How to Onboard Remote Team Members Without Stopping to Train Them

In today’s episode, you’re going to discover how you can have new team members onboard and train themselves. Just imagine you’ve hired somebody new, and you or nobody else on your team has to walk alongside them, spending time helping someone new learn how to do their job while their own task list, or your own task list, is falling behind.

So welcome to this episode of the Eric Dingler Leadership Podcast, a show designed to help you lead better to live better. This episode is part four, I think. Yeah, part four of a five part series where I’m answering the five most common questions I get asked about leading remote teams. Now you want to make sure you stick around to the very end, though, for today’s leadership nugget of the week. I’m really pumped to share this little leadership axiom with you, so we’ll get to that right after we talk about this self onboarding.

Now here’s something that I found kind of strange. This morning I recorded a training module for my ninety day coaching program called the Team Engine, where I send a video for twelve weeks, a different video each week, on the process of building and leading a remote team. How do you recruit a team? How do you onboard them? How do you train them? How do you lead them? How do you make sure you have a team that is successful? And the module for this week was exactly this, the self onboarding dashboard. I didn’t know until after lunch, when I opened the Airtable that we use to coordinate the podcast episodes here, and I looked at the list to see what’s the show I need to get ready to record this afternoon for the podcast, and it was the exact same topic. I thought that was just kind of strange and interesting. So I thought, well, this is definitely something I’m supposed to be spending my day talking about, because it has literally been the topic of the whole day.

Now, before I get into how we set up a self onboarding process for remote teams, I want to take a few minutes to talk about why we would do this. Why go through the effort? It’s not a huge effort, but there’s a little bit of effort to it. Even if you don’t currently have a team, now’s the time to start preparing it if you’re planning to one day have a team. Start preparing now and doing little things here and there. When we get to talking about how this works, you can start laying the framework so that when you do get to the point where you’re ready to hire, you’ve got this process roughly mapped out, at least ready to go. So it’s worth doing this. And if you have a team already, it’s not too late. You can start working with your current team on getting this ready for new team members, and I’m going to talk a little bit more about that here in just a few minutes.

But before we get into the how, I want to take a few minutes to talk about the why, the mindset behind this. There are four things that I can think of that make the work of setting this up worth it.

Number one: This establishes the remote team workflow from day one. You see, most of us got hired into an entry level position at a local business. That’s probably where the majority of us got started, in in-person business. And we went in day one and handled all the paperwork, and then the boss said, okay, this is so and so, and you’re now going to follow them and watch what they do. They’re going to show you how to do the job. So you bus tables, or wash dishes, or helped clean up yard waste, or worked the fryer at the fast food restaurant, whatever your first job was. You learned by following someone, by watching someone. So what happens when we pivot to try to move into the remote team world? We carry that over as the preconceived idea of what training has to look like. In fact, that’s a big challenge in leadership in general. We take how we experience something and we just try to copy that when we’re in a season or a position where we have to do that thing. We don’t take the time to step back and say, what was the goal? What were they trying to accomplish? Why did they have me do it that way? What is the way I want to do that? In this environment, we have to take time to contextualize our experiences to what we’re leading.

So with a remote team, your option is pretty much, okay, meet me tomorrow at this time on Zoom and I’ll share my screen and show you what I’m doing. Well, who wants to sit there and do that? It’s going to slow you down and you’re going to fall behind. Or maybe you’re training them to do something that you’re not necessarily doing every day, so you’ve got to spend a week training them on how to use the project management system, how to use this online tool, this piece of software. You’re training them how to use things you already use, so you think you have to be the one that teaches them this. You take the time to train them, and those couple hours, now what happens with the stuff you needed to get done? Do you work longer hours? Do you spend an extra day on the weekend? The following week, when you set this new team member up to work on their own, are you busy scrambling trying to catch up on last week? It just snowballs into you, or somebody, falling behind. For remote teams, this isn’t the best way to do it. There’s a better way, and it’s by setting the new team members up to train themselves.

