The Covid-19 outbreak at the beginning of the year forced many companies all around the globe to become fully remote companies – including Alasco. Also for us, moving the entire team to home office was the only logical step to do. Luckily, our infrastructure has always been based on digital tools, communication and transparency.
Leading teams remotely from one day to another brings challenges for our employees and the management team. Besides the new situation of collaborating from distance, we also faced a new challenge: The remote onboarding of new employees. Within a few days we came up with some guidance for our hiring managers that we are sharing below.
The challenges we faced
We put a lot of time and effort into our onboarding process to provide new employees with a smooth transition into a new job, new environment and new team. Thus, we questioned ourselves: How can we take all of this positivity and welcoming atmosphere to a now-remote work environment without losing any impact the onboarding process has on a new employee?
Generally speaking, at Alasco we try to have the exact same onboarding steps that we would have onsite. Naturally, onboarding sessions concerning our history, the Alasco app and an introduction into the construction industry are held through video tools, but other than that we tried to keep it as normal as possible.
After researching best practices and ideal onboarding processes, we developed 3 major steps that could help the HR team and the hiring manager to live up to our onboarding standard:
The most important task for our managers was the creation of a safety net for the new employee. Starting in a company without seeing the new colleagues, with little interaction between each other certainly creates uncertainty. As a hiring manager, try to comfort your new team member and provide them with a lot of guidance (not to be confused with micromanaging!)
A clear and structured onboarding process is key to the successful start of new employees. This is true, whether the onboarding happens remote or onsite, but it certainly becomes indispensable as soon as you cannot welcome the new employee face-to-face. To secure a smooth process, we provided our manager with the following list:
Onboarding at Alasco is a team effort. We wanted to make sure that new employees meet the team, understand who works in which department and who they can ask for which topic.
To secure this, we gave our team the following guidelines
The list above helped us tremendously to successfully onboard our new hires in April. By no means we claim this list to be perfect or the one truth, but we wanted to share our experience to help others with their remote onboarding, too. We are excited to hear more ideas and best-practices and to learn how others managed their onboarding during these times.
If you have any questions or want to share your input with us, do not hesitate to contact us at jobs@alasco.de.
Want to join Alasco and experience our onboarding process yourself? Go ahead and visit our career page