employee success. With this thinking in place, add in the more tactical elements of on-boarding using the checklist below. Happy on-boarding! 

Further reading

• Onboarding (MaRS video)
• Successful on-boarding: Integrating new employees (MaRS article)
• New hire form: Sample template (downloadable MaRS template)
• 11 ways to build a successful recruitment strategy (MaRS article)

Checklist: Virtual onboarding

This checklist helps you onboard new employees in a virtual setting. Download the checklist here.