Because you’re working remote, they have to get used to solving problems on their own. They have to get used to working independently. They have to get used to the discipline of sitting down and putting in the effort to reach a goal without somebody there clocking them in and out, without other people walking around the office. You’ve lost that level of accountability, which is fine. I talk about overcoming that in the last episode. That’s totally okay. You don’t need that level of accountability when you hire the right person, but people still need to get used to this. If you take someone and spend their whole first day, or week, or two weeks on Zoom with them all day long, you’re eventually going to have to cut that cord. So I like to take the self onboarding and use it to establish the remote team workflow, rhythm, and culture of your company from day one.

Number two: No one has to stop to train the new kid. That’s my favorite part of this, to be honest. No one has to stop things. Keep moving. They take about a week and onboard themselves and get all caught up, and then they’re ready to hit the ground running, week two or three depending on the complexities of what you’re hiring them for. They immediately take the pressure off of some other team members, or off of you, and now you suddenly have more time. You’re not having to scramble to make up time. You gain time much sooner than you would have if you tried to do all the training yourself.

Number three: Everybody receives what we call first generation training. For example, our project management system, we use a software called Hive, the Hive app. We are totally integrated into it. We are in it every day. I’ve talked about Hive before. They’re not a sponsor of the podcast. If you’re listening and you’re from Hive, feel free to reach out, but we’re not sponsored by them in any way, it’s just the tool we use. And like many softwares, they have a university with a welcoming series of videos for onboarding. When we first started using Hive, it was just me and one other person, Peter. We made the decision to switch over to this tool, and him and I both had to watch the training videos, because neither one of us knew how to do it. That was great for us. It got us trained quickly. We knew how to use it, and we were in the system, benefiting from it. So now anytime we hire a new team member that’s going to be working with us in Hive, one of the first things they do is go through the training from Hive. It’s already there. It worked for me, it worked for Peter.

Now there’s been some things that have happened through this that have been very beneficial for us. Once we were working on something as a team, in a team meeting, and we wanted to do something, and somebody was like, okay, how are we going to do this? And one of our new team members, she’d only been on the team for like six weeks, after a silence, everybody kind of looking at each other on Zoom, she goes, well, Hive can do this. And we all went, what? She goes, Hive can do this. Hive had just added this new feature that was included in her onboarding training, that wasn’t in ours. I don’t read the release notes every week. Every week we get “what’s new in Hive,” and I don’t read those every week. Maybe I should have somebody on the team do it, but in reality, it’s just not happening. So none of us knew that the tool could do that, but since she had just gotten first generation training, she knew.

What would have happened if me or somebody else on the team would have spent time and said, okay, I’m going to share my screen, here’s Hive, over here we do this, over here we do this, this is how we do this? She would have only learned those few little things that person taught her. What if the person doing the training didn’t use a part of Hive that this new team member is going to have to use? Or what if the person doing the training has developed a bad habit, and they pass that bad habit on, and six months later that new hire is training somebody else, and they’ve now passed on the bad habit, plus a bad habit they’ve picked up. Over time, the usefulness of tools to a company really degrades, because people are getting second, third, fourth generation training, and every time they get it, it’s watered down, full of little mishaps, not as good as the original, and the tool just becomes less useful. I think this is a significant problem that can be solved very easily, just by requiring every new hire to go through first generation training. Whatever the software, whatever the vendor provides, use it. Don’t judge it. If you want to, afterward say, okay, here’s how we’ve contextualized that in our SOPs. Of course you’re going to do that, but you still want to give them that first generation training.

We do this if we’re going to hire somebody, say a digital marketing assistant that’s going to help with Google Analytics. We don’t mind hiring people that aren’t trained or experienced with things. We don’t mind training them and investing in them and building them up. We actually prefer that, because we have them go through the free training that’s really good, from Google itself, on Google Analytics. It’s going to be the most up to date, it’s going to have the most accuracy in it, and they’re getting the same training as everybody else on the team they’re working with, so they’re brought up to speed very, very quickly. First generation training is one of the greatest benefits of having a self onboarding process for your team.

