I’ve been thinking lately about how you onboard a virtual team member or a team member in a results-only work environment (ROWE). Onboarding, for those of you not familiar with the term, is the process of bringing on new employees with the purpose of quickly and successfully integrating them into the organization. Most traditional organizations don’t onboard new hires very well, so when we add a virtual workforce into the equation, things are bound to get a bit dicey.

When done well, onboarding can be a strategic process that improves your bottom line—the more quickly you get a new hire up to speed, the more quickly they start producing. Onboarding also improves productivity, performance, retention, engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty. Research and experience show us it’s a good thing.

As a new employee, you have a lot to learn: job requirements and expectations, how your role fits into the team and the company, industry information, company information, who you’ll be working with, the ins and outs of the company culture, etc. So how do you do this effectively if you’re telecommuting, working on a virtual team, or joining a team that’s working a variety of hours from different locations?

This past spring over at the GirlScoutsGoneROWE.com blog, Daniel Malyszka, Director of Human Resources for the Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council, talked about their challenge with ROWE and new employees. He worried that new employees may see ROWE as an opportunity to slack off and shared his thoughts on a potential solution: stricter rules during the initial training period.

I’m not sure I agree with “stricter rules,” but I do believe you absolutely must have a detailed, thought-through onboarding plan in place for new employees. And the “result” they are responsible for achieving the first few weeks working in a ROWE or on a virtual team, is to accomplish all of the onboarding activities listed in their training plan.

Additionally, each new hire’s manager and team need to have a shared responsibility for helping the new employee accomplish all of those tasks. In the past when I’ve worked with clients to create custom onboarding solutions, at least 5 people have been held accountable to produce specific results during the onboarding process: the new hire, the manager, HR, IT, and a peer mentor. It’s built into each person’s job—additional responsibilities for which they are held accountable to complete and are evaluated on when performance reviews come around.

The same stuff you cover when the employee is physically present in traditional onboarding needs to be covered when doing virtual onboarding. However, in a virtual team or a ROWE, some of those activities move online. For example,

• Utilize a private blog or wiki to share information with new hires.
• Schedule Skype video calls with the new employee, his or her team members, and other important people in the organization.
• Provide the new employee with everyone’s IM and Twitter name and provide training on those platforms if needed.
• Use screen capturing software to explain how to walk through a routine task and show the new hire where to find the information on the corporate website.

I read recently that we currently have about 34 million Americans that are working at least occasionally from home. By 2016 it’s estimated that 63 million people are going to be working from home; that’s 29 million more telecommuters entering the remote work force in the coming years and that number doesn’t even include all the people who work in some type of flexible work arrangement. I don’t have all the answers, but I do believe it’s important for us to start thinking and talking about how to onboard virtual team members quickly and effectively.

What are your thoughts? Leave a comment and let me know what challenges you’ve faced onboarding a new team member in a virtual work environment or in a ROWE. What have you done or seen that’s been successful?

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