Speaker 1: Hi, are you a remote founder or maybe you're in charge of an HR department for a newly remote organization and you have no idea how to actually onboard a remote employee? Well, thankfully, in this video, we're going to be going through a 10-step remote employee onboarding checklist. I'm super excited about this. This is the one that we use in our technology company, timedoctorstaff.com and running remote, where we talk about remote work all day long. Stay tuned. So before we get into the checklist thing, number one, will you please subscribe to this YouTube channel? I would really appreciate it. It helps out the algorithm. And frankly, 89% of you are not subscribed. And that makes me very, very sad. Number two, there is a real high chance that you have no idea how to actually onboard remote employees. And there's probably an even bigger chance that you came into this video thinking, man, onboarding remote employees is just like onboarding on-premise ones. No, it is not. It is very, very different. There are very specific differences between a remote onboarding and an on-premise onboarding, i.e. what we like to call an office onboarding. So it's important that you be able to watch all of these steps and write down notes, because frankly, this is probably one of the biggest things that I see a lot of HR directors and remote founders get wrong when they flipped to a remote first model. Step number one, you need to actually send the IT equipment to your new employee. So you need to number one, assess what your actual employee needs. And that's not just their laptop or their computer. You need to actually assess, do they need an external monitor? Do they need a microphone? Do they need AirPods? Do they need a good internet connection? You need to be able to analyze all of that stuff very quickly and easily. Inside of our company, we usually give people a PC or a Mac, and we also assess their internet specifically for upload, download, and ping level. If you have less than five up, five down with a ping of above 20, then usually you can't really work in a remote company because you can't do a video call. So it's super important to be able to assess all of those things and upgrade their equipment if they don't have equipment that's up to stuff. Step number two, you need to help new employees complete all of their paperwork. We talked about this in a previous video where we were talking about a remote work policy, but you need to actually have all of those things written down. Where is this person going to work? What country are they going to be a tax resident out of? Can you legally hire that person in that particular location? Do you have an EOR company set up like Globalization Partners or Oyster HR? Those are two really good ones. And you need to have all of that stuff really focused and locked in before you actually start that work relationship with the employee. This is something that a lot of people overlook, and it can result in a lot of serious problems, and a lot of them legal problems, very soon after you end up working with that person. They need to be able to create all of that paperwork, or you need to create it, and they need to complete it and make sure that they don't start working until they've actually completed all of that paperwork. Step number three, you need to send your remote employee your employee handbook. So we have a pretty big handbook. It's all online, and it talks about everything and anything inside of the company. It also breaks down all of the different departments inside of the company and what they do. I also have a personal handbook about myself, which is literally entitled Guide to Liam Martin and His Weird Little Quarks. And there are nine core components of who I am as a person so that you know who I am and you can actually work efficiently with me. It's kind of like a blueprint on how to get the most out of me as a manager. So send them all of this information, get them to consume it. A really good place to start if you don't have an employee handbook is go to about.geeklab.com slash handbook. It is the largest remote work employee onboarding document on the face of the planet. It's 8000 pages. All of the processes and procedures about remote work are there for GitLab. So if you want to check that out, go ahead, check it out and steal any of their processes because they encourage you to do it. It's open source. Step number four, you need to actually make sure your remote employees have all of their software installed. So what does that mean? Well, do they have Gmail? Do they have Slack or Microsoft Teams? Do they have an SEO software, CRM software? Do they have a project management software? You need to be able to actually go through that entire checklist. What access do they need to which different pieces of software create the logins for it, set up the passwords? I know this sounds like one of those things that you can kind of do organically, but it's a lot easier if you actually just do that initial audit, figure out what they need and start from there. Because long term, this can actually result in a whole bunch of logins that are just kind of created and not documented properly. And it creates a lot of security issues down the line. So make sure all of the software that the employee needs is already set up and installed on their computer so that they have no issues working inside of your company. Step number five, you need to welcome and introduce the new employee inside of your company. This is something that we do in our company in two separate ways. We do a push notification to everybody, usually on Slack in our new HR channel. We also put it up on Basecamp, basically identifying who the employee is, why they're working there, who they're about, that kind of stuff, what department they're working in and who is managing them. And then also we usually bring that up in our bi-weekly ask me anything video call that we do with everyone else inside of the company. It's pretty cool. People really enjoy it. The vast majority of the time we kind of push them up on video to be able to talk a little bit about who they are and just, what they're into, what they're excited about doing inside of our company. But it's important to be