Number four: It’s really kind of the final test. We give people a set amount of time based upon how much is on their dashboard, and I’m going to explain that in a few minutes. But based upon what’s on there, we make a really educated estimate of how long it’s going to take, because most of it is recorded video, and we know the times of all the videos. So we’re able to say, okay, you have a week, you have seven days, you have nine days, whatever it is, to complete this by. And it’s really easy to check in and see, are you doing it, how are you doing, are you getting them done on time. And if suddenly they’re not able to watch twenty hours of video in a week, something’s really wrong. That is a huge red flag that maybe you’ve made a wrong choice, and it’s not even worth investing anymore into this person. So it’s really a final transition test from the hiring decision into the probationary period. They’ve made it through the interview process, which I’ve explained in previous podcasts, and now they’re in the probationary period, and this is kind of a final test.

So those are the four reasons I really am into, and what I appreciate so much about, our self onboarding process. Once we discovered this and embraced it, it made hiring new team members and onboarding them so much easier. So much easier.

Now, how does it work? What’s the practical, what’s the nuts and bolts of how we make this work? Well, before I share that, I just want to take a second to say this. If you are listening to this podcast and you feel like for the last, we’re going to say, six months, things have been kind of stuck. Revenue is stuck, leads are stuck, you’re just feeling stuck, lost. If you can say in the last six months the needle hasn’t moved the way you need it to or want it to, like, if we were having an honest conversation, we sat down over a cup of coffee and we were friends, and you felt safe, and you were to look at me and say, man, the last six months have not measured up to what I need them to, I just feel stuck. Well, I guarantee you, my friend, you have a leadership problem. Your business will never grow beyond your leadership capacity. If you’ve been stuck for six months, you need to take a step in your leadership. You need to learn and grow as a leader, even if you’re a solo operation, a business of one. There is something in your personal leadership, leading yourself, a mindset, a habit, that is keeping you stuck.

So I want to encourage you, don’t let this stretch on. Don’t let this be you in another six months. If you already know the last six months have not measured up, and you don’t know one hundred percent why, or you don’t see what’s going to change to make it happen. Or let’s say you’ve tried this and tried that, and you’ve just tried tactics, well I tried this, I joined this group, I went there, I tried some ads. If you’ve tried and tried and tried, you’re just throwing stuff at the wall. That’s not leadership. That’s desperation. And I want to invite you into changing that, into breaking that, by growing in your leadership. To help you do that, I’ve put together an eleven day leadership reset. It’s a series of eleven emails you can sign up for right now, to help you consider your leadership, to help you wrestle with some of the mindsets and false beliefs that aren’t serving you well and are holding you back.

Now you may be thinking, but I’m not leading a team. Well, then you’re your team. You’re following you. So right now, unless you’re driving or can’t, I want you to go sign up for the eleven day leadership reset. If you’re like, oh, I can’t do eleven days, I don’t like getting eleven emails in a row, that’s okay. At the bottom of every email is a fast forward button. You can click every button and get all eleven emails right in a row. Or you might get a prompt and think, this one has nothing to do with me at all. Well, okay, I disagree, but if that’s what you believe, I’m not going to fight you on it. Just hit the fast forward button and get the next email. The point of these is to help you get unstuck, to help you move from where you are to where you want to be. So don’t let being stuck stretch on anymore. Sign up for the eleven day leadership reset today.

All right, how do we do this self onboarding dashboard, as we call it, at my agency? You can use whatever tool you want, whatever system. We use a Google spreadsheet, and I gave this as a template to download to everyone in the ninety day Team Engine. Everybody inside Team Engine just gets ours to download as a template. Down the left side, column A all the way down, it’s broken into some subsections, but it’s a list of all the different things we need someone to do and learn for their job.

