Borderless Onboarding: Engaging New Hires in a Remote-First World

First impressions matter. Employees are 58% more likely to stay with a company for at least three years if they have a structured, positive onboarding experience. With employee retention one of the top issues on the minds of HR leaders and CEOs alike, the onboarding process can heavily influence staff retention, productivity, and overall success.

To retain top talent and save the cost and effort of rehiring, a strong onboarding strategy is a must. But how do you maximize your onboarding program if your employees are not even in the same time zone? Borderless employee onboarding can be challenging as hiring managers have to do it all through a screen, which adds a new layer of complexity.

In this article, I’ll share what I believe are the most pressing challenges faced by companies in building remote onboarding experiences and different approaches for overcoming them.

Key challenges in borderless onboarding

Although digital collaboration and communication tools have evolved to facilitate the growth of remotely managed teams, remote onboarding still presents unique challenges. Namely:

• How do you build culture with teammates who don’t work in the same building – or even on the same continent?
• How do you manage a new hire’s technical environment and ensure they receive the right equipment?
• How do you pay them on time, compliantly, and accurately?
• How do you create a scalable onboarding process that doesn’t overburden HR teams?

Thanks to emerging technologies, overcoming these challenges no longer has to be complicated.

How to provide an effective onboarding for remote employees

Building culture

One of the biggest mistakes companies make when it comes to culture is believing that it happens organically. This mistake also impacts the onboarding process. If you’re not intentional about demonstrating your values and bringing people into the fold from day one, it’ll be harder for new hires to integrate. For in-person settings, teams are more likely to drive team bonding themselves, for example, by taking coffee breaks or organizing after-work drinks on a Friday. This can have a positive impact on a new hire’s onboarding by introducing them casually to the team. Remote organizations don’t have this luxury.

This can lead to alienation, poor communication, and missed collaboration opportunities. It can also lead to attrition, if employees aren’t feeling the ‘team spirit’ they need to get through challenging times.

• Start with a positive welcome message. Try out one of our 21+ welcome message templates to get started.
• Prioritize face-to-face communication. Build casual ‘get to know you’ meetings into the onboarding process, to introduce the new hire to their manager and their colleagues. Depending on the role, a welcome message from senior leadership may also be appreciated.
• Keep a steady stream of touchpoints. Include enough check-ins that the new hire doesn’t feel adrift, whilst also giving them enough time to digest information and complete onboarding tasks async—at Deel, we send short pulse surveys after 7, 30, 60, and 90 days on the job.
• Create a respectful, positive environment. This is an employee’s first impression of what it’ll be like to work for you. To avoid early attrition, be respectful of their time and offer support. Building trust from day one sets new hires up for a long-term positive relationship with the company.
• Create spaces for informal conversations. Facilitate shared spaces for water-cooler talk, like Slack channels related to special interests such as pets or travel.

Managing technical environments

Communication and technical issues can have a frustrating effect on the remote onboarding experience, and an ineffective or sluggish onboarding process may seriously impact a new recruit’s engagement with the company they are joining.

Onboarding can be an avalanche of forms and tools, so keeping things simple is vital. Using an onboarding platform integrated with your existing software provides a better new employee experience.

Businesses also need to effectively provision and manage IT devices across international borders. Coordinating hardware logistics locally is a relatively painless proposition. But trying to do it effectively and efficiently from another country can be complex.

Deel IT can make the provisioning and management of digital equipment across borders quick, simple, and painless. Supporting tech in over 127 countries, it can help with everything from onboarding, device delivery, collection, repair, and replacement, device security, pre-configuration, and data erasure.

Prioritizing payroll

Payroll is the bedrock of building trust with employees. Something as simple as getting payroll right from the outset can also make a huge difference to a new employee’s onboarding process. Paying international teams can be a complex affair as each country has its own set of local regulations and tax laws. Often HR teams must piece together many disparate tools and compliance systems in each global market, creating data silos, inconsistent worker experiences, and unnecessary extra work. This can also result in payroll errors and delays.

A new generation of multi-country payroll tools makes the process of paying international employees easy. With built-in compliance for businesses of all sizes and industry sectors, employers can fully onboard new talent faster, all on a single platform that scales with the business.

Creating scalable onboarding operations

Just as important, a seamless onboarding process also helps to reduce the administrative burden for human resources and hiring managers.

• Automate repetitive tasks: Standardize and automate workflows where possible to reduce manual effort.
• Choose tools that scale with your business: Choose an HRIS that can automate key workflows such as provisioning equipment and notifying managers of incoming employees.
• Create centralized resources: Invest time in creating resources and documentation like culture guides and tool how-to’s, and SOP documentation.
• Build role-based onboarding journeys: Design modular onboarding tracks that let you personalize the onboarding experience depending on the role or department.
• Implement regular feedback opportunities: Listen to qualitative feedback, as well as tracking quantitative metrics such as training completion rates, pass or fail rates on compliance quizzes, time to productivity, and onboarding satisfaction rate. Continuously iterate your onboarding process to provide the best possible experience for new hires.

Scalable, successful onboarding with Deel

Onboarding across international borders can be complex, but the digital tools and platforms available in today’s market have made the process far easier and faster. Together, they can lead to a better onboarding experience for new international recruits, which, in turn, makes for a more engaged, more committed employee.

With Deel, you get a Global HRIS that helps you swiftly and seamlessly hire and onboard new recruits wherever they are. Additionally, our learning management solution and survey automation tools will help you train and collect feedback from your new recruits, key elements for setting them up for success in your organization.

You also get an IT solution that helps you to equip them with the tech and tools they need, while offering 24/7 support to reduce downtime and respond to issues swiftly.

Keep overseas workforces connected and engaged, right from day one, with Deel. Request your 30-minute demo and discover how we can bolster your teams through onboarding and beyond.