WLP277: Onboarding in Remote Teams
For this bonus episode, guest Nadia Vatalidis talks about the onboarding process at the distributed company Remote.
Before getting into the conversation with our passionate guest, Pilar shares a recent piece of research into the effectiveness of “virtual watercoolers” for newcomers into organisations. The research focuses on how interns can benefit from informal chats with managers, but it should be of interest to anyone thinking about the best ways of bringing their people into their organisation.
To read about this, check out the summary, “Onboarding summer interns in a virtual work environment: an experiment highlights the pros and cons of “virtual water coolers” which also has the link to the original paper. (Or you can wait until next week’s episode, and hear Maya and Pilar commenting on it as part of this month’s What’s Going On episode.)
Nadia Vatalidis is the Director of People at Remote . She is based in South Africa where, before the pandemic, remote work was seen as a bit of an oddity, and Nadia shares her own experience of being one of the few remote workers in her close circle. But things have changed.
There are about 130 people in Remote, in 25 countries, something that Nadia really values. To help newcomers embrace their way of working, they have a handbook that they can refer to. Instead of talking about “company culture”, Nadia prefers to recognise that the geographical diversity brings together many cultures, so she prefers to focus on integrating the company’s values into the company’s way of operating.
So how do we build one culture, while embracing different geographical cultures? At Remote, they create awareness of what it’s like to work in this kind of diverse environments, how one-one’s can be started, how to give feedback etc.
Nadia and her team have created a simple “people feedback” survey, where every question is tied back to a value at the company, to figure out what value needs most work. As an example, their value of “transparency” is role-modelled by asking questions in the public (to the company) #people channel in Slack. It’s important that the values are integrated into how the company operates.
Nadia Vatalidis
16.40 The onboarding process at Remote
Of course the onboarding process takes place on Remote’s own product. On the first day, you have access to the platform and all the documentation (a heavy sounding, but essential word when we talk about distributed teams) about the way the company works.
A welcome email arrives on day 1, giving the newcomer some direction about what the onboarding process is going to be like. That first week is not about training, or team-specific items, but about discovering information and in Nadia’s words, “self-enablement”.
Current employees find out about new hires through Slack, and welcome the newcomer there. The weekly All Hands call also welcomes new people, and the time for this meeting changes every week to accommodate the different timezone blocks. There is also time for one-one time with Nadia, and they can schedule that in her calendar (which she makes sure takes into account her family time and blocks of non-interaction work).
New listeners might want to notice how structured communication needs to be in remote teams, and how this information needs to be available for newcomers to access whenever they need it, and that they have a road map. You need an intentional approach.
”A good indication of knowing when to write something down, is, if it’s stuck in your head and you go on vacation, and all new hires need it, they won’t be able to do this one thing.”
(And that’s a good indication for what needs to be documented in a team generally.)
Week 2 in Remote.
The new person starts embracing their team’s environment, covering the tools and platforms. They start to discover further their specific team’s space.
Nadia uses a range of asynchronous tools to welcome new hires, including video. Every team has created a short video that someone can watch about what they do. They also use short videos for updates, features changes, how clients are onboarded etc. In her own team, they record their work updates, instead of writing them down.
Recording tools (as opposed to text) allow us to connect asynchronously in a richer and more human way.
30.20 Using Virtual Reality
During the pandemic, Nadia and her team used their full creativity to send VR headsets to their employees. The company is starting to integrate virtual reality into some of their team practices. For example, the sales teams used VR for their training and kicking off the year. In December, the company used it for social engagement and Nadia is looking forward to using it more, even to integrate it into the onboarding process.
On Thursdays, you can join a VR game with people from across the company, and new hires can join this in their first week. It’s interesting to see the avatars that people come up with and how recognisable they can be. Remote was recently featured in the BBC’s article “Virtual reality headsets for work ‘could snowball’”.
Nadia ends by talking about how their own product helps other distributed organisations reduce the manual work (“paperwork”) during their onboarding process. She encourages companies to think more broadly about where to hire from, beyond where they would see themselves having physical offices.
Connect with Nadia on Linkedin and Twitter.
A post-publishing note:
After sharing this episode on LinkedIn we received a great question from Mike Clargo:
“Do you have any thoughts about how to on-board people who are new to work? I confess that I am increasingly concerned about the increase in remote working on those people 18-22 who may not experience the benefits we had of working alongside people physically - picking up the subtle nuances of work in ways more suited to how they have lived life so far. I worry about the uncertainty and insecurity that might induce. Any thoughts?”
Nadia Vatalidis shared this reply:
“Great question! I’ve been lucky to work with folks that are very early in their career and join us as their first employer. Something that works well in smaller environments are:
1. Very clear guidelines and how the company works, where to find what and clear processes for basic day to day things.
2. Shadow sessions works beautifully, especially in the first two months - these should be hosted with more experienced team members, I also really like live work-sessions to work on a topic together, to help ramp someone up.
3. Intentional social connection (it will not happen organically or accidentally, it must be deliberate and ideally time to just connect about everything but work)
4. Early stage L&D, especially with very modern tech if possible, but very boring solutions work too! The more engaging the better.
5. Allow and trust folks to fail (I don’t like calling it failing, it’s always learning!), this creates psychological safety early on! I’ve been so lucky that I was allowed to break things in the amazing tech starts up that I’ve worked in, more folks early stage in their career, should be allowed to break things and ask why every single day 😉
I can keep going, but these are just my initial thoughts!”
If you are in the mood for more listening, we recommend last week’s episode, all about how to hire people for your remote team.
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