Making your virtual onboarding successful

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Whether you are a few weeks in to a new role or contemplating a move in the coming weeks, it will be important for you to be proactive in ensuring you set yourself up for success.

During Covid, managers that I’ve trained to ensure they build cohesive, high performing virtual teams have raised their concern about how to ensure their new starters are onboarded effectively without face to face interactions. It’s a mutual responsibility between organisation and new starter – of course the organisation must do their part as it can be hard for a new starter to onboard without any support but the new starter can take some proactive steps too.

A recent research study by Perceptyx, a people analytics organisation found the following in relation to the ‘Covid Cohort’ (those people starting a new job during the Covid era):

• They were five percentage points less likely to feel part of the team than those employees who joined before the pandemic.
• They had less favourable perceptions about how connected they felt in the organisation

While many organisations are starting to move towards hybrid working, it is still likely that face to face interactions will be limited and so an intentional onboarding strategy is essential if you want to feel connected and engaged with your new organisation.

Key elements to focus on as you build your onboarding strategy include how to acculturate, how to build a sense of belonging and connection, and how to make a contribution quickly.

Four key focus areas I’d recommend when building your virtual onboarding strategy include:

1. Expectations:
   Be clear on your own expectations for your onboarding and ask for what you need. Remember, your new organisation/boss wants you to be successful and you have a right to ask for what you need in order to achieve that.
   
   
2. Invest considerable time in relationship building:
   Onboarding virtually means you need to intentionally take time to get to know people virtually moving beyond the transactional to enable empathy, understanding, and the start of a connection. Make sure you get contact details for a list of the key people you need to know to get your job done but also those a little further removed but for whom your success impacts their success.
   Arrange an introduction meeting with each of them and start with more personal ‘getting to know you information’ – if you lead the way, they will often follow your lead. Ideally, you will find something that you have in common that gives you a connection beyond the work.
   If you don’t normally venture into sharing personal information, start with relatively safe topics that will take no more than 1-2 minutes and could include:
   
   1. Very short career summary (20 seconds; education led to this; changed career to this; excited for this new role because…)
   2. Family/home – who they are, something about them, including pets, where you live
   3. Outside of work – when I’m not working I spend time…/ I love to… because
   4. If you start to feel rapport building you can share further, picking up on what the other person has said. Once we see someone as ‘like us’ in some way we feel more connected which is a good foundation to move into more work related issues.
      

Image by nneem from Pixabay

3. Learn from your connections:
   Once you’ve started to build a relationship with key people you can then set yourself up to make a contribution quickly by asking them questions to understand their role, what they expect from you in your role (e.g. ‘If I’ve made a successful start in this role and we are chatting 3 months from now, what would you be telling me your pleased about?’), and how they might be able to help you.
   You can also learn about the culture of the organisation from them by asking questions like ‘
   
   1. How would you describe the culture here?
   2. What is important for me to know to be successful within the culture here?
   3. Is risk-taking encouraged? What happens if people ‘fail’
   4. How do the company values influence the way the organisation works?
   5. Putting structure aside, who are the key players with influence?
   6. What’s your favourite organisational ‘tradition’?
      
      
4. Build trust and credibility with team & stakeholders:
   In order to build trust and feel part of the team it’s about having 1-1s with each team member to understand what it is like to be part of the team, how they see you fitting within the team and what you can do that supports this, and importantly for you to show that you are extending trust to them and showing that you are positively intentioned.
   For key stakeholders that you need to work with to fulfil your goals, be consistent in terms of doing what you say you will do, be responsive to show them that they matter, and be visible – working virtually means you’ll need some regular but targeted touch points to weave yourself into the working network and be automatically included where you need to be.

These points particularly aim to help you feel connected to people and the organisation when onboarding virtually.

In my coaching partnerships with leaders to set them up for success in their first 90 days we focus more broadly on how to get up to speed fast, how to build authentic relationships, how to plan for the long-term while being successful in the short term and more – if you’d benefit from coaching support as you start a new role, do get in touch to explore further.