Best practices: Remote recruitment, onboarding, performance management

Remote work is becoming increasingly popular. What used to be a total utopia just 30 years ago is now the reality for many companies and their employees. In a report by Findstack, 16% of companies around the globe are completely remote in 2022.  

According to the UK Office for National Statistics, 37% of people started working from home in 2020, which was a 10% increase from the previous year. The same report also showed that 85% of all people who are working remotely want to use a hybrid approach of both home and office working in the future. However, 32% of businesses aren’t all that certain about the future of the workplace. So, having a team and software for managing a remote workforce is a must. 

In this article, we will discuss all things related to remote work. As traditional offices become a thing of the past, successfully managing a remote workplace is a valuable skill to have for any business and HR manager. From recruiting and onboarding to conducting performance reviews and team buildings, here’s how you can manage your remote team.

Boosting the productivity of your remote team starts with optimizing each step in your remote processes, starting with recruitment. When deciding to recruit employees remotely, managers and recruiters have to deal with making smart decisions, since making one wrong move can cost their company a lot of money. That is why recruiters need to first adapt to remote recruiting and start with creating a good virtual hiring strategy and preferably, using a recruiting tool.

Remote recruiting, when you think about it, isn’t anything new really. Recruiters have been using virtual recruiting tools to hire people for decades. There are many examples of successfully conducted virtual hires. Often, recruiting managers simply used the phone to interview a potential candidate. Nowadays this is replaced by video calls, automated LinkedIn messaging, and searching the candidates’ online presence on social media.

Hiring a remote team has never been easier. Many organizations hire people they’ve never met in person and from places they’ve never been to. But this is the new normal. And managers who use remote recruiting tools will be able to easily find the perfect remote workers for their companies.

Using HR software with a good Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a great place to start when improving your remote recruiting process. Creating a good careers page will bring you more applicants and having HR software will enable you to collect data for each of the candidates, communicate within the platform, and have a great overview of the applicant pool. The applicant tracking system will help you hire the most suitable candidates for your remote workplace, while a GDPR compliant software will also ensure that other candidates’ CVs are deleted after the position has been filled.

Once you decide which candidates will form part of your remote workforce, you can begin with the remote onboarding process. The first thing managers need to do is to have an onboarding checklist. An onboarding checklist allows you to create, assign and keep track of the tasks you need to have in mind when hiring remote workers. 

Having a good remote onboarding strategy can bring you and your organization many benefits. First, you will give a positive impression to your employees and a higher talent retention rate. An employee who feels good in an organization from day one is an employee who will likely stay and work for you for a long time. 

Moreover, a good remote onboarding process can increase employee productivity. Employees who are given clear objectives from the start of the onboarding process will be more focused and will perform better in their jobs. And last, but not least, effective onboarding can reduce hiring costs and prevent a high turnover rate in the future.

Ever since the beginning of the pandemic, conducting employee performance reviews is one of the most important tasks that HR managers need to do to better lead their remote workplace. As it's hard to monitor employees who are working remotely, conducting regular performance reviews is key.

Good performance management software can help you optimize your team and implement regular evaluations. With the help of an online performance management system, you can conduct 90, 180, and 360 degree employee appraisals, organize and collect your data, and gather and evaluate feedback.

Factorial’s performance management software offers you complete flexibility over remote employee performance. You can either use suggested performance review questions or create your own. You can choose from different question formats (both qualitative and quantitative), archive previously-used questions for future evaluations, and schedule regular reviews of your team. Plus, you’ll be able to gather great insights directly from the platform (such as the pay gap in your company, location of your workers, net promoter score, etc.) or create bespoke dashboards for reading your reports.

Payroll management is a vital part of every business with a substantial workforce. But running payroll in multiple countries is one of the major hurdles for organizations with a remote team. Different local regulations, different compliance requirements, and managing a whole fleet of local payroll providers are just some of the factors that make global payroll a difficult and complex process. 

Luckily, there are platforms like Lano which offer businesses a way to simplify their global payroll by automating data flows and consolidating payroll data for the entire team. Interested in knowing more? Then read on as we highlight the different features of Lano’s global payroll solution.

Remote offboarding is just another part of the process of managing remote workers. And just like you have an onboarding process when hiring new employees, you are expected to conduct a similar process when an employee leaves the company.

Offboarding an employee allows the organisaton to easily gather feedback from those who leave. This can be especially helpful in situations when employees haven’t been satisfied with their work experience. This information can help you improve your organization greatly. 

Although some people think that the offboarding process is unnecessary, companies that have reflected and invested into the spheres that the employees who left the company highlighted, have a higher employee retention and a better employee engagement rate. 

Without a good offboarding plan, you may have negative consequences for your organization. For instance, you may not receive back the work equipment the company paid for or lose access to important softwares and tools that are essential to the organization. The proper offboarding plan will help you detect these issues and react on time.

Working from home requires everyone to switch to a digital organization. Employers and HR managers need to have access to HR data and analytics to ease their work. 

HR analytics is essential in any organization looking to grow and scale their processes. Not only does it provide great insights into your current organization, but it makes the areas of improvement much more clear. Not to mention the benefit of being able to make data-based decisions for an organization that’s answering to their stakeholders and shareholders.  

Having a reporting tool like Factorial enables you to have a different policy for ie. absence management (annual leave/sick days/parental leave), depending on the office location and its laws and regulations. By using this feature, managers can extract data for one location only or for all of the offices globally. HR analytics may also help you to deal with diversity and inclusion, or the gender wage gap.

So, what is the thing that both HR management and remote workers need? They need to have access to helpful tools that save them time, ease their work, and bridge the gap between the physical office and the remote workplace. 

If you are a manager searching for the best HR software for remote workers, you don’t need to look any further. Factorial is an all-in-one solution, making it easy to manage remote workers. So, why not make your life and the lives of your HR easier today.

The best part is that Lano and Factorial made a partnership that benefits you dear reader! We’re happy to announce that all Lano clients are able to receive a 30% discount with Factorial for the first 3 months. So what are you waiting for? Take a look at what we’ve prepared for you!