As construction recruiters and hiring managers continue to maximize the effectiveness of remote onboarding, it’s important to know how it works along with the benefits. A few years ago, many organizations wouldn’t have considered the possibility of hiring candidates without meeting them in person first. But more high-growth companies are quickly realizing that opting for remote onboarding is more beneficial than going back to some of their traditional strategies. Let’s take a look at some of the advantages of remote onboarding, along with some steps you can take to improve your virtual hiring and onboarding environment.
Promoting Diversity
Better retention and productivity are some of the most common benefits of smooth and successful remote onboarding. But construction leaders are also realizing some unexpected advantages of hiring candidates remotely. For instance, they have been looking for new ways to overcome unconscious bias in the hiring process to encourage more diversity. One drawback of traditional face-to-face interviews is that interviewers tend to hire people that think, look, and act similar to themselves. Virtual onboarding can also help remove the physical constraints that could be holding you back from accessing great talent.
Onboarding Restructured
Moving from in-person onboarding to a virtual environment requires a creative, dedicated approach from executives to keep new hires informed and engaged. Since new employees aren’t able to connect in person with their coworkers in many states, business leaders really need to focus on promoting virtual connections, or socially distanced face-to-face meetings to ensure that new relationships are built, and company culture is shared. It’s important to promote empathy in the onboarding process now too. Some companies are experimenting with work-at-home personas to better assess the state of wellbeing of their employees. Some of the categories include:
- New hires
- Working alone
- Working while caring for young or school age children
- Working with other adults in the home
Successful Engagement Strategies
The biggest challenge of remote work and onboarding will be keeping employees engaged. Given the lack of social opportunities, interactive onboarding with virtual lunches, breakout groups, etc. is proving to be an effective way to keep new hires connected. Managers are encouraged to think outside of the box when it comes to welcoming employees. For instance, you can send a welcome basket with branded gear to their homes, or even assign an onboarding mentor to ensure that they can ask questions and share advice.
If you are transitioning to remote onboarding, just make sure that you are still hearing and valuing your new hires. Focus on keeping everybody engaged and informed with interactive tools and encourage managers to show some empathy to new and current employees now and into the future.
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