It’s your first day at a new remote job. You excitedly hustle through your morning routine, then finally plop down at your desk and log into your new email account. You’re greeted by an inbox brimming with new-hire training alerts, meeting invites, and account setup tasks—and there’s no rhyme or reason to what you should tackle first. Suddenly, your excitement turns to overwhelm.
This isn’t the way anyone wants to feel—or wants their new hire to feel—on their first day. And it’s why getting remote onboarding right is so important. After all, it’s not like new work-from-home employees can turn around and tap a coworker on the shoulder to ask for help.
So how do you create a remote onboarding process that’s smooth sailing for new employees and doesn’t become a time sink for managers? The following five techniques and inspiring examples from remote-first companies can help you make every new hire’s first months as a remote worker a success.
Why is it important to get remote onboarding right?
Aside from interviews and hiring updates, your onboarding process is an employee’s first impression of your company. Everyone wants to make the best first impression possible, and making a new hire’s first few days or weeks fun, engaging, and educational is the ideal way to do that.
An effective onboarding process accomplishes several crucial objectives:
Starts new hires off on the right foot, building their confidence and making them feel welcome
Introduces employees to their new role, company culture, and processes
Builds key relationships with coworkers across the organization
Creates clear expectations about the individual’s work and how they contribute to the larger company goals
The following five techniques will help you create a scalable onboarding process that avoids some of the pitfalls of the remote work revolution.
Technique 1: Provide login access ahead of time
Help remote employees prepare for their new roles by sending their company laptops and necessary equipment before their start date.
Additionally, share invites and login info for any essential remote work software, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, as well as messaging and collaboration tools like Loom’s screen recorder, Slack, Zoom, and Asana.
Allowing employees to set up their hardware and apps ahead of time reduces first-day distractions. It can also reduce time lost troubleshooting technical mishaps or tracking down an IT administrator for access.
Send and manage remote employee equipment
If you’re tracking equipment in one spreadsheet, new orders in another, and juggling equipment orders and repairs across multiple companies like Dell, Best Buy, and Apple — there’s a better way.
Multiple services now offer end-to-end equipment management that also handles packing up and shipping out new devices. Some even handle equipment logistics across multiple countries, so you don’t have to figure out shipping costs or policies.
Some popular options include:
Share new employee logins with a password manager
Sure, Google Docs or Excel spreadsheets are easy to use for storing passwords, but they’re not secure. And, they quickly become outdated and useless if you have multiple people managing the login info and changing passwords regularly.
Password managers are a better way to securely share account information with new remote hires. Instead of copying and pasting from a Google Sheet, a password manager suggests account IDs and passwords, making it easy to log into everything from Figma design workspaces to Zoom video calls.
Here are some business-friendly password managers known for their security and ease of use:
With technical hiccups and login steps out of the way, your latest remote hires can dive into their first tasks and begin building connections with their new teammates.
Technique 2: Create a written list of onboarding tasks
Along with developing connections, your onboarding process is an employee’s first impression of your company culture and work environment.
Are you super organized, with clearly documented processes, employee resources, and points of contact? Or will new hires spend weeks trying to track down a copy of their stock options and a login for their Google Workspace?
A thorough remote onboarding checklist puts everything a new employee needs to know at their fingertips. Some ideas of what to include on a new hire’s first-week checklist include:
One-on-one sessions with their manager, coworkers, and workplace mentor to get to know each other, go over expectations, and review the new hire’s 30/60/90-day plan
A one-on-one with the CEO with opportunities to ask questions about the company vision, mission, and values
A virtual team lunch where the new hire can get to know their new team members in a casual setting
Assignments to complete required training sessions
An introduction to team processes and assignments that put their new learnings into practice
Information on where to find team documentation and assets
When writing down onboarding tasks, be sure to leave employees room for solo time. Not only does this give them a chance to take a breath, grab a snack, and stretch, but they can also review team training videos and documents or complete any outstanding HR and IT tasks.
Check out these onboarding checklist templates for ideas:
With a clear path forward into all their responsibilities—and opportunities—your new employees will feel supported and empowered to jump right in.
Technique 3: Make them feel welcome
While remote work has quickly become the new normal, one area where the whole “remote” thing can make life difficult is getting to know your fellow employees. There are no spontaneous chats in the hallway, quick hellos in the break room, or in-person lunches to bond over. Those small moments are key to company culture.
Less connection can affect employees’ well-being and sap productivity. When team members struggle to cultivate strong relationships with each other, their communication and collaboration suffer. But a sense of belonging in the workplace increases employee performance by up to 56%, according to Loom’s remote work stats report.
Schedule a mix of formal and informal meetings
To make remote onboarding both personal and scalable, and ensure virtual employees feel welcome, everyone needs to be proactive. Encourage coworkers to reach out and say “hello” on Slack or your company’s communication channel of choice.
Managers should set up a mix of formal and informal meetings with the new hire and any individuals they might benefit from knowing. Invites to recurring group meetings are another chance for them to observe their colleagues as they collaborate, communicate, and ideate.
You can also avoid overwhelming your new hire by sharing Loom video introductions. The new teammate can watch the recordings whenever they have a free moment and get to know their coworkers.
