Next-level onboarding: Accounting for your remote and distributed workforce
2 mins, 13 secs read time
Work is getting more distributed every day and in every field.
Consumer products? You’ve got retail stores to staff and brand ambassadors on the road.
Tech companies scaling fast? Hiring the best engineers and top customer success professionals likely means employees spread far and wide across the globe working out of co-working spaces and their homes.
Lean marketing team? You’ve got freelancers and agencies on call and ready to help you execute greatness.
All of this is to say that new hire onboarding is an invaluable process that sets your team up for success. This is especially true for remote, distributed and contract or part-time workers. The fact is, not everyone is prioritizing new hire onboarding. And oftentimes, companies don’t have an organized, strategic and thoughtful approach to this more-than-just-paperwork process.
At OPEN 2019 this year, workplace expert and straight talker Laurie Ruettimann is curating a how-to session that will dig into what next-level onboarding should look like, and why it can mean the difference between business success and missing the mark on goals.
New hire onboarding: Time for real talk
“So many organizations have a great process for full-time employees (FTEs), but they don’t have any process whatsoever for their distributed workforce,” Laurie says the Let’s Fix Work creator and podcast host. “This is a major problem as the freelance/contractor/temporary workforce is a rapidly-growing component of the employee base.”
Typically, when a non-FTE is brought into the picture, the main onboarding focus is on compliance. Ensuring they feel like they’re part of the team, set up for success and instilled with a sense of belonging and connection is usually an afterthought, if even a thought at all.
“Talent is talent regardless of the time they spend at work,” Laurie believes. “Because procurement is outsourced, you may not feel the investment that has been made in finding that right person. We need to peel back the curtain on that process to increase appreciation for the investment, resources involved and process which will inherently increase appreciation and acknowledgment of those workers.”
Food for thought: Open 2019 onboarding session prep
To prepare for Laurie’s session on June 13 at Greenhouse OPEN 2019 at the Jacob Javits Center in New York, we wanted to give you some thought starters to bring with you to the session.
Questions for OPEN how-to session on next-level onboarding: Lawyers have us worrying about joint-employment and co-employer issues.
- In an ideal world, what does next-level onboarding look like for a distributed workforce?
- How is it the same—and how does it differ—for FTEs and freelance/contractors/temporary talent?
Get ready to evaluate your own onboarding process and share ideas with your session mates during the interactive portion.
Dinah Alobeid
is the Senior Director of Content and Communications at Greenhouse. She helps shape and share the Greenhouse brand story and keeps its audiences informed on company news and industry knowledge. Dinah has over 16 years of communications and content experience in the technology field and prior to Greenhouse, she built and ran the communications team at Brandwatch. She's an avid writer, dancer, foodie and book nerd. You can connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.