How to Run Remote Onboarding: 12 Best Practices

Remote onboarding? A year ago the term sounded exotic and a little “nerdy” — and it applied to only a small fraction of companies. Today, onboarding a new hire entirely online is the everyday reality for most organizations. So how do you do it well, for the business and for the employee?

Before we get to the best practices in the title, let’s start with a handful of numbers. From the organization’s point of view, onboarding is a business-critical process. It shapes not only how engaged an employee feels, but also their effectiveness, day-to-day productivity, and loyalty to the company.

• According to “The True Cost of a Bad Hire,” a report by Brandon Hall Group, a well-run onboarding process can improve team retention by as much as 82%.
• What’s more, onboarding also lifts employee productivity, by up to 70%.
• As SHRM reports, 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years after a great onboarding experience (and 58% stay beyond the three-year mark).
• Losing an employee simply doesn’t pay. The cost of losing a freshly hired candidate can reach three times their salary.

So how do you design onboarding that runs 100% online and still feels like a remarkable experience for everyone involved?

1. Start onboarding before day one

This is always true, but in the era of remote work it matters more than ever. Imagine you and a candidate have jointly decided they’ll join the company. The first day of work is… six weeks away. You can’t afford to lose touch for that long.

That strange stretch between no-longer-a-candidate and not-yet-an-employee is the perfect time for preboarding. You can gradually introduce the new hire to how the organization works, walk them through internal processes, and start building loyalty and engagement.

How? For example, by giving them access to a platform where, step by step and at their own pace, they get familiar with key information (say, through bite-sized, micro-learning lessons), pick up on the company vibe (watching company videos and employee-generated content), and even test their knowledge (with an engaging quiz).

No platform yet? Send the new hire short, recurring emails (ideally one email = one piece of information). Use them to share company handbooks, a series of welcome videos, or simple how-tos. Just don’t overdo the number of emails!

Remember that whether someone actually reads the material depends entirely on their goodwill, so it should be as inviting and engaging as possible. Our clients who use gamification in onboarding reward every preboarding activity with points. Once the employee joins the organization, they can exchange those points for rewards and perks.

2. Ship the equipment early, and with passwords

Before you walk a new hire through new rules and your company culture, give them the conditions to actually do the job: the equipment they need to carry out their responsibilities. Try to have the package arrive at least a week before the official start of your collaboration. That way, from the very first moment, they can focus on getting up to speed instead of fighting technical issues.

3. Put together a welcome pack

One of the main reasons freshly hired employees quickly start scanning for new opportunities is the lack of a sense of belonging. Over the past months, that problem has only deepened. After all, it’s hard to feel part of a company community without direct contact with colleagues or a shared office space.

A gesture that helps build belonging is sending a welcome package of company swag to the employee’s home. Think branded notebooks, t-shirts, or mugs. But you can go a step further and add gifts tailored to the new hire’s interests. If someone noted on their resume that they’re a coffee lover, they’ll be delighted to find a bag of aromatic Arabica beans in the box.

To make the employee feel like an important part of your team from day one, it’s worth including a personalized note from the CEO or their direct manager, with congratulations and a warm welcome. A small thing that goes a long way.

4. Give the process structure, for the long haul!

A good plan is half the battle. Build a universal template ahead of time to serve as your blueprint for onboarding new people, and adapt it to different roles and departments.

Start with a simple checklist. It should include tasks to complete before day zero (during the preboarding mentioned above), plus actions covering the first day, week, and month, and a final checklist for the end of the probation period.

It matters that the action plan reaches beyond the first few weeks and includes the key milestones all the way to full productivity (which usually arrives 6–9 months after the hire date).

Time to put the plan into action. Add the relevant meetings to calendars in advance (the new hire’s, their manager’s, their team’s, and yours), and give the candidate a heads-up about how the whole process will unfold. If you use an online onboarding tool, it’s a good idea to configure it as a sequence of phases, so the employee unlocks the next stage’s content only after completing the previous one.

5. A guide, a mentor, a buddy… point to a helping hand

Another key element of onboarding is assigning a so-called buddy, someone who introduces the new hire to how things work at the company. It can be a more senior colleague or a teammate with a knack for coaching. The buddy’s job includes explaining the company’s informal customs, answering questions in real time, and clearing up doubts (and there are always some).

A buddy’s support is especially important online, when direct contact with other employees is missing. Prepare the people in buddy roles to take a proactive approach. It matters that they don’t just answer questions but proactively “show the new hire around,” for instance through a series of short virtual coffee chats with defined topics (company customs, team customs, how you celebrate, how you run online meetings, and so on).

