Top 6 Tips to Getting Virtual Onboarding Right for Frontline Blue-Collar Workers
The trend of virtual onboarding has resulted in many benefits, including greater flexibility, and reduced costs. However, experiences have been specific to sectors and companies. Those who had well-executed onboarding processes pre-pandemic did well virtually too.
The pandemic forced companies to discard old ways of conducting affairs. Remote onboarding became the new norm even in the blue-collar workforce, to ensure business continuity.
Companies had to ramp up hiring and onboarding remote employees across sectors and cities, to meet the increasing demand for online deliveries. Varying intensities of the pandemic in different regions forced manufacturing concerns to follow suit.
The trend of virtual onboarding has resulted in many benefits, including greater flexibility, and reduced costs. However, experiences have been specific to sectors and companies. Those who had well-executed onboarding processes pre-pandemic did well virtually too.
For others, this shift led to challenges, and as a result lower retention levels. It has been seen that more than 69% of employees tend to remain employed with a company for 3 years if they have a great onboarding experience.
Companies need to take the right steps in integrating the workers into the company at the onset of employment. Here are some tips to make remote onboarding a success.
Tip#1 Start Interaction As Early As Possible
Companies need to be proactive and start interacting with workers on the first day of their jobs. Employee experience needs to be a priority to create a positive first impression. Top management can address them through video check-ins to make them feel valued and welcome.
Tip #2 Provide an Exceptional First Impression
Interactive online forms can ensure they don’t spend a vast amount of time on paperwork. The onboarding platform should be customisable to the specific needs of every site.
Companies can include important policies, protocols, reminders, and more to prevent any confusion. To enhance their experience, and provide convenience the use of native tongues in reading materials is important.
Tip #3 Create a Sense of Belonging
One of the top benefits of a remote onboarding process is that companies can personalise the experience. New workers can feel isolated and disengaged in a virtual setting. It’s important to allow multi-platform virtual experiences.
The new employees don’t have to be concerned about device specifications. Asynchronous options can let them follow the process at individual paces. This is the optimal way to let frontline workers understand a company and its culture.
Tip #4 Mentoring is Important in Virtual Onboarding
When onboarding remote employees in the frontline workforce, it’s a great idea to assign workers with a “buddy”. This is someone who has been in the company for some time and can guide the worker on the way things work.
These buddies can be contact persons should they have any queries. It prevents workers from getting overwhelmed with online processes and helps companies to retain them.
Tip #5 Provide Engaging Subject-Training
A well-designed online training program is essential to boost confidence and empower workers. Mobile-based microlearning platform is a great way to do that, and let workers learn at their own pace.
By incorporating gamification elements like pop quizzes for topical assessment, workers can remain engaged and involved. Again, courses must be multi-lingual. Companies can offer rewards for the successful completion of training programs to motivate employees.
Tip #6 Maintain a Continuous Approach
For a successful virtual onboarding process, companies must keep up with the efforts to address, train, and network with new hires. This process has to be done for a few months at least. The admin and HR team must continuously monitor the process to identify areas that need improvement.
A Remote Onboarding Platform Especially for Frontline Workers
Strong onboarding processes make blue-collar workers feel visible, valued and empowered. However, distributed workforce across multiple sites makes it difficult for companies to streamline remote onboarding efforts.
BetterPlace offers a technology-based onboarding platform that enables simple registration processes, and intuitive workflows to make onboarding effective at scale. With AI-driven bulk-onboarding and auto-creation of compliance documents, HR teams can achieve operational excellence in blue-collar workforce management. Contact us to learn more.
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