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First impressions matter.
20% of employee turnover occurs within the first 45 days of employment, meaning many new hires leave a new job before they officially complete onboarding. With employee retention one of the top issues on the minds of Australian CEOs, the onboarding process can heavily influence staff retention, productivity, and overall success. So it’s important for businesses to get it right.
Onboarding relates to everything a new hire experiences, from the moment they accept the role through to the first few weeks in the role as they ramp-up and build the skills and speed to perform their new role at a high level. The goal of onboarding is to make a new employee feel comfortable with the entire team, knowledgeable about tools and tech, and excited to settle into the role and the business. A great onboarding program gets new hires up to speed quickly and keeps them in the company long enough to see results versus the cost of recruiting, hiring and training them.
But how do you maximise your onboarding program if your employees are not even in the same time zone? Remote employee onboarding can be challenging as hiring managers have to do it all through a screen, which adds a new layer of complexity.
Remote onboarding challenges
Common challenges to onboarding remotely include difficulty in making company connections, demonstrating culture, keeping new hires engaged and effectively managing their technical environment and equipment. 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.
Conversely, a seamless, positive onboarding experience can enhance employee engagement, helping new hires feel connected to the organisation’s mission, goals and values and increase the chances of a new recruit staying with the company for longer.
Just as important, an easy onboarding process also helps to reduce the administrative burden for human resources and hiring managers.
Some best practices to create a positive and engaging onboarding experience include tailoring the onboarding timeline to the respective recruit, involving multiple team members, personalising the experience and using onboarding software to streamline the process.
Tackling the tools of the trade
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. Tools like device supply and management software Hofy, acquired by Deel in July this year, 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.
Prioritising payroll
Beyond hardware, something as simple as getting payroll right from the outset can also make a huge difference to a new employees’ 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 tons of extra work. This can also result in payroll errors and delays.
A new generation of multi-country cloud-based payroll tools make 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.
Ongoing actions for long-term onboarding success
With the fundamentals taken care of, businesses can implement continuous improvement strategies and evaluations over time to get a handle on ensuring long-term international onboarding success. After the first week, for instance, it’s a good idea to book daily virtual check-in meetings and allocate for new recruits to review onboarding materials and complete necessary training courses.
At the one month mark, weekly virtual check-ins are a good idea, as is setting performance goals with new employees for the first three months. For the three-month milestone, businesses should continue to host regular check-in meetings, typically bi-weekly, and send a survey about the employee’s onboarding experience.
Beyond the three month mark, it’s a good idea to host ongoing check-in meetings and discuss new team members’ career progression goals, build a career progression plan that outlines how and when they can get promoted and schedule training sessions for skill development.
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.
Shannon Karaka, Country Leader, Australia and New Zealand, Deel.
Last Updated on October 9, 2024 by Shannon Karaka