able to do that just to kind of give everyone that feeling of like, hey, here's a new guy or gal, go check them out, talk to them and hopefully treat them nicely because they're probably going to make a lot of mistakes over the next couple of months. Step six is you need to train your remote employee. Training your remote employee is actually a pretty, it's a two-way street to be completely honest with you. Training your remote employee means you need to make sure that that employee is really happy with where they're at and you need to be able to make sure that you have quantitative KPIs so that you can keep them accountable to what they're doing. So how much time are they actually going to be working in their job? What are the clear quantitative measures that they need to be able to accomplish inside of the company? And are they working towards that goal to be able to achieve them? What happens if they don't meet those quantitative goals and what timeline are you giving someone to be able to not hit those goals or hit those goals within that time period? These are all things that you need to really kind of communicate to the employee at the very beginning before they really get into the company, because you just need to be able to make sure that you're not miscalculating the goals inside of the organization, particularly as it applies to training the employee. Outside of that, we also have the buddy system. So generally a brand new employee is brought on, they'll have a manager, and then they'll also have a buddy, hopefully inside of that particular department that you can just kind of show them the ropes and hopefully mentor them for a little while to become bigger and better employees inside of the organization. Step seven, and I already actually talked about this in step six, I kind of jumped the gun here a little bit, but you need to set goals and expectations. So if you have a salesperson and you just say, hey, just do whatever you want, doesn't matter if you're making any money, just go ahead and talk to customers. No, that's not the right direction you need to have. You need to be able to say, hey, in three quarters, you need to actually deliver X, Y, and Z. And usually X, Y, and Z result in money, money, and money for salespeople. But it might be different. It might be the amount of tickets that you're required to actually answer, or it might be the lines of code that you're required to write, or the amount of backlinks that you're required to generate. Whatever it might be, you need to actually set those goals and make sure that everyone's clear on those expectations so that if you do have to let that employee go in the future, which hopefully you never have to do, it's not a surprise. One of the worst things that you can possibly do is terminate an employee and the employee thought it was a surprise. Not good HR. Step number eight is you need to do some remote employee team building. We do this in a lot of different ways. We'll do some games. We'll usually have our teams do even more games with people. We do a lot of games to be completely honest with you. I also have an Oculus Quest, and I usually jump on with a lot of team members that also have Oculus Quests, and we do stuff in virtual reality, which is pretty fun. Outside of that too, if you're going to do a team retreat, which I highly suggest that you do, that's going to be where you really build in that initial cadence with that employee. It's always magical when a brand new employee ends up coming to a team retreat because their energy completely changes after the fact. They're just able to chat with people, interact with people that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to do working through a computer. Those are quite expensive too. We do have a video on team building for team retreats, but it is absolutely worth it. In my opinion, it's probably some of the best dollars that we spend on HR per year. Step number nine is you need to actually create consistent check-ins. What does that mean? Well, usually I will have a one-on-one call with everyone I directly manage, and we will have one team call with everyone that I directly manage. Everyone in the company should at least be getting two calls per week. Those can be very short. They can literally be as short as 15-minute calls if they really need to be. But it's important that you actually create those check-ins so that people are posting their quantitative goal, right? They're basically like their KPI that they've been focused to hit. And more importantly, you ask them like, hey, are there any problems right now? Are there any blockers that I can unblock for you in accomplishing your job? Or is there anything that you're not understanding? So important that they are consistent. They're not bi-weekly, they're not monthly, do them weekly. It's really important towards the long-term career growth of your employees. And the last step is, again, just because we're remote companies, it doesn't mean that we actually don't meet in person a lot of the times that we do. So you need to be able to arrange in-person meetings if possible. And I would do it in two separate ways. Number one, I would do a team meeting in person. So maybe the marketing department goes off and has their own little team meeting that they do together. And then also our company team retreat, which I would highly suggest that you take advantage of as well. So between those two times, usually you want to kind of work that out where maybe your team in-person meeting would be on month six and your actual company in-person meeting would be on month 12, just so that people have a lot of distance between those two. Sometimes you can't actually do that because every department is different. But I think that that's such a useful way to be able to get that face-to-face communication, which even though we all work remotely, we still need in order to build a fast growing organization. So that's it. If you have any other tips, can you put it down in the comments below? I'd really love to check them out. And while you're down there, why don't you like this video and subscribe to this YouTube channel? It is indeed free. And we talk about this kind of stuff all day long. I'll see you next video.