The onboarding process in a company is the first step in building a solid workforce that helps your company grow. An effective onboarding process allows your business to build a good relationship with your new employees and helps them adjust to their new roles and the company culture.

Suppose you lack a proper system for onboarding new hires. In that case, it will confuse you, and your new employees will find it difficult to adjust to the expectations of your business. A proper onboarding process is challenging, and the remote work culture makes it even more challenging.

Today the rise of the online workforce resulted in the need for virtual onboarding, which demands more strategic planning from your HR departments. However, as an HR manager, you can follow the steps mentioned in this article to make your virtual onboarding process effective and can lay the foundation for building a solid workforce.

So without further ado, let’s discuss the strategies you can implement in your virtual onboarding process.

Create detailed guidance for your new employees

Unlike face-to-face communication, people tend to miss the information conveyed online. So you should provide detailed information to your employees to avoid missing crucial information. Providing extensive details of what is expected of your employees, their roles, responsibilities, reporting structure, and performance metrics will help them adapt to your new work culture.

So make sure you convey everything to your employees without missing any details. This will allow them to look into the details you provide whenever they face difficulties or confusion.

Provide self-study materials

You don’t need to conduct endless virtual meetings with your new employees, explaining everything about the company and the role offered. Instead, you can provide your new hires with essential documents such as product documentation, handbooks, introductory articles, websites, competitor analysis, etc. This helps new staff to get accustomed to your business without spending hours on zoom meetings. It is an effective and time-saving method of handling employee onboarding.

Schedule a team introduction

Virtual working can make your employee feel lonely and disconnected from the company. To avoid this, you can arrange a virtual meeting with the essential team members with whom your new hires have to interact with. Organizing such discussions will help them realize they are part of a huge organization and that there are coworkers who can help them succeed in their new roles.

Also, you can organize a virtual meeting with your organization’s key figures, which helps your new employees break the ice. Such meetings will help them understand the organization’s mission, vision, and value.

Conduct frequent meetings with your new employees

Conduct frequent virtual meetings with your new hires to build a connection with them. Such sessions will help you understand the challenges they are facing now and allow you to provide any guidance if needed. These meetings will be valuable for the new hires as they feel cared for and will ensure they are part of an organization that considers their employees valuable.

Assign a mentor

Every new hire needs someone experienced to help with the strategies, tools, and task management. You can help them by assigning a mentor who can work with them closely and help them navigate the challenges of the job. To ensure the mentorship is effective, you should give someone who lives in the timezone close to your new hire.

Create Standard Operating Procedures

Proper systems created for your business can break or make the growth of your business. Instead of repeatedly teaching specific tasks to every job, which is time-consuming, you can create standard operating procedures that help your employees follow them easily.

For every recurring task, you can create SOPs that outline the exact steps needed and share them with your new hires. So they can follow the SOP to complete the specific task without hours of training. You can share the SOP with all your new employees and save hours while ensuring the efficiency of the tasks.

Plan virtual team activities

Every employee is a human who needs social interaction. Understanding this will help your company to lay strategies that facilitate team communications. You can plan virtual team gatherings and activities to unwind and arrange team lunches.

Make sure your business allocates time and budget for such activities, as they are core to the growth of your business. A strong relationship between your employees may seem impossible with remote work culture, so you need to take extra steps.

However, you need proper employee onboarding management software to streamline the entire onboarding process in your organization.

Artify 360 –  The Best Employee Onboarding Software in UAE

With Artify 360, you can simplify your onboarding and ensure a smooth process. You can recruit your employees easily and help them succeed in their new roles by building a good first impression of your company.

Artify 360 is a cloud-based HRMS software that suits the remote work culture perfectly. It comprises an effective onboarding checklist that you can customize based on your business needs. The friendly user interface will help your HR team operate without technical knowledge. Artify 360 is the only tool you need for effective virtual employee onboarding.