How to integrate new hires into your remote team
As companies are figuring out how to adjust their hiring method to mandatory work-from-home policies, they also have to update their onboarding processes. Apart from improving the existing documentation and organizing conversations with key personnel, you also need to find a way to help them take part in your company culture.
Taking part in company culture is more than knowing the company’s core values and participating in occasional coffee breaks. Your goal is to make the new person feel welcome and part of the and the company as such. Here’s one way on how to integrate a new hire: connect them with an onboarding mentor.
Find a friendly face outside the immediate team
Pairing every new hire with a mentor or buddy from outside their immediate team is something I’ve seen at Automattic, implemented at Klaus and recommended everywhere else. If possible, this mentor should be someone not reporting to the same person, possibly even from a different division altogether. If your company has a hybrid setup, make sure fully remote people are paired with someone who has access to headquarters and vice versa.
This mentor should be someone who has been at the company for some time already and can answer questions around “how things work around here”. They should set up weekly, then biweekly conversations during the first three months. I have seen real friendships develop out of these pairings, though this is not a requirement.
These conversations won’t focus on work, since mentor and mentee probably don’t even work together. Instead, they are a great way to address values and ideas important to the company in a somewhat less structured way. That said, make sure you create a Mentor Guide (see below) that makes life as easy as possible for those who volunteer for mentoring.
Advantages of offering onboarding mentorship
Company culture is what people do every day. Having someone who’s official role is to ask all those beginner questions reduces friction and speeds up the learning process.
Access to an onboarding mentor reduces loneliness, especially for shy people. It can be quite daunting to join non-work chats or know where to ask for help around specific policies. Having a mentor who can present the new hire in selected channels or answer starter questions do a lot for inclusion.
An onboarding mentor can reduce anxiety. Sometimes it’s the really simple questions that create the biggest insecurities. “Can I walk the dog during the work day?” In these cases the mentor can usually help or point into the right direction.
Connecting people from different departments reduces silo thinking and avoids us vs. them situations. By pairing wildly different departments, you’ll break down silos simply by humanizing the existence of the others. Pair engineers with accounting, support people with marketing, marketing with engineering etc and you’ll increase empathy across the board.
If you’d like to try this out in your company, here’s the blueprint for a mentor guide that you can (and should) adapt to your own reality:
New Hire Mentor Guide
Mentors should have been at the company for a minimum of six months. HR or managers are in charge of the pairings. Mentors can sign up voluntarily for being part of this program. The time commitment is 1 hour per week during the first months, and 1 hour every other week for months 2 and 3.
New hires are assigned automatically.
Instructions for the Assigned Mentor
Check in with the new hire on day 1. Present yourself, maybe have a (virtual) coffee.
Make sure the new hire knows what to expect in the next couple of days, e.g. whom they’ll be working with or whether there’s an onboarding list for them.
Schedule a weekly 30-45 min meeting for the first four weeks, and biweekly (every two weeks) meetings for months 2 and 3. You will find recommended topics in the below list - and they are just that: recommendations. Feel free to bring your own topics.
Do not skip those meetings! It is part of our remote culture maintenance. Our communication depends on us having strong connections between sometimes-in-office and almost-never-in-office folks.
Go through as many of the topics on the Onboarding checklist as you feel like.
Answer questions, all the questions.
Don't know what to talk about in your check-ins? Have a look at the conversation menus in this article. Here are some additional starting points for the first two months:
Week 1: People
Present yourself, get to know each other.
Who is who and who is responsible for what within the company? Are there specific people they should talk to learn about fascinating stuff that may or may not be related to work? This is a great way to reach out to new people and have THEM talk about their passion (and get a peek in what they work on).
The productivity nerd
The photographer
The poker player
The one renovating houses...
Which meetings are there for everyone - how to find out and which to attend?
Week 2: Practicalities
Expensing guidelines and reports (for those who are remote) or how to get access to tools/headphones etc etc
How do you manage vacations, e.g. how do people usually communicate and organize their days off? If you have employees in different countries - how is that handled?
Week 3: Communication
How has their experience been so far using your internal communication suite? What works well? What’s different to what they were used to? What’s new? What do they struggle with?
If you use different types of communication for different types of discussion (e.g. Github, Slack, internal blog, Confluence) - what is the difference and how can they participate?
Social Slack channels and which one YOU enjoy most - maybe go through the channel list and check out what has been added in the past
Existing documentation that can be helpful in general, including where to publish ideas.
Week 4: Productivity
Helpful tools you are using. Discuss best practices from others. Maybe there’s an internal list that you can go through and update together?
Task management - share your approaches?
How do you make sure to stay on track and stay on task in general?
Week 6: Remote-first
What is the company’s view of remote. What stands out for you as an employee.
Discuss together what are the biggest differences, and the most surprising similarities between remote and sometimes-in-office? How can you both make sure that no one feels that they are missing out (on either side)?
Week 8: Retrospective
The new hire has been here for 2 months. How do they feel? What has been the biggest challenge? Any recommendations on what we can do better in the onboarding process? Please pass recommendations on to HR - this guide is a living and breathing object (kind of), so it should be updated regularly.
Feel free to continue to meet once in awhile if you loved hanging out. Otherwise, you’ll probably run into each other when in-person meetups resume - or in shared social channels.