5 Tips for Onboarding Your Hybrid Employees

Here are five standards to follow when training hybrid employees, to ensure a seamless and welcoming transition.

When new employees first start at a company, they can feel discomfort and that they are completely out of touch. This is particularly true for hybrid employees, regardless of whether they have prior experience working in a similar environment. It’s a completely new environment with new challenges for them, so it’s a completely new adventure. 

As a result, your hybrid onboarding plan must provide new employees with the information, tools, and support they require to grow. You can set your employees up for success by preparing them before they start work and making them aware of the people, resources, and programs available to assist them adapt to a hybrid work environment.

Here are five rules to follow to ensure that your hybrid employee training plan truly serves and supports your newest team members.

1. Initiate answering Frequently Asked Questions about your hybrid workplace before their first day

The majority of employees will never forget their first day on the job. It’s their first chance to make a positive impact on their boss, bond with their team, and learn the ins and outs of the company. It’s also an important opportunity for the company to make a good first impression on the new employee by helping them feel informed, comfy, and welcomed.

This is especially true for hybrid employees, who may have hybrid work-related questions about their first day, in addition to the usual list of FAQs, such as:

• Is it necessary for me to be on-site during my onboarding period, or can I work from home?
• When will my business computer be delivered? Can I use my personal computer to work?
• When should I come in? Who will let me in? What are the current health and safety regulations, as well as the social constraints?
• When should I be available?  Are our hours 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or are they more flexible?
• Who will be responsible for my orientation? Is it going to be HR, my department head, or another person?
• If I’m on-site, do I have to give proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test result? What is the procedure for submitting it?

While they can contact HR before their first day or ask the team on the day of starting, not having the answers to these and other questions may make it difficult for new employees to adjust to their new role on day one. Instead, reach out to new employees ahead of time and share answers to the most frequently asked questions about your hybrid working place. Set up a quick meeting to go over your hybrid workplace FAQs and give the opportunity to ask any remaining questions they may have about hybrid work.

2. Break the barrier by scheduling meetings with team members during their first week on the job

In contrast to on-site employees, hybrid employees frequently need to schedule fully interactive one-on-one meetings in order to connect with their colleagues. This can be challenging for new employees, who are still getting to know their team and may be hesitant to schedule meetings with key contacts.

To assist new employees in building positive connections faster in a hybrid setting, request that hiring managers or team members set up meetings on their behalf to make it easier for new employees to introduce themselves to key contacts in the company.

Here are three important steps hiring managers can take to achieve this:

1- Make a list of three or more contacts to whom the new employee should reach out, such as fellow team members, department heads, and rising stars at the company. Give a brief background on each contact and emphasize what they will bring to the table.

2-Send emails to these people to explain why they have to meet your new employee and what they hope to learn from them. This will help your new employee break the ice and make it easier to them to personally follow-up, set up, and attend the meeting.

3- While it may appear to be a minor gesture, assisting new employees in having internal networking chances will go a long way to assisting them to thrive. It makes things simpler for new employees to form valuable relationships with colleagues, which will assist them in fulfilling their roles and growing professionally in a hybrid environment. Because there are fewer organic and informal ways to connect with others than in a traditional on-site environment, this is an important step in making new employees feel like they are a part of the company community.

3. Assign an Onboarding Buddy to each new employee

A major challenge for new hires in a hybrid environment is being connected to their coworkers, teammates, and the company as a whole. Everyone may be assigned to a new office, time zone, or project, making it harder for new employees to establish stronger ties with their co-workers.

This happened more normally when everybody was at the office. People conversed at water coolers, in lunchrooms, and even on casual Fridays. Many of those channels are no longer available, but employees still have to form strong bonds with one another. This is especially essential for new recruits, who may want to confide in an employee about their personal troubles in a hybrid workplace and receive advice on how to effectively adjust.

