Best practices for remote employee onboarding in distributed teams
How to Organize To-Dos Into Checklist(s)
In fact, multiple employee onboarding checklists should exist in your company:
- ones for the HR manager or team member responsible for the onboarding;
- ones for the employees themselves.
Besides, it makes sense to divide all to-dos into milestones and have a checklist for every milestone.
For instance, there is often extensive paperwork preceding the first working day. It requires a separate checklist as it ends after the successful start. On the contrary, a few other to-dos — such as project onboarding or introduction into the company-specific technology — may be stretched across months.
We like these checklists as they cover the most important to-dos and are divided into milestones. But they do not solve all employee onboarding challenges, including tracking of the onboarding progress, getting ready all learning materials, and onboarding new hires remotely.
Electronic Checklists
Electronic checklists are not just a cool thing; they allow the responsible mentor to monitor the onboarding process easier, even if the new colleague is not in the same office. This new challenge becomes particularly pressing as many verticals and their teams get scattered around the globe.
Three main options exist on the market:
- full-stack HR software with employee onboarding features;
- employee onboarding software;
- general task management software.
Depending on the company size, the number of new hires, the complexity of the onboarding process, and your budget, you can consider any of these options. We won’t even discourage you from using a task management platform, such as Trello. It offers a free employee onboarding template that you can customize for your needs.
In your task management tool, you can simply add checklists as lists with to-dos as tasks and assign them to newcomers or their managers.
Learning Videos
A lot of employee onboarding publications highlight the importance of personal greetings and successful knowledge transfer.
However, during a growth phase, companies may hire a lot of people within a short period of time, forcing important employees to spend their time training newcomers instead of doing their actual work. Senior specialists may have too many things to do.
This can lead to tensions.
On the other hand, it is not always possible to shake hands with every new hire personally.
As a solution, companies started to record learning videos for new hires. Compliance training is a typical case.
Nonetheless, delivering learning videos to the right people in the right time may get tricky for busy managers:
- Videos must be integrated with the checklists to ensure that they will be watched.
- Access must be provided, but the materials should not become publicly available.
- “Flat” videos cannot replace the quality of personal training: interactive videos are necessary instead.
Integration, secure access, and interactive nature can be achieved if you use a proper tool to produce and publish your training videos.
Dadan for Employee Onboarding Videos
Dadan is a free video and screen recording tool. It allows you to create employee onboarding videos quickly as it does not require any technical skills or special equipment. You can combine screen sharing and webcam recording to create explanatory videos with a personal touch. Moreover, you can add interactive features, documents and links to your video.
Dadan can be installed on a Windows PC or Mac or used in the Chrome browser as an extension.
The recordings are saved in a cloud where you can configure access rights easily and set an expiration date for videos.
Last but not least: dadan can be integrated with Trello! A dadan button will be added to each Trello task to enable you to start recording right from the task or add a video from your online archive.
With dadan and Trello, you can create employee onboarding checklists that are easy to share and follow. Get your new hires onboarded quickly and efficiently.
