Onboarding While on the Go

You’ve taken the time to define your goals, interview candidates, and select the best new addition to your virtual business. Now what?

The final aspect of growing your virtual business by expanding your team is to onboard your new hire. We wanted to provide you with tips that can help your new employee excel in their new position, helping you to see all the amazing benefits of expanding your remote team.

When you’re onboarding a new remote employee, keep these 4 tips in mind.

They can help you set your entire team but especially your new employee up for success.

1. Connect your new employee with the rest of the team

Take the time to have a full team meeting, or meetings scheduled so that your latest employee can meet the rest of the team. This will help ease the transition, and make your new team member feel more comfortable. No one ever works alone, so making sure from the start that they feel comfortable going to the rest of your team for help or to collaborate is important. It can also help your existing team members feel more comfortable with the latest addition, and understand what they can bring to the table.

2. Share your guidelines and boundaries

The guidelines and boundaries that you have already defined should have been mentioned at least briefly during the interview process. But during the onboarding process make sure that the expectations are explicitly stated, and that your new team member is able to fulfill them. Set your new team member up for success by giving them clear guidance on what it will take to be a cohesive team member.

3. Provide collaboration tools

In a remote team, it can be easy to disconnect from the rest of the team. This can lead to information silos, and errors that could have been avoided. Whether you use Slack to stay connected, Zoom to run meetings, or Yodel to collaborate on voice communication, make sure that your new hire has access to these tools and understands how best to leverage them.

4. Resist the urge to micromanage

As with all remote employees, it would be impossible to micromanage a new telecommuting team member. Trust that you have made the right choice in your latest addition, and set up benchmarks and checkpoints to evaluate their contributions to the team. But don’t be afraid to let them go and do the job they were brought on to do.

We hope that we have given you the resources to understand if it’s time to add to your remote team, and tools you can implement if you choose to do so.

What challenges or benefits have you experienced when growing a remote team? We’d love to hear from you!