The former independent vice chairman of Deloitte Jay Samit once said, “Onboarding starts with satisfying the most basic of Maslow’s psychological needs: belonging. New hires shouldn’t arrive to an empty cube and be forced to forage through corridors searching for a computer and the bare necessities of office life. A new hire isn’t a surprise visitor from out of town. Plan for their arrival.” While Mr. Samit is referring to a more traditional in-person onboarding scenario, his point that companies should plan for the arrival of new hires still stands. In the United States, as many as 25% of workers are organizational newcomers engaged in an onboarding process. The rise of COVID-19 has changed the business landscape, as a Workable survey noted that 71.1% of respondents believe remote work and distributed teams will be a major paradigm shift going forward. With necessity being the mother of invention, remote onboarding processes are the future of business. Here are a number of benefits to using a remote onboarding process.
Safety
As COVID-19 appears not to be going anywhere for a while, a remote onboarding process is a prudent way to bring newly hired employees up to speed without needing them to physically be in the office, keeping them and other employees safe from being exposed to the coronavirus. In addition to physical safety, remote onboarding also keeps your employees’ information and data secure via restricted access to the respective software and server that runs the remote onboarding process.
Paperless
In addition to being better for the environment, a paperless onboarding process also helps prevent unnecessary clutter either at the workplace or at employees’ homes. It also makes it easier to access any files, as instead of having to physically go into the office and dig the papers out of file cabinets, employees can simply log onto the server and pull up any documents that they need. Most remote onboarding programs also offer a companion smartphone app, which allows the user to access the requisite files even when they are away from their computer.
Saves Time
Done in the office, the onboarding procedure for new employees can be an arduous task. Your human resources professionals have to make sure documents and credentials are prepared and assist the new hires by walking them through the process until it is complete. Once that is done, your HR people must file any forms that have been filled out by employees, give them the organizational spiel, and introduce them to the other employees that they will be working with. This process can take a considerable amount of time and is just plainly inefficient. A remote onboarding system automates most of these tasks, and streamlines the onboarding process, saving everyone’s time.
Accuracy
A remote onboarding process not only saves time, but it has the potential to keep your company on the right side of the law. Any errors committed during the employee onboarding process could find your company not in compliance with state and federal labor laws. A remote onboarding process is more accurate than the standard, manual onboarding process for a couple of reasons. First, it is automated. Instead of multiple people handling multiple documents and trying to keep everything straight, the remote onboarding process handles all the required forms in the same place. Second, it is organized and transparent. In most programs, you can create a checklist that new employees can view, allowing them to easily see what they’ve already completed and what they still have left to do in the flow of the onboarding process.
Provides Complete Information
A remote onboarding process allows your company to easily create a replicable standard program that introduces new hires to your company. Typically, this can be daunting, as there’s a lot of information that a new employee would need to know in order to be able to be successful at your company. Performing the onboarding process manually would theoretically be possible, but instead of having your human resources professionals show videos to new hires, a remote onboarding program can include videos among the other information available within the program. It also would enable your company to tailor its message so that it highlights your company’s core values as the potential new hire learns about your business’s vision, goals, and mission statements, as well as your organizational policies.
Detailed Reports
One of the top features of a remote onboarding process is that it can conveniently track the progress of each employee as they work their way through the onboarding program. Instead of exchanging a long chain of emails with each new hire to see how far along they are, the necessary employee can simply log onto the onboarding program and read a detailed report that states who has already completed the onboarding process, who is in the middle of it (and what stage they are at), and who has yet to begin the onboarding process.
Conclusion
Employees working remotely appears to be a trend that is here to stay. It only makes sense then that the standard onboarding process used to get new employees acclimated to their new organization would follow suit. There are several advantages to implementing a remote onboarding process, including its accuracy, efficiency, and the information and reports that it can transmit and provide. It also has the ancillary benefits of being paperless and safe. Looking ahead, the future is clear, and it involves the utilization of remote onboarding processes.
