Tips for Adding a Human Touch to Virtual Onboarding

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So your candidate just accepted an offer. Great! Now what? Given the uncertainty of when things will be back to “normal,” odds are you’ll need to onboard new hires virtually. Whether your team is working from home due to COVID-19 — or you already had a distributed team — the current situation is showing us just how important onboarding (and pre-boarding) are to the success of each hire. If you’re in charge of making hiring decisions, it’s time to tune up your game.

Why? In my experience, most employees make the decision to bail or commit long term in their first six months, and the last thing any company needs is more future instability. An employee’s early days are a critical stage that requires intentional leadership, even more so when done virtually.

I won’t bore you with the administrative logistics of onboarding 101 (like tax forms, office supplies, ordering swag, and log-in credentials, etc.). Rather, let’s dive into the “feels.” It’s extremely important to create a sense of belonging, trust, and engagement even when you’re working from home. Making a new employee feel welcome is the first step to setting them up for success.

There are two critical components that serve as a foundation for successful onboarding: Mission & Values Alignment and Engagement.

Mission & Values Alignment

It’s extremely important that employees understand your company’s mission and values. These values should be visible (as in, write them down somewhere where people will see them), and spoken about often. It’s important to make the mission explicit, too. Regardless of where everyone’s home office may be, the mission unites each person on the team. The mission keeps everyone focused on a common goal, the destination. Even if you’re at home working in your favorite sweatpants, trying to keep your cat from typing nonsense messages on Slack, you’re not alone. Your mission provides you with a sense of purpose and connection to your distributed teammates.

Your company values serve as a guide on your mission, like an internal compass. They direct your actions. It’s important not just to tell your new hires what your company values are, but to show them. Values are reinforced by action and rituals, regardless of where you’re working.

As one of Riviera Partners’ first New York employees, I worked alone for a period of time and recall feeling isolated before we built out our team in NYC. It’s easy to lose sight of values and culture, especially when no one’s around! What kept me focused was Riviera’s mission and the clarity with which our founder communicated it to me, which made it easier for me to trust that I wasn’t (metaphorically) alone. That mission was, and still is, to deliver the best service and experience, and to help people and companies reach their full potential.

Your company’s mission and values don’t have to be complex, but they do have to be clear. It’s critical you create a shared consciousness around them in order for new employees to guide their own actions when working from home.

Engagement

When onboarding a new hire virtually, you can’t just pop over to their desk with your matcha latte to organically check-in. You need to create new ways to make them feel welcomed and to get them engaged, even though they’re distant. In remote environments, it’s crucial to make a conscious effort to get to know each other as humans, not just colleagues. You’ll need to demonstrate you are approaching their onboarding purposefully and prepare to engage with intention. This builds trust in leadership, and it also helps build camaraderie with co-workers.

Here are my tips for how to create an intentional onboarding.

Pre-boarding:

• If you don’t already have a company face page (picture an “About Us” page, but aimed internally instead of at the public), you’re missing an opportunity to humanize and connect people. Create a digital space where each employee answers a few questions to allow others to get to know them. I’d stay away from asking about certain status markers like university or degrees, as this works against creating a feeling of inclusivity. Instead, they can mention things like their hobbies, favorite places, foods, and share a personal picture with their families, friends, or pets to make the bio more personable.
• Carefully consider a start date, and make sure it works for everyone. Starting someone too soon without downtime between jobs — or starting them during crunch time when your team is on a deadline — is not setting anyone up for success.
• Have anyone who interviewed the new hire send a personal email to welcome them and connect on LinkedIn.
• Ease new job anxiety by sending your new hire an onboarding care package before they start. This can include HR docs, login credentials, and their agenda for Day 1. Keep it simple.

Onboarding:

• Document everything. Consider everything they’ll need for communication, file storage, and collaboration. Your FAQ/company repository should be your bible — and if you don’t yet have one, now’s a good time to make it.
• Give them a virtual office tour. If you have some pictures and videos from the BC (before COVID-19) era, share them with your new hire.
• Set up a buddy system. Help ease the social transition for the new hire by assigning them a buddy who will assist them during their onboarding, making them feel welcomed and supported. Gitlab is renowned for this, and thankfully they documented everything here.
• Assign the new hire to shadow various people across the organization. Let them digest the lingo and experience the different interactions.
• Introduce the new hire to their teammates. You can build trust and personal rapport through virtual lunches, coffee chats, or casual hangouts.
• Don’t forget about cross-pollination! For remote employee interaction, use tools like the Donut-Bot in Slack, which pairs random people to have conversations that build social connections.
• Hold CEO/founder intros and AMA (“ask me anything”) video meetings, with the camera on. Share the founders’ story and their vision, and emphasize how the new hire plays into the future.
• Schedule weekly one-on-one meetings with the new hire and their hiring manager. Make sure to budget time for personal chit-chat.
• Set clear expectations. As Mike Lee, director at Riviera Partners, suggests, try to “lay out what the new hire should be aiming for at certain benchmarks — 30 days, 60 days, 90 days — in their role.”
• Provide a certain level of suggested structure to their day. You’ll also want to keep new hires connected by clarifying expectations, which will help give them confidence they’re on the right track.
• Plan (a little) in advance. In addition to weekly check-ins, your head of HR (or whatever the appropriate department is called in your company) should schedule a one month check-in to evaluate your company’s onboarding process. Create a scorecard for your performance so you can course-correct and identify areas for improvement.

No two onboardings are exactly alike, but you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. Following the simple steps outlined above can help you give new hires a clear sense of purpose and a strong feeling of community right from the beginning. By doing this, you’re not only setting them up for success in the future, you’re also making your own job a lot easier. And most of us would agree that “making things easier” sounds pretty good right now.