For remote teams, how is your new hire on-boarding process?

Hey John, I’ve seen it in multiple ways - huge company that eventually told remote team members to relocate and my current one who’s ~20 US based employees are distributed.

First for the huge company. First 3 days included a boring HR orientation in one of 3 offices whether you where remote or onsite - everyone was treated the same. Got badge, laptop, security overview, heard some company history, etc. The hiring manager would make team introductions and it was about it. Remote team members would have to figure out what access they needed to contribute and figure it out themselves if a team member didn’t go out of their way to help them. I’d advise against this approach.

At my current company, we try to get new team members contributing ASAP. After an offer is finalized, laptop, monitor, and other remote gear like an external web cam & improved microphone are shipped to the new member to arrive before their first day. I handle tech, so I’ll stick with developers scope wise here, but other roles should be similar minus the code. We have a checklist of accounts, access and training materials (always be improving your training material) for each role. Since we are in healthcare, we have extra industry/security training for access to certain tools and accounts. But basically, on day one, I’ll have a kickoff call with the new team member showing them all our tools (list of things provided previously) then either pair with them on a deep dive into the system, git repos, backlogs, etc to get them familiar with the eco-system as a whole. Then either have a team member schedule a few more video calls to elaborate more and/or make a small assignment that involves a Merge Request. Even if it small, like a documentation fix, ideally a new team member will be able to make a contribution within 48 hours . In the following days/ weeks, go out of your way to make sure they are added to any new/appropriate meetings, chat rooms, email lists that might have popped up since their initial account setup. Basically facilitate that they are visible and interacting with other teammates.

I glossed over a bunch since I’m on my phone, but i hope it helps. Companies like Gitlab & Zapier are fully remote and have some great general remote articles/ handbooks/ blog posts FYI.

I've done remote work in the past, and in each case there was little or no onboarding. This has always been a giant problem and tripled the amount of time needed to become productive. :/