The top section is universal things. Access your company email here. One of the third or fourth things is a video they watch on security. Teaching them, we never ask clients to email us usernames and passwords, because as soon as they do that, if their email gets hacked, or heaven forbid our email gets hacked, or one of our team members’ email gets hacked, then all a hacker has to do is search “password” and every email with a password in it pops up, and now they have the username and password to all of these things that have been shared. So we never use email for username and password. We’ve got a video that we recorded one time that says, this is our policy, and here’s the tool we use, now watch this video on how to use the tool. When you’re done, the next step is emailing this person on the team to get your credentials into our password vault. Then they watch a video on our history, a video about our vision, our mission, our core values, our brand promise, and there’s a video on how to communicate with clients.

Because let me tell you something, when you’re hiring people from different cultures, they communicate in different ways. People from Eastern Europe, they love to answer questions that you ask them with, “of course.” It sounds really rude to people from the United States, but it’s not rude at all when you understand the culture. So we have some cultural trainings, on working with people from different cultures, and on the culture of the United States, because these are our customers. There’s just these universal trainings, and a lot of them are five minutes, just little video clips I recorded. I started recording a series of videos and sent them to my team to watch, and when I recorded them, I was really careful to say, hey, in today’s video I want to talk about this. I had some slides, and I would record myself and send it to everybody on my team, and then put it on the onboarding dashboard, a link to it.

Then we have a whole section of tools. Watch these videos to learn how to use our project management system, Hive. Watch these videos to learn how to use Loom. Watch these videos for all the tools we’ve got that everybody on the team needs access to. Then we have sections depending upon the person’s specific job. If someone is being hired as a web developer, there’s a whole series of videos just for developers. There’s a replay in there of a webinar we did in the past, where we share with people our approach to digital marketing, what makes digital marketing work. It was a webinar we did that was a lead magnet, and it’s like three years old, but it’s still accurate, still relevant to today, so we have everybody watch it. We want you to learn our approach to digital marketing, here, watch this.

So I would say the majority of the content in here is pre-recorded videos. We have links to other people’s YouTube videos, links to videos where somebody teaches something really well, watch this video, it’s public, we’re going to use it. We have links to podcast episodes on whatever we wanted to cover. It’s all in there. So this spreadsheet, column one, is all the steps to onboarding and the things they need to do. Column B is who they’re going to work with on the team to do that. A lot of them just say self, self, self. And then it may say your leader, your leader, or it may say Peter, or somebody else on the team. Like, when they have their headshot and bio ready for the team page of the website, they email it to Peter, our director of web services, and he takes care of reviewing it for us. He knows to do that, and if he doesn’t have any questions about it, he posts it on the website. There’s this whole automated system doing it.

And it starts with a thirty minute meeting with their leader. We offer somebody the job, they accept the job, we’re happy. Then we send any paperwork, fill these forms out, sign this agreement, this confidentiality agreement, non-compete, all that kind of stuff. So they sign all their paperwork, and then they schedule a meeting with their leader. It’s a thirty minute Zoom, and the leader welcomes them. The leader goes over right away with them a reminder of the vision, mission, and core values, what their role looks like and how it helps us reach our vision and mission. They go through quickly and introduce people on the team, basically going through the roster and saying, this is Eric, he’s the CEO of the company, this is Peter, director of web services, here’s what that means, this is Manoosh, he handles client support tickets, this is Marissa. They just go through the roster, so the person knows who does what.

Then they say, now we’re going to introduce you to our self onboarding dashboard. They show them the spreadsheet, they show them how it works. The very last column is date completed, and they say, the very first row is this meeting, do you have any questions, okay, we’re going to go ahead and mark this complete, I’m emailing this to you, and you pick it up on row two. Then they give them a date and specific time, aligned with the East Coast of the United States, that all of it needs to be done and completed by, and the team person is off and running. They’re going to get access to their email pretty quickly, within a day or so, and access to Hive. Then people on the team start sending them personalized welcome videos, everybody on the team makes a video for the new team member, and it’s this whole onboarding to the team.

