Remote Employee Onboarding has become the preferred method to integrate new employees into a company. But, it has also become a significant challenge for HR teams to tackle, with 37% of the respondents in a survey citing it as their top concern. As remote work policies continue to attract and retain quality talent, a structured onboarding process has become even more imperative.

We had the opportunity to chat with a People & Operations team that has successfully mastered the art of remote onboarding: Ashley Chain (Director, People & Operations) & Erin Rice (People & Operations Coordinator) from Process Street.

Process Street is a workflow management tool that makes it easy for you to manage your team’s recurring work. It’s simple, powerful, and easy to use. Being a no-code tool, anyone can get started with it in a beat and build powerful automation workflows quickly. 

Process Street has also been a Luna Park customer for quite some time now and throughout this conversation, we cover some of the ways in which they integrate Luna Park into their remote onboarding process.

In this summary, We cover some of the key takeaways from our conversation and share tips for building a comprehensive employee onboarding process that prioritizes employee experience.

1. Getting Creative with the Onboarding Process

Luna Park: Can you tell us a bit about Process Street’s employee onboarding process?

Erin: Our onboarding process starts well before a candidate is hired. We want to ensure that everyone who applies to a role has a positive experience, regardless of whether or not they're selected. We use Process Street to manage all our employee onboarding activities. Once a candidate is hired, we use a combination of our templates & Luna Park’s social games to create a welcoming environment that helps them feel comfortable and engaged from day one.

Ashley: One of the ways we use Luna Park is by hosting a welcome call with our new hires. This gives them an opportunity to meet with us and ask any questions they might have. We also use Luna Park's icebreaker social games to help new hires get to know each other and build connections with their colleagues.

Ashley: We also find it incredibly helpful to share onboarding information with new hires at least a week prior to the start date. We don’t expect them to prepare anything for their first day, but it helps to keep them informed.

2. Building Relationships in a Remote Environment

Luna Park: Remote work can be challenging when it comes to building relationships. What are some of the ways you try to address this in your onboarding process?

Ashley: Building relationships beyond standard team calls is crucial for remote companies. People often tend to stick within their own teams and hangout. We try to organize social activities that allow people to get to know each other regardless of their departments or teams. We try to schedule our activities at different times for different departments to accommodate their schedule.

Erin: We schedule monthly activities and cross-department game sessions to help build connections between teams. One of the things we love about Luna Park is that it has international-friendly games, which help us build connections with people from different countries and cultures. We also host smaller hangouts among teams. We might catch up over coffee or play a quick round of Word Games to get conversations flowing.

3. Personalizing the Onboarding Experience

Luna Park: How do you make sure new hires feel welcomed and supported?

Ashley: Personalization is key to making sure new hires feel comfortable and engaged. Using the hashtag #NewOnTheStreet, we encourage our new hires to share tidbits about themselves, their hobbies, and more with their team. This helps us get to know them better and create a more personalized onboarding experience.

Erin: We also use Process Street’s Pages product to create an Employee Handbook that contains everything a new hire needs to know about our company, their department, and frequently asked questions. We include company policies, leave policies, training manuals, and some tips & tricks for remote work life to help new hires feel more prepared and supported.

4. Luna Park & Process Street In Onboarding

The Role of Ice Breakers In Onboarding

Luna Park: You mentioned using Luna Park’s Ice Breaker games to engage with new hires. How does that help? And what are your favorite Luna Park games?

Erin: Icebreaker games have been immensely helpful in helping new hires open up and come out of their shell. These games are designed to get people talking, so even the shyest team member gets a chance to speak up and get their voice heard. It also acts as a conversation starter outside of these games, people remember their gaming sessions and use these to chat with their new connections.

Ashley: Our favorite Luna Park game so far has been: Over-roasted!

Workflow Management & Remote Onboarding

Luna Park: Can you share some tips about using a workflow management tool like Process Street to simplify the remote employee onboarding process?

Erin: The biggest benefit of using a tool like Process Street is the level of scalability that it helps you achieve in your onboarding process. When a company is hiring for several roles across several departments, it can get chaotic without proper planning. Process Street helps you create structured processes for your organization once and reuse them for any number of new hires. Process Street lets machines do what machines do best (recurrent tasks), so humans can do what humans do best, be creative, and connect.

Ashley: You can create checklists, assign due dates, set up payroll, schedule performance reviews, and even send out automated messages to new hires. All within one single platform. It truly unlocks the power of automation to simplify remote onboarding.

5. Continuous Improvement

Luna Park: How do you ensure your onboarding process is always evolving and improving?

Erin: Every onboarding session is a learning for us. We keep a record of questions that arise throughout the onboarding process and use them to build knowledge bases and FAQs.

Ashley: This helps us continuously improve our onboarding and identify and address any areas where new hires might need more support.

6. Gathering Feedback

Luna Park: Gathering feedback is an important part of continuous improvement for any process. How do you approach this?

Ashley: We start collecting feedback within the first week of a new hire’s time at Process Street. Erin gets on a call with them after their first week to learn about their experience, their challenges, and how well they’re integrating themselves into their new role. This opens up a lot of opportunities for improvements and course corrections if needed.

Erin: As always, everything we learn in these interactions becomes part of our strive to improve the remote onboarding process but it also demonstrates to new hires that their voices are being heard and their opinions matter.

Erin: After their first 30 days, we also invite them for a casual check-in over a round of Luna Park. This keeps the session light and makes them feel comfortable talking about their first month at the company.

Ashley: We also use workflow automation within Process Street to send out a 30-question survey to new hires once they’ve spent 60 days in the organization. There are pre-built templates that help us create these quickly. Employees just need to rate them on a scale of 1-5. Think of it like an NPS for remote onboarding.

In Conclusion

Building a comprehensive employee onboarding process for remote companies can be challenging, but with the right tools and strategies, it's possible to create a welcoming environment that helps new hires feel supported and engaged from day one.

Check out Process Street’s Employee Onboarding templates & our own Luna Park OnDemand games to start your remote onboarding journey.