Chris Buttenham
The pandemic has forced organizations across the globe to shutter the office environment and take up a remote-first strategy. Through necessity, professionals have adapted to remote working. But the systems they use are still playing catch up.
One area less readily accommodating to the remote environment is the onboarding process. Given that it is the first sustained contact that a new starter has with a company, a remote-first strategy is dependent on its success. When looking to onboard new employees, the luxuries of first-day meet and greets, in-person hardware setup and a team lunch are no longer available. From interview to offer letter and beyond, any new hire’s early journey is critical to their life at the company, their job satisfaction and ultimately their productivity. The remote induction must be a smooth process, and so needs a thorough rethink.
A cultural shift in the company may be necessary. Organizations need to embrace knowledge sharing and collaboration, by turning to a “handbook-first” approach. A few simple steps can lead them there. Companies also need to analyze their workflow. Are the right systems in place to ensure the seamless flow of both tacit and explicit knowledge?
Perhaps most importantly, artificial intelligence can help transform a clunky old onboarding process into a sophisticated, smooth journey. Naturally the best AI models to use will depend on the business and department in question. However, with a few pointers business leaders can carve out a path to AI integration.
Let’s dive into the specifics that can transform the remote onboarding process, for the benefit of both the company and the new starter in question.
How to handbook
This is arguably the most important piece of the puzzle when it comes to ensuring newcomers are able to access the right information at the right time; it’s also the most difficult to get right. It is for workers at all levels of an organization to think about how knowledge is shared between teams and the processes that surround that interchange of ideas.
What is most important is that everyone in an organization prioritizes documentation; exactly how they do it is secondary. You can spin up plenty of free and paid software to start creating a handbook. Anything cloud-based is suitable, with more sophisticated paid options recommended to keep things easily searchable with documentation sorted into well-defined hierarchies rather than losing those nuggets of information in a sea of folders.
However, this systemic challenge is best addressed from top down. The process should include some checks and balances, with permissioning crucial for parts of the handbook that should remain static, like policies and SLPs. Other parts of the documentation should be kept flexible, like processes and team-level knowledge. The majority of the handbook must be democratized as far as possible.
GitLab, an all-remote company, first coined the term “handbook-first.” The DevOps software provider acts as a great example of a company that lives and breathes through documenting and codifying internal knowledge. Everyone within the organization buys into the mantra of documenting what they know, with subject matter experts assigned to manage knowledge base content. Keeping company documentation up to date is a collaborative task, considered paramount to the company’s livelihood. Software gives a helping hand, nudging contributors to keep information up to date.
Darren Murph, head of Remote at GitLab, says that their documentation strategy, twinned with a cooperative approach, helps to build trust with new starters. “When everything a new hire needs to know is written down, there’s no ambiguity or wondering if something is missing. We couple documentation with an onboarding buddy — a partner who is responsible for directing key stakeholder conversations and ensuring that acclimation goes well.”
Murph adds that asking for those new starters’ views and contributions serves to strengthen that relationship. “We also use GitLab (the product) to iterate on the process, which means that every single new hire can propose improvements to make onboarding better for the next thousand team members.”
When employees are new to an organization, they are more susceptible than ever to new ideas and changes in behavior. By instilling a strong culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration, companies can set good habits for years to come that are able to be translated and echoed from employee to employee and then seamlessly to new starters as they arrive to the organization.
Next, it’s workflow
There are two types of information that one needs to have in order to thrive in a new workplace: Explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge.
Explicit knowledge includes documents, code, manuals, websites, videos, presentations and procedures. All of that documented information can be recorded and structured into an organizational knowledge asset. Others can find it, reuse it, tweak it and by collaboration improve it. McKinsey suggests a searchable record of knowledge can reduce the time employees spend searching for company information by as much as 35%.
Centralizing explicit knowledge assets will reduce organizational inefficiencies and administrative overhead. Knowledge-base tools, wikis and documentation need to be remotely accessible from wherever people are working. This is where out-of-the-box integrations can expand that accessibility, by pushing updates and changes to everyone in real time through the company’s operating system.
Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, is the information and knowledge one keeps in their head and can then spew at will. It’s what we don’t know we know. In other words, you don’t realize you know it, until someone asks, and the answers magically come to you. For example, even if you have never considered a question like, “What are the three sales strategies you would tell people to follow?” Anyone in the right position in the organization can probably quickly provide an informed, competent response. By pairing newcomers with buddies, as Darren Murph suggests, tacit knowledge can flow organically. This can be achieved through social Slack channels or even by automated, AI-powered chatbots.
Integrating AI
AI can transform the onboarding process. Companies can now use technologies like natural language processing and machine learning to aggregate the common questions and roadblocks faced by newcomers. Then, the software can automatically recommend solutions to them as they occur throughout their onboarding journey.
One useful AI tool for a sales department could be decision trees to help guide newcomers through a call process. Onboarding for engineers could see bug-fixing tasks lined up with the code revision history and a k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) model to find other coders who have approached the problem in similar ways. The trainee coder could be directed to that comparable coder, sparking communication and collaboration.
For customer support agents, onboarding could involve a question/answer training, where knowledge about the company’s products is easily searchable to the agent until they know it like the back of their hand. For this, an organization should turn to a natural language processing (NLP) solution.
As for data: As always, the more the merrier. Many of the models rely on copious amounts of data. Organizations that don’t see results immediately should be patient. Tweaking and playing with the model’s parameters to see what gives the consistent best results may take some time but is a normal part of the process. If in doubt, outsource the tasks; there are plenty of AI/ML engineers happy to help with a custom AI onboarding solution.
As soon as organizations begin to collect data on the tenure of a given employee in various roles across their company, an AI model can start to learn from the challenges employees face, past and present. With this technology available, you can not only ensure new hires have the right information at the right time, but can start to anticipate the knowledge and cues they will need as they grow into the organization.
The remote onboarding process can be as satisfying and trust building as the traditional face-to-face methods that organizations were accustomed to for so long. But it must be done the right way. A “handbook-first” culture is paramount to promote knowledge sharing at all levels of an organization, while a buddy system helps to integrate some good old human guidance.
The workflow patterns must be set in place. Explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge need to be able to pass between teams and be accessible for a new starter. That is ultimately a question of getting the right technologies at employees’ fingertips and opening the door to easy collaboration. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, AI-supported technologies have the power to take an old-fashioned onboarding system and transform it into a sophisticated process able to predict the issues faced by a newcomer before they even arise.
Companies were forced to embrace remote work virtually overnight in 2020, and understandably many have taken time to adapt. As businesses continue to grapple with this new reality, they must remember the crucial nature of the onboarding process. If they get that right, it will breed trust, information sharing and collaboration, and the organization will see their systems improve ad infinitum.
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