The mass transfer of staff to remote work has made the issue of adapting remote teams one of the most pressing topics. The tech industry has always been a leader in terms of remote staffing.
It is essential to understand that adaptation is relevant both for a new employee who is just coming to the company and for established employees who return from maternity leave or a long sabbatical.
All parties involved in this adaptation have questions:
- Managers — How can we ensure that a newcomer adapts quickly?
- Newbies — What helps remote employees feel like part of a team?
- HR — What is the best way to build processes for different teams?
- Business — How do we hire more employees and help them adapt?
The adaptation process is organized differently depending on the company or team. Some companies keep a whole staff of adaptation specialists, others put a recruiter in charge of this process, and some give a prominent role to the immediate supervisor.
If you are building a new process, it is worth looking at one of the successful teams in your enterprise and analyzing why employees stay.
Here are some tools that successful companies use to help organize the process:
- Provide an additional call for a newly hired employee.
- Distribute welcome letters with details about the first day or week.
- Select a career coach.
- Use automated platforms and chatbots during different stages of adaptation.
- Conduct heart rate surveys among new employees to help measure stress levels.
- Provide a new employee itinerary / create an onboarding plan.
- Personalize policies by adapting them to suit each personnel group (like office support staff, skilled professionals, or managers).
- Use a welcome book and welcome packet.
- Lead an office tour.
- Coach managers on new employee onboarding / create a checklist for managers and coaches.
Employers are always looking for ways to improve their remote adaptation strategies. Recently, there has been an increasing need for employee life cycle analysis, exit survey results analysis and integration, and tools for understanding and working with employee experience and impressions.
There are clear examples of companies using intelligent technologies as part of the adaptation process. For example, when IBM used the IBM listening system, it learned to measure the level of effort required by an employee to solve a particular task within the points of contact.
It is worth noting that many adaptation tools are now available in an online format. For example, office or production tours can be conducted virtually or even with the help of VR technologies. The number of tools used by employers is beyond the scope of this list and may or may not be appropriate for your company culture and onboarding budget.