Overcoming Challenges in Virtual Onboarding of Employees

What if you were joining a new organization today? How would you want your first day to be? Welcoming? Inclusive? Pleasant? That, in a nutshell, is what an organization should be focusing on providing its employees on their first day of work with them. The importance of onboarding new employees can’t be stressed enough.

The onboarding experience lays the foundation for new employees to overcome their natural anxiety and get acquainted with the organization culture and their new role in an unstressed manner.
It can also help reduce employee attrition and build loyalty among new joinees.

Changes in the Onboarding Landscape

The human factor is extremely important in the onboarding process. The initial meeting with team members and experiencing the organizational culture in person can go a long way in creating a lasting onboarding experience both for the employees and the organization. With a pandemic-hit environment, virtual onboarding has become the norm in the industry. But the big question arises, is virtual onboarding as effective as regular onboarding?

Challenges in Virtual Onboarding

With the change in the onboarding landscape, enterprises have had to overcome many challenges to ensure smooth onboarding, the biggest of them being, as mentioned earlier, the human factor – the socializing with the team, the face-to-face meetings, the feel of belonging to the organization, and so on. Here are some challenges that enterprises need to particularly overcome.

Logistical issues and IT support

Employees need assistance in getting their work laptops, IDs assigned to them, and logging in for the first time. Considering a virtual setup, the organization needs to ensure maximum support and comfort during this process. How can employees access any confidential data from their own devices, if at all, or from remote locations without security breaches? It may be a good idea to assign a remote IT person to the employees to take them through the initial process of accessing important company and project-related documents, and assist them in queries if any.

Time and attendance capture

Capturing the time of login and logout could become a big challenge when employees are working remotely. Project and deliverable schedules could also be missed by employees when not in the company network. The organization needs to ensure the new employees are given enough training on logging their time and tracking project deliverables.

Lack of communication

Virtual onboarding can result in a total lack of communication between the new employees and the organization. A regular onboarding process would involve a couple of days of structured orientation that would throw light on the company culture, processes to be followed, teams to interact with when in need and general networking opportunities that employees may miss out on when being onboarded virtually.

Overcoming Challenges and Providing Effective Onboarding Experience

With advancements in technology, it has become possible to bridge the human gap between virtual and traditional onboarding. There are many onboarding platforms available in the market that organizations can use for their end-to-end onboarding needs.

Digitized documents

Leveraging technology can begin right here. There are a lot of processes and paperwork that can easily be initiated digitally before onboarding the employees. Collecting certificates, digital signatures, approvals if any can be made online so that the onboarding process can be made seamless and efficient.

Timely communication

One of the key points in making new employees comfortable is timely communication of what is to come. What are the next steps that they need to take? Where and how can they find help? Timely communication is very important, and can easily be done through a robust onboarding tool.

Virtual introductions with teams and managers

If there’s one thing that employees may miss in a virtual setup, it would be the in-person time they would have got with the teams and the managers they will be working with. You could think about scheduling timely online meetings with their teams and managers, to ensure the communication channel is always open and transparent.

Online training and support

Once an efficient onboarding tool is set in place, providing online training and support to new employees will become easy and smooth. This is pivotal to make the employees comfortable and get them up to speed with their work.
Once an efficient onboarding tool is set in place, providing online training and support to new employees will become easy and smooth. This is pivotal to make the employees comfortable and get them up to speed with their work.

Conclusion

A good onboarding experience is critical for every organization. Recruiting isn’t over until the new employees are settled in their jobs. With companies waking up to the concept of onboarding remotely, technology-enabled onboarding is here to stay. There is no dearth of onboarding tools available in the market today.

HirePro’s SaaS-based platform automates end-to-end virtual onboarding activities. Its robust technology makes it easy to integrate with any Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that has an Application Programming Interface (API) support. Deliver a human and seamless experience to all your new employees with HirePro’s virtual onboarding today!