Remote working has become increasingly popular among industries like tech, marketing, and software development. But one of they key challenges remains the area of onboarding – how do you onboard remote employees? People you have never met, and probably won't for a while either.
Here are eight essential tips to help you get your team up to speed with onboarding remote employees so that they stick around for the long haul:
- Use an LMS to automate the process – Build your onboarding process once and reuse it for every new hire. An LMS allows you to create structured training modules, automate paperwork, and track progress—saving time and ensuring consistency.
- Start the process early – Ensure new hires have access to essential tools, accounts, and paperwork before day one to set them up for success.
- Familiarize them with your culture – Convert your company values, mission, and policies into a digestible, easy-to-access format. This will help new hires quickly understand your organization’s expectations, work style, and core principles.
- Make the employee’s points of contact clear – Clearly define who new hires should reach out to for different questions to prevent confusion.
- Go beyond the keyboard – Incorporate video calls and face-to-face interactions to help remote employees feel connected to the team.
- Provide role-specific training – Offer tailored training sessions and job shadowing to ensure new hires feel confident in their responsibilities.
- Get organized – Lead the process efficiently, rather than relying on the employee.
- Remember that onboarding extends past the first week – Maintain regular check-ins for at least 90 days to support and engage new hires beyond their first week.
8 key tips for onboarding remote employees
If the numbers are any indication, most companies struggle to get onboarding right. So, how can you make the most of this critical period and show new hires why your company is a great place to work?
GoSkills is a 100% remote online training company. Over the years, we’ve learned a thing or two about successful onboarding. Here are eight essential tips to help you seamlessly integrate virtual team members and set them up for long-term success:
1. Use an LMS to automate the process
Onboarding can be unnecessarily time-consuming, especially when managing remote employees. Without a structured system, HR teams and managers often find themselves repeating the same steps for every new hire—sending documents, setting up training, and tracking progress manually.
A Learning Management System (LMS) eliminates these repetitive tasks by providing a centralized, scalable onboarding experience. With an LMS, you can create a standardized onboarding pathway that includes essential training modules, company policies, role-specific courses, and interactive resources—all in one place.
Key benefits of using an LMS for remote onboarding
- Consistent Onboarding Experience: Every employee gets the same high-quality introduction to your company, no matter where they are.
- Automated Administrative Tasks: Easily send and collect required forms, assign training modules, and track completions.
- Self-Paced Learning: New hires can complete onboarding at their own speed, reducing the pressure of information overload.
- Built-in Tracking & Reporting: Monitor progress in real-time and ensure no step is missed.
- Easy Updates & Reuse: Instead of recreating materials for each new hire, simply update your LMS content.
2. Start the process early
In a traditional office, new hires have colleagues and managers readily available to answer questions and provide guidance. Remote employees, on the other hand, start their first day alone in front of a screen, without immediate support. Without a structured onboarding process, they can feel lost before they even begin.
To prevent this, ensure they have everything they need before day one. Set up their logins, email, and access to essential tools so they can get started without delays. Sending paperwork—such as emergency contact forms and benefits enrollment—before their start date also helps streamline the process.
How to do with GoSkills: Create an onboarding course in the GoSkills LMS and use Genie AI to generate a structured outline. Add a lesson dedicated to essential tools, listing all required software, login credentials, and access details. Once the course is built, simply duplicate and customize it for different roles and employee requirements—saving time while maintaining consistency.
3. Familiarize remote workers with your culture
In a traditional office, new hires naturally absorb company culture by observing how colleagues interact. They pick up on unspoken norms, like whether staying late is expected or how team discussions are structured. Remote employees, however, miss out on these subtle cues, making it harder to understand workplace expectations and company dynamics.
To address this, at a minimum, provide new hires with company policies on day one. However, with the GoSkills LMS, you can go beyond the basics and create a more immersive, structured cultural orientation.
Introducing company culture using GoSkills
Many mid-sized and large organizations use an "About Us" brochure or similar materials to introduce company values and mission. Instead of relying on static documents, you can digitize and enhance this information for remote employees using GoSkills Genie AI.
- Upload company policies and ‘About Us’ materials as PDFs into Genie AI, making them easily accessible.
- Provide context using chat app screenshots from tools like Slack or Teams—highlighting key communication channels, informal discussion spaces, and client-facing interactions.
- Showcase real-world interactions by including examples of help channels, announcements, and social chats to illustrate how employees engage day to day.
By combining structured materials with real workplace interactions, new hires gain both a macro-level understanding of company culture and a practical sense of daily communication norms—bridging the gap that remote work creates.
4. Make the employee’s points of contact clear
Starting a new job comes with plenty of questions, and in an office, new hires naturally find a go-to colleague for guidance—whether it’s about company processes, role expectations, or even where to find office supplies. Remote employees, however, don’t have that same immediate access to coworkers, which can leave them hesitant to ask questions and struggling to find the information they need.
To prevent this, clearly define points of contact from day one. Instead of leaving new hires to figure it out themselves, provide a structured list outlining who to reach out to for different concerns. For example:
- Questions about your role or responsibilities should be directed to: Jenny
- Questions about company processes and procedures should be directed to: Matthew
- Questions about technical glitches and software should be directed to: Claire
- Questions about everything else should be directed to: Desmond (when in doubt, he can point you in the right direction!)
Being this explicit means you’ll empower your new hires to actually seek out the information they need, without feeling like pests. Plus, it’ll save a lot of hassle and confusion among your other team members as well—because everybody knows where in the process they fit.
