Remote onboarding. A very important and limp process...

The remote mode of work is gradually leading to a deepening crisis in employee bonding. According to Gartner research, only 40% of employees have a sense of belonging to their organization. The problem is even worse for new hires; only 32% of employees hired in the last 12 months have a sense of belonging to their organization. According to the survey, HR professionals are already predicting that nearly half of all employees will continue their remote work mode when the pandemic ends.

Challenges of remote work

Undoubtedly, the biggest challenge associated with remote work is maintaining the productivity and culture of the organization. Employees switching to work-from-home mode report less frequent contact with colleagues, and interactions are more transactional in nature. This causes a very serious problem in creating a cultural bond for an organization. Imagine: if current employees, i.e. people who understand the organizational culture of a given company, are "disengaged," what hope do new employees have to develop a sense of belonging? Organizational culture is not just a pleasant element for employees - Happy Hours, team-building events, etc. It's also a competitive differentiating element. The customer, working with a particular company, observes and sees how employees act among themselves, the degree of intimacy between them, and, as a result, whether they give the impression of a friendly company. This affects the financial success of the organization and, according to a Gartner study, the percentage is as high as 70. Undoubtedly, an additional benefit is the higher level of commitment of the employee team and the desire to stay on the job.

Traditional onboarding

HR leaders use onboarding to help new employees acclimate and connect with the organization's culture. Traditional onboarding methods do not work well for new employees. Prior to the pandemic, only 44% of recruiters said that their organization's onboarding process integrates new employees into the company culture. Only 33% of employees are satisfied with the organization's culture and training. Although traditionally onboarding has often missed the mark in connecting new employees to the company culture, HR leaders assumed that new employees would adopt corporate values and ways of working in an "organic" way. There was method in this madness: new employees bonded with the organizational culture simply by living it and observing it in their daily interactions, getting to know their neighbors at their desks, or having casual conversations in the social room. These opportunities are much more limited today - it's harder to grasp norms in virtual meetings or connect with peers when you don't know who to approach or how open they will be. New employees need to see how the organization achieves and follows through on its goals. More experienced employees may know how an organizational goal translates into business impact however, new employees do not have this insight into the organization.

Remote onboarding

Faced with a virtual environment - in which virtually the majority of companies now work - the opportunities to build organic cultural connections have been greatly reduced. This is a very difficult task, since personal contacts are based on behavioral details. One could say that the devil is in them. As we know, verbal communication is only 30% of our total ability to communicate. Signals such as, for example, the type of smile - whether the whole face is smiling or just the lips - are very important information that our body picks up for analysis. Starting from such small pieces of information, we build an effective message - understandable because it is supported by this non-verbal communication. It is a good idea to use management tools - platforms for comprehensive work organization. They offer many functionalities tailored appropriately to each level of employee in the company. The principle of this type of solution is to create, so to speak, a remote structure on the model of stationary work practices. Individual activities are carried out from the level of our employee portfolio, which contains all the information we need to perform our work, documents, contracts, archives, etc. In the case of onboarding, our HR specialists have the opportunity to plan a detailed process of implementation individually for each employee, prepare for him a set of necessary documents, or order on his profile appropriate training, for example, in a specialized field. The creation of such individual and detailed instructions for each employee, significantly speeds up the implementation process, and thanks to individual planning, we can include relevant information for each employee, which in turn creates the very unique culture of the organization.