So that’s what it looks like. Now, how do you get started with this? Well, first, and I think this is probably the best way to do it, email me to join the waitlist for the next Team Engine cohort. I run that cohort once a quarter, and it’s a small group, a couple of people. I only bring in three or four people. Right now I’m keeping them small. Down the road I may make them larger, but right now I like to keep them small. We go through ninety days. We cover writing job descriptions, how to clarify the win, how to delegate, how to post a job, where to post it, how to budget to afford the position, how to filter applicants, how to interview, how to build the self onboarding, what one on one meetings look like, what you talk about in meetings, how you measure what the client, or how you measure what the team is doing, how do you manage the team. It’s an entire twelve week process to learn how to build, onboard, and lead a remote team, even if you already have a remote team, there’s something there you can learn. If you don’t have a remote team, it’s a great place to get started. So email me and say, hey, I want to be on the waitlist for the next Team Engine. I’ll make sure I let you know.

Now, the other thing you could do, if you’re like, nah, I’m not signing up for a coaching program, well, then what do you do? Start where you are and grow into this from there. So the first thing I would do is open a Google spreadsheet and just start making a list of everything you want people to do, in order. Just start making that list and brain dump into it. What are all the tools we want them to learn, what all the processes we want them to learn. And then after you do that, if you have a team, start creating content for the team and say, hey, listen, I’m starting to create some stuff I wish I would have had when you got started, but we didn’t have it. I’m going to create this, and I need you to watch each of these, just to make sure we’re all coming together to be on the same page, we’re growing as a company, we’re getting healthier as a company, and this is how we’re going to do that. If you don’t have a team, start creating content for your first hire.

Now, I would also say, after you make that list of all the things you want to offer, before you start recording anything, go look for everything that already exists that you can plug into that. Say, watch this, watch this. Whatever the tool is, don’t just assume everybody knows how to use Slack. I don’t know how to use, I hate Slack, to be honest, the few times I’ve used it. But that’s just me, okay, nothing against Slack, nothing against the people that work at Slack, whatever, if I offended you, build a bridge and get over it. I was just personally, I don’t like it. We had, and with us it’s Hive, Hive has its own built in team communication system, channels and stuff, kind of works like Slack, but it’s just integrated into our project management system, so I just prefer that. But if you use Slack, don’t assume everybody knows how to use it. I probably don’t like it because I don’t know how to use it well. I never went through the process to learn. Well, don’t make people stumble around and figure it out. I just had to figure it out, they can figure it out. Well, okay, that’s a little arrogant. Be kind and provide a training. If Slack doesn’t have any videos, somebody on YouTube has created one, go find it, plug it in, train your people. You have to, don’t assume, train. You’ll be surprised how many of those slots you get. You’re not going to be able to find a pre-recorded video of the history of your company, your mission, your vision, your core values. That’s something you need to come up with.

All right, I want to go ahead and share this week’s Leadership Tip of the week with you. This is a good one, I’m so pumped for this, this is one of my favorites. In fact, when I looked at it on the list I have, a whole list of these that I personally pull from to add to the leadership tip of the week, we’re in week forty eight here, and I’ve done forty eight of these, and I had to put it all in a list because if not, I forget, I can’t remember which ones I shared in week ten. When I saw this one on the list I got really pumped, and a little convicted, because I realized, well, I’ll explain that in just a second.