Assigning an onboarding buddy to each new employee is an effective method to do this at scale. Here are a few things a new employee’s onboarding buddy can provide to help them adjust to their new hybrid place of work:

• Share their own experiences as a newcomer to a hybrid workplace.
• Discuss their own challenging experience of the hybrid environment and how they managed to overcome the challenges.
• Give a complete understanding of how things are done and who is in charge of what.
• Provide a summary of the corporate culture, social activities, and communication channels.
• Clarify any unspoken assumptions they have, as well as any helpful tips and tricks they have learned.
• Listen to new employees’ concerns and ideas, and provide positive support and feedback.
• Start introducing them to other colleagues with whom the new employee can connect in order to broaden their network.
• Create a shadow schedule so that the new employee can sit in on meetings and hear firsthand about customer discussions.

An onboarding buddy is a precious asset of whom to ask informal inquiries about the corporation, or more specifically, questions that they do not feel free to discuss with their boss or with HR. When new hybrid employees know they can talk to and trust someone, they are less likely to leave and will often work harder to stay engaged with your company.

4. Continually provide opportunities for new employees to link with their company community

Aside from their direct manager, team, and onboarding buddy, it can be beneficial for new employees to meet people in a similar boat as well as employees from other departments, in fun, cooperative settings. This allows them to make friends with people they would not have met at work otherwise, and as a result, they become more socially accomplished in a hybrid workplace.

Here are a few examples of how to plan this for new employees in a hybrid environment:

• Interest Groups: Provide a space for hybrid employees to be involved in their passions and contribute to their community. Cooking, pets, and hobbies such as reading or exercising are examples of this. As a result, new employees can meet people who share their desires.
• Virtual Games: Utilize online games such as Jackbox to bring co-workers together for games online. It’s a wonderful way for hybrid employees to enjoy the experience in a virtual setting while also allowing new employees to do so.
• Breakout Rooms: Many online meeting applications, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, have created breakout rooms that automatically sort large groups into smaller meetings of 4-5 people. This is an excellent opportunity for new employees to meet colleagues with whom they have not previously communicated. These means also facilitate meetings with employees if the company has branches in other countries, even if the languages ​​are different. For example, if you are from Dubai and want to meet with your employee who is from New York, you can use translation services in Dubai to communicate with him.

• Cooperative Content: Incentivize and enhance employee-created content within your company, like a podcast, video, or blog series. Create challenges, promote company-friendly content, and enable new employees to collaborate with their peers and promote their creative works through your intranet, Slack, or other internal paths.

5. Gather Feedback on Your Hybrid Employee Onboarding Method

Giving employees the opportunity to evaluate and give comments to allow them to feel listened to. Investigate what they have to say about your onboarding program critically, and make an attempt to identify and implement positive feedback. This guarantees that your hybrid employee onboarding program improves over time.

Here are three important inquires to put to your hybrid employees during their onboarding process:

• How satisfied were you with your journey? Is there anything you’d adjust about this? What would you change to make it more appealing to potential employees?
• How do you like our hybrid workplace? What do you admire about it, and what do you believe needs to be improved?
• As a hybrid employee, what do you value the most or find most useful? Is there anything else we can do to make our hybrid office more interesting?

Make use of this data to enhance, emerge, and grow. Remember that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to onboarding, and this is true for hybrid workplaces as well.

Getting Ready for the Hybrid Workforce

When you look at the big picture, onboarding hybrid employees isn’t all that different from hiring traditional on-site workers. You’re still welcoming them to the team, presenting them to their teammates, and assisting them in any way that you can.  There are just a few extra things to think about when doing it in a hybrid environment.

Here’s a quick rundown of our five recommendations for your hybrid employee onboarding process:

• Share frequently asked questions about your hybrid worksite with new commers before their first day.
• Set up meetings, on behalf of new employees, with recruitment or HR managers to help start their internal networking.
• Every new employee should be assigned an onboarding buddy.
• Invite new employees to meet peers from other sectors in fun, cooperative settings.
• Collect feedback about the onboarding process from new employees and use it to improve the program.

A powerful onboarding process frequently leads to new employees staying with the company for a long time and succeeding. Use the recommendations above to supplement and enhance your onboarding process in order to provide a positive environment for new employees in your hybrid worksite.

If you’d like to understand more about our hybrid workplace solutions, contact us today.