Create a new-hire mentorship program
Another way many remote-first companies help new employees quickly feel like a welcome addition to the team is to set up a mentor program.
A new hire’s mentor can answer any and all questions, help their new teammate learn the ropes, and understand any quirky company nuances that they might have otherwise missed. Plus, the new employee also gains a friend, which can help them feel supported and less stressed out about their first few months.
Technique 4: Define a reasonable progression of expectations
Onboarding sets the stage for expectations, including how work gets done and how a new employee’s work contributes to larger company goals. This is sadly an area where many businesses fall behind and retention suffers.
Gallup found that only 47% of remote employees and 41% of hybrid employees know what’s expected of them at work. Without this vital knowledge, employees become disengaged, unproductive, and more ready than ever to find a job somewhere else. In fact, Nectar, an HR platform, found that 29% of employees left a job within the first 90 days.
Create a 90-day plan
Developing a 30/60/90-day plan is a helpful way to introduce new hires to their day-to-day tasks, ramp up their performance in a sustainable way, and demonstrate how they can have a fulfilling future with your company. Having a written plan also gives new employees a chance to review your expectations for them and ensure everything matches their understanding of the role.
If you need inspiration, Microsoft alumni J.D. Meier outlined a 90-day plan based on the book The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter by Michael D. Watkins. The plan includes priorities, goals, milestones, expected outputs, and items for new hires to review with their manager for the first 30, 60, and 90 days on the job.
Have meaningful conversations
Managers should also check in with their new hires regularly to review their progress, walk through their outputs, provide feedback, and answer questions. In a Loom survey, manager check-ins boosted team connection and improved goal clarity.
Manager check-ins also give employees a chance to share their own feedback about their current workload. This is key for creating expectations that accelerate your employees toward tackling their full range of job responsibilities in a sustainable way.
Technique 5: Leave room for flexibility and questions
A 2023 survey of workers’ onboarding experiences found that 81% were overwhelmed with the sheer amount of information they encountered during onboarding. This can create a stressful first few months for new hires, especially if they can’t lean over and ask a teammate where to find a specific asset or document.
The same survey found that 72% of new hires were concerned about asking too many questions during their first few months. This causes them to spend almost 13 minutes searching for answers on their own before they ask for help.
Provide multiple points of contact
This is why it’s critical to foster an environment where new employees feel confident enough to ask any question. Introducing them to multiple points of contact helps to build relationships and avoids concerns over potentially distracting a single person throughout the day.
A variety of relationships also gives remote workers access to peers with different subject matter expertise rather than relying on a middleman to funnel questions and answers. This strengthens cross-functional collaboration and supports colleagues sharing diverse ideas freely.
Create a documentation library
You should also make it as easy as possible for new hires to find information autonomously. Building a library of team documentation, tutorials, and assets ensures everyone knows where to start searching for answers—even if it’s their first day.
Along with written documentation, include video walkthroughs where teammates explain processes. Recordings, like those made with Loom, add important context by sharing your screen and webcam while you walk new teammates through important steps or explain why the team does something a certain way.
3 ideas for onboarding remote employees
Get inspired to create your own scalable, personalized remote onboarding program with these remote onboarding tips used by successful remote teams.
1. RoRemote’s LinkedIn Learning guides
RoRemote founder, Rowena Hennigan, provides training to those interested in becoming digital nomads who travel the world while working their nine-to-five.
She launched a LinkedIn Learning course to share her knowledge but found that many of her learners weren’t familiar with the platform. So she recorded Loom videos to guide users through the platform’s features.
Once she shared her remote onboarding content, Hennigan saw an increase in both course sign-ups and engagement.
2. Percolate’s Day One Document
Employee handbooks are fine, but Percolate, a content marketing platform, took things one step further with a Day One document. Originally created by co-founder Noah Brier, the document is part of Percolate’s onboarding process and is described as a “living, breathing document that covers all aspects of our culture, from where the company comes from to our point of view on meetings.”
The document includes a list of what new hires can expect on their first day, a list of tools, the company mission and vision as well as a roadmap, information on how to report bugs, clubs to join, and how to host effective meetings.
3. Buffer’s work blueprints
Buffer created work blueprints to help new remote employees collaborate more efficiently. The blueprints contain a list of work preferences ranging from how to deliver feedback to their most productive working hours.
Buffer’s Head of Communications and Content Hailley Griffis noted that, because most of the marketing team joined within the past year, the work blueprints have “acted as shortcuts to feeling like we can get to know each other better and start working more effectively together sooner.”
Optimize your onboarding with Loom
Between customized 90-day plans to frequent manager and team check-ins, building strong relationships and communication channels is key for setting WFH employees up for success. You can further embrace the flexibility of remote work without sacrificing connection with Loom screen recordings.
Loom videos offer a human touch during virtual onboarding by capturing not just your screen, but also your facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice. This makes Loom the perfect way to greet new teammates, walk them through the ins and outs of their role, and even provide asynchronous feedback as they ramp up their performance during their first months.
Add a new tool to your remote onboarding and try Loom’s screen recorder today.