In recent years, the number of remote workers has increased tremendously worldwide. Remote work has become a new norm and today, many companies offer their employees the opportunity to work outside the office.
Before the pandemic, Upwork research showed that hiring managers think 38% of their staff would switch to remote work in the next five years. Currently, they rank this percentage at around 58%.
Truth be told, many of the companies that practiced this way of work due to the restrictions and quarantine keep doing it today, at least partially. At this point, remote work is considered one of the most required and preferred benefits a company can offer.
However, since this is relatively new for most businesses, many still struggle with it. To help you onboard remote employees in your team, as well as motivate the ones that don’t work in the office, we’ve created this short list of 6 useful technologies.
Technologies that facilitate the onboarding process for remote employees
According to the research by the University of Minnesota, supervisors believe that the biggest challenge of onboarding is balancing the onboarding responsibilities with the current workload at the company. Let’s start with a few technologies to use to improve the onboarding process for your remote workers and more importantly, tools that will help you save time while doing this.
1. TestGorilla to test skills pre-employment
TestGorilla is “a crystal ball for job success”. This company has been trending for quite some time now. They are known for their easily customizable tests that now go in hundreds. Thanks to this tool, businesses can better evaluate the job candidates and hire the right people for the positions they have open.
Let’s say, for example, that you need to test Shopify skills to pick the right candidate for a position. You can simply go on the website of TestGorilla and test Shopify skills pre-employment with a ready, high-quality test. This particular test will show you if the candidates have the competency in customizing, developing, and managing a store on Shopify.
If you are looking to hire a Shopify developer to handle your e-store needs on this platform, you can use the tool to check skills like management, development, customization, and apps.
The options do not stop there. There are now over 200 different tests that you can tweak and send out, and the tool will automatically grade and rank your candidates. In other words, you won’t have to do a thing, and you can figure out who the best person for the job is in no time!
Why is this important for onboarding and motivation?
The right person will go through the onboarding process rapidly and learn how to work in your company. If you hire a person with the necessary skill set, you can tailor your work conditions and benefits to their needs, and motivate them accordingly.
It all starts with hiring the right person, and TestGorilla is a great tool for this purpose.
2. Firstbase to manage employees’ equipment
No matter if your employees come to the office or work fully remote, they will need good equipment such as a computer, printer, furniture, gadgets, etc.
Onboarding depends greatly on what you provide to the remote worker to facilitate their new job. That being said, you might need a tool like Firstbase to keep track of equipment and streamline the management process.
That’s just the beginning, too. FIrstbase has many other features and purposes. You can use it to ensure that your new business is compliant with the regulations in place, manage documents and other things for your company, access various growth features, etc.
Speaking of employee equipment, you can use Firstbase to do the following:
- Simplify the equipment billing process under one or two vendors.
- Automate the selection of equipment during onboarding.
- Help with the redistribution and retrieval during offboarding.
3. Microsoft Teams for facilitating the remote onboarding process
If you want to improve the onboarding process, you need quality software that enables smooth communication and collaboration. One of such tools is Microsoft Teams that can help you easily organize the onboarding tasks of their new workers and serve as a secure collaboration platform for any other use case.
Microsoft Teams can be integrated with various native and third-party tools, greatly extending its scope of work. You can add onboarding tasks in Planner with the right attachments in form of files and links, create a form in Forms so that a new employee could share their feedback or upload necessary documents, add videos in Stream with useful training resources, and more.
You can store all sorts of documents and files in Microsoft Teams files that’s connected to the team’s own SharePoint site. And these are just a few simple examples of what this tool can do.
Some other things that you can do with Microsoft Teams for the onboarding process:
- Schedule onboarding meetings with new employees before they start their new job to welcome and inform them,
- Schedule recurring meetings to help them learn about the job and share feedback
- Organize real-time, live training sessions and Q&A sessions
- Connect your remote workers with other employees in the company
- Share important documents and files and work on them in real-time
- Stream a variety of video resources for training
- Create onboarding guidelines and add them as a tab for easier onboarding
Learn more about how to onboard new employees with Microsoft Teams.
Technologies that help you motivate your remote employees
Now that we went through some useful tools for onboarding, let’s head over to technologies that you should be using to keep your remote employees happy and motivated.
4. TravelPerk for organizing your travel benefits
Travel is a very big part of business operations nowadays. Statistics show that 20% of all travel is for work purposes and 75% of airline travel profit is sourced from corporate travels. If your business is handling trips for employees, including remote workers, then you definitely need Travel Perk to help you.
TravelPerk is one of the best and most affordable alternatives to SAP Concur, a popular tool used for this purpose. This is, in fact, the solution with the largest travel inventory, which gives you access to the most cost-effective, versatile solutions for your remote team.
You can use Travel Perk to track your travelers, book quality and affordable accommodation, track expenses, and ensure hassle-free cancellations when you need them. The tool will also provide you with accurate reports that should help you make more informed travel decisions.
If you use TravelPerk, you can enjoy round-the-clock support in under 15 seconds, which will make your team’s trips safer and worry-free. Both SAP Concur and TravelPerk are fierce contenders, but based on these features, the latter comes out on top.
5. Talent LMS for learning management
The onboarding process includes some basic learning of how the company works and what is expected of a new member. However, learning never ends at a company. This is why you should use a learning management system or LMS to facilitate this for your team.
TalentLMS helps you build a smarter organization by sharing onboarding courses, storing all the essential information about the company in one place, and making it accessible to everyone who needs it. Thanks to this technology, you can minimize the number of orientation meetings as well as eliminate the errors that occur when a remote employee doesn’t understand the rules, policies, and goals.
One of the best things about Talent LMS is that you can use it to track each learner’s progress. You can then use this data to personalize the learning materials and training plans to improve the overall work of the company.
6. Trello for project management
Managing teams is not easy, especially when some or all of them are far away. Remote teams are tricky to keep track of, communicate with, and motivate. Trello makes this much easier.
Trello is a web-based tool with a small learning curve, used for project management for teams of all sizes. Employers can use it to assign tasks to individual employees or groups, track their progress, and send automated reminders to avoid delays.
This tool also comes with an optimized mobile app, which makes it possible for you and your team to use it on the move. In it, you can add checklists, attachments, due dates, and empower your business with many automation features for the most tedious tasks.
If everything in your company runs smoothly, people will be much more motivated to work.
Which tool will you try out first?
Most of these tools have free trial versions, which gives you a chance to test them before making a purchase. They are checked and approved by us and will surely make remote team management better and more effective for you.