It’s no secret that onboarding is one of the most important training programs deployed by corporate learning and development (L&D) teams. This first point of contact is how employees at all levels of the organization learn the company’s mission, history and values. On top of that, onboarding is an important process for employees to learn the processes they need in order to succeed in their new role. There is a reason why poor onboarding leads to lower morale and lower retention rates.
However, while many business and learning leaders alike can speak to the importance of designing effective new hire training, the channels used to deploy it can sometimes be overlooked. Many people believe that as long as the content is designed and the trainers are prepared, leaders surmise, then the training will go off without a hitch … right?
It turns out this isn’t necessarily true, especially when it comes to onboarding remote employees into a hybrid or dispersed workforce. Take for example the case of Spring Venture Group. A health care insurance comparison company based out of Kansas City, in 2020 Spring Venture Group began scaling monthly new hires while the entire workforce simultaneously went remote. Their onboarding training content remained the same, but their creation and delivery needed to change to serve their people with onboarding materials effectively.
With that in mind, here are three secrets Spring Venture Group learned about managing the logistics of onboarding remote employees.
Secret No. 1: Make Sure Your Team Can Make Last Minute Updates
Assume there will be last minute updates, and make sure your team is empowered to act on them. At Spring Venture Group, the onboarding content often had to be updated multiple times per month as the health care market evolved. The sales development manager who oversees the training content actively prioritized those changes when searching for a logistics partner, since otherwise the new hires would be trained on outdated information.
Necessary, last-minute updates can look different depending on your content and team, so make sure you speak with your training administrators about what kind of flexibility they need. For print content, for instance, they may need the ability to swap out specific pages on a standard document before each order. Or they might be trying to deliver a personalized experience and need the ability to do variable data printing, such as inserting each learners’ name on the first page of a workbook.
Having control over your digital content is important for training specialists. To be able to have a successful onboarding experience, choose a platform or service that allows your team to make last minute changes as necessary.
Secret No. 2: Be Flexible
The next secret to managing course material delivery while onboarding remote employees is to be flexible and, if necessary, find partners who can be flexible with your volume and frequency, too. When Spring Venture Group onboarded only a few employees at a time, the previous content distribution process worked. Back then, their sales development manager spent Friday night updating the manuals with current market information, then sent print instructions to a local vendor. The books and worksheets were then shipped to the office for in-person classes.
When inputs change rapidly without flexibility — such as during times of company growth or economic uncertainty — processes will break. In the case of Spring Venture Group, when the workforce went remote, it wasn’t feasible to ship physical training materials from the office to new hires’ homes. They had to search the market for a new partner that could handle their onboarding content at multiple volumes and with direct shipping to employee homes.
If you are anticipating changes to your hiring practices, workforce geography or other factors that impact the physical logistics of your onboarding, it’s time to sit down with your team and your partners to make sure they are capable of making changes dependent on your needs.
Secret No. 3: Empower Remote Learners to Manage Their Own Logistics
The final secret to be learned from the story of Spring Venture Group is that your training facilitator doesn’t need to actually do all the logistics of onboarding. A lot of it should be outsourced to your vendor partners. Also, your new hires themselves can do a part of it.
For example, Spring Venture Group started publishing their onboarding workbooks and activity sheets along with company swag and other training materials on a central, internal storefront. Instead of pre-ordering the employee workbooks ahead of their start date, the sales training manager publishes the updated documents to the storefront on Monday morning. That afternoon, he trains the new hires on where to find all the resources they need to succeed. To make sure they learn the system, he has them order their own new hire workbooks for delivery to their homes. It takes a large project off his to-do list while also training new hires on how to use an important internal system.
Logistics are an important, often overlooked part of any training program’s success. That couldn’t be truer when it comes to onboarding remote employees. After asking your instructional designers to spend considerable effort putting together a great experience for your new hires, it’s worth sitting down with your training managers to understand how they will deploy it. Then make sure you have set up your team and new hires with the right logistics partners to guarantee that — no matter where your learners are — your onboarding is easy and effective.