How to do this with GoSkills
Prepare a list of key contacts for each job role. In your GoSkills LMS course builder, edit your onboarding course and add a dedicated "Who to Contact" lesson. Upload your list, then use Genie AI to structure it into an easy-to-navigate course module. Once built for one role, duplicate and customize it for other positions—ensuring every new hire gets a clear, structured guide to company contacts.
5. Go beyond the keyboard
As technology has continued to advance, a large portion of our workplace communication now happens via the written word—think things like emails, instant messages, reports, memos, meeting summaries, and more.
This type of communication is convenient, but it doesn’t give your new remote employees a chance to interact face-to-face with your team and understand who’s who.
So, make sure that you set up some video chats as part of your onboarding process too. Whether it’s a meeting with your entire team or some personal video conversations with each team member, provide ample opportunity for them to actually see and speak with the people they’ll be collaborating with.
Oh, and if you have the chance to get your whole team together in-person? That can greatly contribute to your culture and team bonds. It’s why so many thriving remote companies make sure to meet up at least once per year.
6. Provide role-specific training
While general onboarding covers company policies and benefits, new hires need practical, role-specific training to succeed in their daily tasks. Without clear guidance, employees can quickly feel lost and uncertain about expectations.
To bridge this gap, integrate hands-on training that directly applies to their role. If possible, offer job shadowing opportunities or guided walkthroughs to help them understand workflows, tools, and responsibilities.
This not only accelerates their learning curve but also reduces turnover—43% of employees who leave within 90 days say it’s because their role wasn’t what they expected.
7. Get yourself organized
Successful onboarding is your responsibility—not your employees'. A disorganized process can quickly turn an eager new hire into a disengaged one, as inefficiencies and unanswered questions replace their initial excitement.
This is why onboarding software like GoSkills LMS is invaluable. Instead of scrambling to provide ad-hoc answers, you can automate and structure the process from the start. By creating an onboarding course within the LMS, Genie AI handles the heavy lifting—generating a structured program so you can focus on refining and personalizing the experience, rather than starting from scratch each time.
8. Remember that onboarding extends past the first week
Research indicates that many organizations conclude their onboarding processes within a week, which may be insufficient for effective employee integration. As well, only 11% of employers extend onboarding beyond three months, despite HR professionals recommending this duration.
Implementing a 90-day onboarding process offers several benefits, including:
- Enhanced Productivity: A structured onboarding plan can boost employee productivity by up to 70%.
- Improved Retention: Effective onboarding processes can increase employee retention rates by 82%.
At minimum, HR managers should address this by scheduling regular check-ins. Give employees set times to connect about questions, confusion, progress, and more. Keeping those lines of communication open will help your employee feel like a supported member of your team for the long haul.
How to do this with GoSkills
Instead of limiting onboarding to just a week or a month, extend the process with follow-up courses designed to reinforce learning and engagement over 90 days.
- Keep the Initial Onboarding Course Accessible – Let new hires revisit key materials as needed during their first month.
- Create Follow-Up Modules – Develop short check-in courses at key milestones (30, 60, and 90 days) to track progress and address concerns.
- Integrate Quizzes & Feedback Fields – Use interactive quizzes and text fields where employees can reflect on challenges and submit updates.
- Assign Due Dates – Set deadlines for follow-up courses, applying them to bulk learners or individual hires.
- Route Feedback to Managers – Direct employee responses to department managers, who can review the data and schedule one-on-one check-ins via Zoom.
This structured approach ensures ongoing support, encourages engagement, and provides managers with actionable insights to guide remote employees effectively.
Why remote onboarding is essential for new hires
Hiring an employee for a remote role comes with inherent risks. Without a strong start, confusion and disengagement can take hold. In some cases, remote employees may take advantage of the lack of oversight, appearing active while staying disengaged.
A well-structured remote onboarding process reduces this risk by setting clear expectations, providing essential tools, and fostering a sense of belonging. When new hires feel supported and engaged from day one, they’re more likely to stay motivated, accountable, and committed to their role.
Learn more: Onboarding Best Practices For Small & Medium-Sized Businesses
Remote onboarding statistics
A strong remote onboarding process directly impacts retention, engagement, and long-term success. However, many companies still fall short. Here’s what the data reveals:
- High turnover risk early on – Up to 20% of employees leave within the first 45 days of employment. (Source: SHRM)
- Onboarding boosts retention – 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experience great onboarding. (Source: SHRM)
- Companies are falling short – Only 12% of employees strongly agree that their employer does a great job onboarding new hires. (Source: Gallup)
Key takeaway: an effective onboarding process can improve retention, boost productivity, and reduce the risks of disengagement. This can help remote employees succeed from day one.
Employee onboarding isn’t easy, but it’s important
Tackling the onboarding process for your new employees (especially your remote employees!) is intimidating at best. But, figuring out how to refine your process is crucial for ensuring that you provide the right information and set the right tone.
Use the tips we’ve outlined here, and you’re that much closer to an onboarding process that shows your remote employees why your company is a great place to work and gives them everything they need to be productive and happy members of your team for the long haul.
After all, when they succeed, you succeed. Talk about a win-win!
Simplify your onboarding process with the GoSkills LMS. Quickly get your new hires up to speed and give them the effective skills training they need to succeed, with easy to understand reporting and analytics.
Check out the GoSkills LMS today for free.
Train any size team
It's easier than ever to track and manage your team's training with the GoSkills LMS.
Start for free
