When you’re running a B2B company, your staff is crucial to productivity, customer satisfaction and ultimate business success. However, a business’ vision and achievement cannot be realized if an employee is improperly or poorly trained.
When it comes to remote employees, there could be potential threats of inadequate performance because there is no luxury of on-the-job training or in-person communication. Thankfully, a slew of improvements and advancements in technology have made it easier to seamlessly onboard new remote employees for your B2B company.
Why Is Onboarding Remote Workers So Crucial?
The answer to this question is two-fold. Firstly, the era of remote workers is upon us. Sadly, the COVID pandemic has forced many businesses’ hands when it comes to working more flexibly. Ergo, pandemic-related shut-ins and quarantines during the height of COVID gave birth to doing business virtually.
In fact, remote work is trending and to date over 45% of the American workforce is working remotely in either a full-time capacity or in a part-time hybrid situation. What’s more, employees are delighted with this trend and are demanding more remote work opportunities. In essence, remote work is here to stay, and the trend is only expected to grow over time.
Secondly, an improperly trained remote worker can lead to costly errors, reduced productivity and wasted time in correcting mistakes or retraining. Furthermore, neglecting to effectively onboard remote workers could lead to poor morale, higher employee turnover and subpar results. All of these consequences can manifest into reduced sales, and losing customer loyalty because unsatisfactory customer service or work performance consistently results in loss of customer retention and sales.
Find The Best Onboarding Solution
Fortunately, remote workers are already accessing your businesses’ files and data online. This makes giving remote employees access to training materials an easy feat. But what about onboarding solutions and training practices that get results? That’s where getting a learning management system into place can be incredibly effective for your B2B company.
To explain, a learning management system (LMS) is specifically designed to check all the boxes in terms of training employees. Furthermore, this system can keep your employees in compliance, enhance interoffice communications, and provide reports and statistics as to how employees are learning and thriving with your training strategies.
What’s more, an LMS fully integrates across devices so your employees can access your training materials via their laptops, phones or tablets. All of these training materials such as instructional videos, standard operating procedures and FAQs are centrally located in an LMS. This makes training information easily accessible and easy to find for all employees, whether they are remote workers or in-office employees.
Keep an Open Door Policy
We realize that an open-door policy is an oxymoron in a remote work situation. However, you can still find ways to make yourself available for new hires while they’re learning the ropes. Encourage new remote employees to contact you or a supervisor with any questions they may have.
In far too many instances, new employees are often intimidated or wary of asking questions in fear of appearing ignorant. Of course, this isn’t the case. In reality, employees who are comfortable with asking questions are more likely to be successful in their jobs because they are equipped with the right information when they need it.
Furthermore, keeping an “open door” policy is more likely to engage employees and garner a sense of teamwork within your B2B company. B2B companies know that the more engaged an employee feels the odds of improved communication increase. Furthermore, another positive side-effect of open communication is that remote workers feel a sense of loyalty and relevance within the company.
Therefore, employee engagement means better retention, better adherence to training, and more pride in the company’s vision for the future. Initially making yourself or your supervisors immediately available might be a bit of a challenge. However, ultimately, this open door access to managers and trainers pays off in investing in your B2B company’s future.
Put The Right Tools In Remote Employee Hands
There’s nothing worse than hiring a remote employee with tons of potential and discovering they don’t have access to the right tools required to get the job done. Some companies opt to provide remote workers with company-sourced laptops that are equipped with all the apps, internal platforms, email access and intranet access so that a new virtual worker can get started immediately.
If your B2B company doesn’t have the ability to lend out company-owned laptops, then at the very least, provide employees with tools that will help them do their job better. For instance, provide them with headphones if they are responsible for telemarketing or handling customer service over the phone.
You may also want to equip employees with videoconferencing equipment or chat tools so they can more easily communicate with your team for weekly meetings. In short, if you want to get the most out of your remote employees, you’re best served by providing them with the equipment and tools they need to get their jobs done optimally.
In conclusion, seamlessly onboarding new remote employees is absolutely achievable. It’s just a matter of finding the right tools for you and your employee, along with encouraging communication and establishing the ideal learning management system that meets everyone’s needs.
