In this guide, you will learn:
- The importance of onboarding and adaptation
- How to control productivity
- All about high-quality internal communications
- Why it is important to train middle managers
- Well-being is not a buzzword
Onboarding and Adaptation
Sociologists and other researchers believe that 60% of people make a decision about long-term cooperation with a company in the first three days of work. How can we make these first three days successful remotely?
The effectiveness of onboarding depends on the HR manager and the supervisor. At the very beginning of cooperation, it is especially important not to leave a newcomer alone. In the office, they can communicate with colleagues between tasks, ask questions, and feel the charisma of the supervisor and the atmosphere of the company. But remotely, all that connects them to the company is just a computer screen.
Make onboarding and adaptation checklists. Add to the newcomer’s calendar meetings with the HR manager, line manager, and connect them to general online meetings. Arrange a feedback exchange and provide the newcomer with access to the necessary information and instructions for all cases of working life from the very first day.
Adapting new employees takes from 3 to 6 months. Set measurable goals for probation periods and document them at the very beginning. Be transparent in your communications with the newcomer. It is very important for the employee to understand what is happening in the company and what its development vector is, and how they fit into this roadmap.
Controlling Productivity
It is necessary to control the productivity of employees working remotely. Do you need to do this with the help of spy software? Probably not. There are more friendly ways to track the productivity of the remote team.
Business processes are divided into subprocesses. Each process should have a digital footprint that reflects employee engagement and tracks progress. What is a digital footprint? Anything: follow-up, ticket, post, letter, meetings in the calendar, and so on.
For this to work, it is necessary to create rules for recording work events.
Improving the Quality of Internal Communications
When all communication goes online, there is a need for clear meeting planning. This is important both for effective work and for tracking team morale.
“When working in the office, it is easier to notice the mood of an employee: today they are sad, and tomorrow they take a half-day sick leave. What does it mean? Most likely, they went for an interview. How to determine this remotely? Now, in order for an employee to go to an interview, they just need to switch to another tab and put the status “Busy” in the calendar. Try not to bring it to this. Communicate with the team”.
Consulting Service by Values Value
What we do:
– Develop an HR strategy.
– Build the company’s structure with a division of responsibilities.
– Design recruitment plan in detail, including timelines and budgets.
– Develop an onboarding and adaptation system.
– Diagnose the culture and values and create a system for their transmission (both external and internal communications).
– Implement a feedback collection system and automate it within reasonable limits.
– Define and plan a compensation and benefits system.
– Create and maintain a risk map for employees.
Contact us!
With a hybrid work format, build processes so that remote workers do not feel like freelancers. Manage calls, general meetings, and follow-ups: all members of the distributed team should be aware of what is happening.
Make video calls (Skype, Zoom, Google Meet): this increases discipline and allows you to see each other’s moods, while correspondence can distort the emotional message.
Take a balanced approach to call planning: there should not be too many or too few of them. Organize team-wide calls and one-on-one calls between employees, HR manager and line manager, where you can exchange feedback.
Plan the goals and agenda for calls in advance, and limit the duration of meetings. We recommend reducing the duration of calls from whole numbers to fractional ones (25 minutes instead of 30 minutes, 45 minutes instead of an hour) so that employees have time to switch and relax.
Creating a Virtual Knowledge Base
Remotely, you cannot throw a question at a colleague while they are pouring themselves tea and thereby get your bearings. Create a common information space and provide the team with access to it. Decide which tool to use based on the size of the team: Confluence, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. This knowledge base should contain instructions for any case, recorded important video calls, codes of rules, and checklists reflecting template processes such as adaptation or dismissal of employees.
Training Middle Management
Everything we talked about above reflects this point to some extent: in remote work conditions, a huge responsibility for employee morale falls on line managers – producers, leads, project managers.
It is very important that managers know how to communicate, develop their soft skills, be empathetic, and become the embodiment of the entire team spirit for their subordinates.
In addition, it is necessary to improve the hard skills of managers so that they can effectively conduct meetings, give feedback, plan time, delegate and decompose tasks, correctly assess project deadlines, and so on. Sometimes this requires hiring a career coach or training managers on external courses.
It is worth noting that middle managers need special care: due to their high communication workload and great responsibility, they are very prone to burnout.
Work-Life Balance and Well-being
Speaking of burnout, remotely everyone has a higher chance of getting discouraged and gloomy. Through a computer screen it is more difficult to transmit energy and motivate. In endless calls, feedback sessions, and emails, you can lose the most effective employees. This is because the most involved ones burn out first: line managers, HR managers, mentors for newcomers, and so on.
How to prevent burnout? Setting up a work-life balance is a very individual matter, it doesn’t work the same for the whole team. Therefore, an even more difficult task falls on HR managers: in remote work conditions, they need to help employees optimally organize their working day, be available all the time, and extinguish fires.
In many companies, a trend towards team well-being has been developing: employees are provided with access to fitness applications, meditation and healthy lifestyle master classes, organized online team non-work thematic events, and offered consultations with a coach or psychologist if needed.
In conclusion, let’s say that work on retaining employees in 2024 should be as conscious and carefully planned as possible. And the secret to effective collaboration with remote workers is based on three pillars:
- Transparency and regularity of communication
- Access to information
- Common rules for recording tasks and plans for the whole team
Have pleasant and productive work!