Before I do that, you’ve made it this far into the podcast. We’re like thirty five, thirty six minutes in. You’ve made it. So I would invite you to please do me a favor and make sure that you have subscribed to the podcast wherever you listen. Subscribe or follow, whatever it is on that platform, and then leave a review or a comment if you’re on Spotify. Jamie left a comment on episode forty six, and I really appreciate this, Jamie. He said thank you for your leadership podcast, Eric, he’s always happy when he sees another episode come out, he’s really enjoying the content and finds it inspiring to see how I’m running my remote team, and he hopes to implement similar strategies when he can create a team around him, and he’s looking forward to the next installment. Jamie, thank you so much. And I’m telling you something right now, you are putting in the work to become the leader that the team you want to lead wants to follow, and that is so important. You realize there are things you need to learn, and so you’re doing that, and I believe you’re going to get to the point that you’re going to have that team. You’re doing all the right things, and when you do, you’re going to be a better leader, and your team is going to benefit from it. I appreciate that kind comment, it made my day last week when I got a notification that there was a comment on my Spotify creator account.

So, thank you very much, and here’s this week’s Leadership Tip of the week. You ready? Your calendar is the receipt of your true priorities. I know, right, some of you just went, whoa, that’s good. I’m going to say it again for those that might have missed it. Your calendar is the receipt of your true priorities. What do I mean by that? Look at your calendar for the last month, then ask yourself, are the priorities I have in my life on my calendar? Did they get time on my calendar? I say this is a priority, I’ve said I’m going to work on this, I’ve said this is important, this has to get done, this is what matters to me. Well, look at your calendar for the last week, or for the last month, and did those things get on your calendar?

Now, you might have to fill some time in. Like, my kids are a priority, and I looked at my calendar and was able to say, okay, Sundays I’ve kept to my priority of no screen time on Sunday, and instead of looking at a screen, looking at my kids, talking to my kids, interacting with my kids. Did I do that this last month? Did I do other things to prioritize my kids? Can I see chunks of time in my calendar where I know that time went to my kids, went to my wife? Are there times on my calendar that I spent specifically working on developing my team, developing myself? Is there time in my calendar that was spent on prioritizing our clients? We’ve been in the process right now of rolling out changes to our care plan, and I have to contact and communicate this to all of our clients. Have I been scheduling enough time to do that? And the answer was no. And that hurt, because I’m letting the team down, I’m going to miss my own self-imposed deadline. So I realized I needed to make up for that a little bit.

So this is a good activity to do, no matter how long you’ve been a leader. When you do this, look forward. Don’t just evaluate from the past, use that to make adjustments for the future. Right now, look at your calendar, look at the last month, it’s the receipt of your true priorities. Did your true priorities have time in your calendar? And maybe you’re like, oh, I don’t know what my true priorities are. Well, then start by making a list of your true priorities first, and then look at your calendar. The calendar is the receipt of your true priorities. If not, calendar time for it right now. Put a block of time on the calendar, block it off, and say, during this time I’m going to work on this priority. Because if you don’t, you’re going to keep saying something is a priority, but it’s never actually going to be. Maybe it’s a dream and not a priority, and that’s different, and you need to acknowledge that. A dream, a wish, a hope, isn’t a priority if it’s not getting your time. The only things that are really priorities are your time. A lot of people have a list of hopes and wishes and dreams that they say are their priorities, but they’re not, because the calendar shows that it’s not. Your calendar is the receipt of your true priorities.

All right. Let’s recap some hot takeaways from today’s show. I’ve got four hot takeaways that I saw, and I’d love to hear what your takeaway is. Here are the four I saw.

Number one: Set up a self onboarding process for new team members to help them settle into a remote team culture from day one. Plus, it’ll save you hundreds of hours of time.

Number two: Start by listing what your ideal onboarding process should include. Just start making the list.

Number three: If you have a list, link to as many existing resources as you can, to avoid reinventing the wheel. Again, back to saving time.

Number four: Evaluate your calendar from the last couple of weeks to see if what you say are your priorities, and deed, are.

So those were my four hot takeaways. I’d love to know what your takeaway is from this episode, send me an email and let me know. Until next time, pick one thing to take action on right now, to help you lead better to live better.