Virtual Onboarding: How To Train New Hires Remotely
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Business today is more digitally and remotely managed than ever before. This trend isn’t reversing any time soon, which means your organization needs to achieve maximum value from digital versions of common practices.
Onboarding is one such process. In highly specialized fields like life sciences, a well-designed onboarding program can boost retention by 82%. But how do you bring new hires into the fold and get them up to speed on your practices when they work from home some or all of the time?
Fortunately, virtual employee onboarding may not be as challenging as it appears. Some of the most compelling and engaging digital tools and techniques, including the use of video and virtual reality, are available remotely. Modern tactics, including gamification and personalization, are also digital, meaning there’s a path to optimal onboarding that uses 100% virtual methods.
How the Onboarding Process Is Changing Across Industries
The transition toward hybrid and remote work was underway as the 2010s ended. The forced telecommuting of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated the change. Now, organizations that weren’t considering a flexible work model a decade ago are fully or partially remote and global in nature.
To add a further level of complexity, while some companies are becoming more dispersed, others are returning to the office. There’s no one way to manage a business, but the need for well-prepared and effective onboarding is universal.
Human resources and people management departments have to keep up with this shifting landscape, adopting new practices to stay effective. In a recent BambooHR report, 32% of HR professionals named onboarding and offboarding as a challenge, while 31% highlighted training and development as areas of urgent improvement.
Beyond the difficulty of onboarding, getting it right matters. With effective onboarding causing 89% of employees to feel more engaged, it’s worth focusing on the tactics and technologies to bring workers up to speed. Self-guided onboarding journeys and multimedia content like video can help new employees absorb a large amount of information relatively quickly.
Leaders have to find technological and strategic ways to reconcile the difficulties of onboarding with the opportunities of a successful process. This means coping with the more general challenges of digital systems, including the risk of a breach or other data loss incidents. Digital employee management systems must deliver an employee-pleasing onboarding and training experience while keeping data safe.
Known Challenges and Pitfalls in a Virtual Onboarding Process
Patching vulnerabilities in technology is one concern for your company as you build your remote onboarding capabilities — it’s not the only issue you’ll have to overcome, however. Other known issues include potential difficulty connecting over distance, as well as the friction that can come from information overload or an excess of processes.
By aggregating challenges and breaking them down into two general groups, you can start to think about how best to overcome them.
Human Disconnect
Issues stemming from a lack of direct human connection are easy to explain, but they can be hard to deal with. Even the best digital systems aren’t as vibrant as face-to-face contact when it comes to communicating important information like company culture. Employees may struggle to understand the company’s unwritten norms if they’re learning remotely.
Building rapport can also be a challenge for virtual employee onboarding programs. Learning from office mentors is easier when new hires can access in-person meetings.
Operational Friction
While some issues with virtual onboarding come from the simple fact of remote communications, others are directly tied to the ways digital systems function. Information overload is a real risk when employees have access to a new employer’s learning and onboarding resources.
Other potential points of friction include setup. If it’s too hard to install the necessary applications or access company onboarding resources, employees may have disappointing, inconsistent experiences. HR professionals, too, can struggle as they spend excessive amounts of time and budget to smooth out a complicated remote onboarding process.
The Playbook: 5 Steps for an Effective Virtual Onboarding Experience
Virtual onboarding, as a concept, isn’t going anywhere. As digital-native members of Gen Z become a dominant force in workplaces, there’s a natural convergence between these employees’ expectations and online educational content.
Faced with the inevitability of digital onboarding, HR professionals have to become as adept as possible at curating virtual experiences for new hires. Five impactful practices you can follow in your own remote onboarding process include:
1. Start Before Day One (Pre-Boarding)
Onboarding doesn’t have to start on an employee’s official first day. Your organization can make a strong impression by sending out pre-boarding materials before the start date to give the new hire time to acclimate to the company’s culture and expectations.
You can also square away logistical details of employment during this stage. This means ensuring the new employee has access to all the necessary systems to follow the onboarding process, along with the necessary equipment. You can also pass along a clear schedule for the worker’s first week.
2. Make Human Connections
Hearing from team members in their own words can make a new hire feel welcome immediately. Video is a powerful tool for accomplishing this type of connection, because the multi-sensory experience of watching a video can convey more information than reading a written document or even listening to isolated audio.
This kind of interpersonal connection can help employees integrate into the company culture seamlessly. Millennial and Gen Z workers tend to prize these types of interactions, which show that people are more than interchangeable numbers.
3. Deliver Engaging Training
How can asynchronous, remote training deliver the kinds of engaging, interactive experiences associated with in-person learning? Well, advanced digital tools make this kind of connection possible. Interactive videos on core topics can help new hires explore those concepts in depth while undergoing virtual onboarding sessions.
Live streaming is another potential option that allows your company to provide detailed information on the more complex aspects of your business. A live question-and-answer session with team leaders and subject matter experts can assuage doubts and drive in-depth discussion.
4. Guide New Employee Growth
New hires are best equipped to succeed when they have clear learning paths that are targeted to their new roles. These paths should guide employees through your expectations for them while equipping them with the knowledge and best practices they’ll need to succeed. Ideally, these paths will be easy for employees to follow at their own pace.
Today’s workers expect technology solutions to be convenient, well-designed and user-friendly. This is a natural consequence of living in an app-based world where consumer technology provides streamlined, easy experiences. Your digital onboarding solutions should meet this standard.
5. Iterate and Improve
Your onboarding program can and should evolve over time as you collect more data about its performance. There are two sides to this kind of measurement: quantitative data about new employee performance and qualitative feedback.
Useful metrics to measure the effectiveness of your program include time to productivity and satisfaction scores. The other side of the equation, interviews with new hires, can be more open-ended. You can ask for opinions about the virtual onboarding system and solicit suggestions for improvements.
Following these virtual onboarding best practices can deliver a smooth path for new hires, one that’s fully in line with the digital tone of business today.
Enjoy the Benefits of an Onboarding Program That Drives Business Results
When your virtual onboarding program is functioning at its best, you gain a wide range of advantages. These include:
- Lower costs compared to in-person training and acclimation sessions.
- High levels of consistency and scalability for large numbers of new hires.
- Access to a global talent pool.
- Faster time to productivity for new hires.
Building such a program calls for the right technology foundation. That’s where Vbrick’s enterprise video platform comes in. This system is the engine of a successful virtual onboarding program.
How Vbrick Supports Seamless Virtual Onboarding
The right video content platform props up your onboarding program in numerous ways. With Vbrick in place to manage your video content, you can:
- Centralize, Integrate, and Distribute: With Vbrick, welcome videos, training modules, and more can be created, hosted, and distributed from a single, secure, centralized hub that integrates with any enterprise tool or application, providing a seamless onboarding experience for employees.
- Engage and Analyze: Detailed analytics features allow you to track engagement, measure completion rates, and identify your most effective content, all so you can prove return on investment and improve your program.
- Protect and Comply: You can ensure your sensitive information is protected, taking advantage of Vbrick’s industry-spanning, enterprise-grade security and governance features.
Stepping into a new era of successful virtual onboarding sessions is only possible if companies build out the right infrastructure. The Vbrick platform is a useful part of that infrastructure, one that can support your HR programs as they expand and grow through the application of virtual onboarding best practices.
Schedule a demo to see what Vbrick can do for you.