6. Define tasks for the manager

One stage of onboarding is role-specific onboarding: giving the new hire detailed information about their responsibilities and what the job actually involves. This is usually the job of the direct manager or team lead.

Role-specific onboarding covers things like how the team operates (recurring meetings, team processes and rituals), a review of ongoing projects, a walk-through of the duties tied to the role, and an introduction to how individual and team goals are set and tracked. Because the work is remote, it’s worth agreeing with the manager, already at this stage, on the cadence of their regular one-on-ones with the employee, including the informal ones that stand in for spontaneous chats by the coffee machine.

That’s a lot! A list of tasks with deadlines and the main goals of each step makes role-specific onboarding much easier.

7. Introduce the team, and make it fun for both sides!

“Hi everyone, meet Ola, she’ll be handling our customers from today. Ola brought us cookies. Everyone say two sentences about yourself.” That’s roughly what a new hire’s first contact with the team usually looks like. In a remote setting, without cookies or handshakes, joining a team can turn into an awkward video call where everyone squirms, trying not to say something embarrassing about themselves.

What if you flipped the whole thing around so it’s genuinely fun for both sides? You can task the team with introducing themselves in an unconventional way across three half-hour meetings. In one, colleagues might share their favorite moments together, or tell the team’s story using photos they’ve collected beforehand. Turn it into a mission with a reward unlocked for every team member once it’s done. Satisfaction guaranteed!

8. Blend different ways of sharing knowledge

In an onboarding process that runs entirely online, it’s easy to accidentally overdo it and bury the new hire under too much material. Remote work minimizes face-to-face contact, and we try to make up for it with extra documents, instructions, handbooks, and spontaneous “just one more thing” emails.

Go for varied formats, blend your knowledge! Blended learning is a mixed teaching method that combines direct contact with a facilitator and online activities (webinars, 1:1 conversations, quizzes, and so on). Guides, procedures, and “knowledge nuggets” don’t have to be dry documents. You can turn them into eye-catching graphics, podcasts, or videos. Add employee-generated content, knowledge checks, and surveys that gauge how people rate the process, and you’ve got a healthy, easy-to-digest mix.

9. Set the mood, grab a coffee

A virtual coffee with a randomly chosen teammate? Why not, especially when “conversation starters” help break the ice and get things going. The Donut app for Slack helps automate these spontaneous meetups.

Donut pairs employees for short meetings and gives them a chance to get to know each other. That’s especially helpful in a remote reality where we don’t get to chat “in passing.” I can vouch for the effectiveness of these donuts personally. The Gamfi team has been using Donut for almost a year, and these short meetings in random pairings are a great chance to connect and get to know colleagues from a new angle.

10. Survey the employee after every stage

A lot has already been said about measuring candidate experience. You can extend that monitoring to onboarding too, and tailor it to the stages of the whole process. A new hire’s experience changes over time, after the first week it can look completely different than after a month. And if we only ask for an assessment of the entire process once it’s over, important, fixable details can slip past us.

Define the most important check-points in the onboarding process, say, after a week, a month, and three months. After each one, invite the new team member to a short survey. It might consist of an NPS score and two qualitative questions about the strongest and weakest parts of the process so far.

Aggregated results make it easier to diagnose any problems and get new employees used to speaking up on the matters that affect them.

11. Show them how to share the new job on social media

A common practice in the first week is celebrating the new employer on LinkedIn. How do I do it? What can I say about the new company? How do I describe the recruitment process I just aced? Can I tag my new colleagues in the post? Will anyone mind? These questions can run through the mind of an employee who wants to share the change but doesn’t yet know the rules at their new employer.

It’s worth getting ahead of these doubts. Include a short guide in your onboarding on how to communicate a job change on social media. In it, you might encourage using a company hashtag and outline the basics of your employee advocacy program. Maja Gojtowska writes about why it’s worth building one, and how, here.

12. Reinforce the effect with gamification

Make the whole process more effective, for instance by moving it entirely into a gamification platform! Gamification lets you translate the full employee onboarding journey into a compelling narrative inside an online platform. You guide the employee through a series of tasks and micro-trainings split into stages, during which they learn the company’s story, its products and services, its structure, and its key processes. They even complete basic training along the way! In a single platform you can bring together every element of the process: from a knowledge base, through form processing and team challenges, all the way to satisfaction surveys.

Onboarding takes just a few weeks. Once designed in a gamification platform, the onboarding process can scale freely, whether you’re rolling it out to one, dozens, or hundreds of new hires. You can also extend it to candidates who’ve already received an offer but haven’t started yet, creating an engaging preboarding experience that builds their bond with the company and minimizes the risk of losing them to another organization.

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I hope the list above helps you design an effective remote onboarding process for your new employees.