Bringing new people into a business has never been easy. The onboarding process has to take care of such a wide range of different issues, ultimately ensuring that the person you’ve hired is able to operate in a completely new environment, that it can end up being quite difficult to tick all the right boxes.
In the context of global teams, this can become even trickier. In this article, we go through some of the main factors that you should aim to keep in mind during the onboarding process to increase efficiency, from consistent approaches to regulatory compliance to buddy systems.
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Consistent regulatory compliance
With global teams, it can be a lot more difficult to approach issues surrounding regulatory compliance. If you’re operating in multiple markets and have to navigate several different but overlapping regulatory frameworks, compliance can soon end up becoming a bit of a nightmare.
It’s important that you adopt and adhere to a consistent strategy from the very beginning. Make sure that you also get help where necessary. Use services such as Personnel Checks to help you with DBS and other background checks, and make sure you have access to a legal team that fully understands the jurisdictions you’re having to deal with.
Automate where possible
There are plenty of aspects of onboarding that can be automated nowadays, and it’s important that you do so where possible. Look at the different technologies that are available, especially in the relatively new context of AI, and implement them wisely.
Whether that’s your HR system or how you manage onboarding documents, automation can make it a lot easier to maintain an efficient, legally compliant approach in the context of managing and onboarding global teams.
Buddy systems
Often, the most effective way of bringing new hires up to speed is by using some kind of buddy system. No one knows how to work at your business quite like your other employees, and it’s often highly effective to pair new recruits up with some more long-standing people in your organisation.
Ideally, they’ll work in roughly the same department, and maybe share some of the same general responsibilities. This person will be there to answer any basic questions, whether that’s how to use a specific piece of software or how best to email the IT department should their computer start to play up.
Buddy systems aren’t just practically effective when it comes to sharing skills; they also help new hires feel more comfortable in their new work environment, helping them settle into their team as quickly as reasonably possible.
Onboarding global teams can present a whole host of slightly unique challenges, and it’s important that you take those challenges seriously. From regulatory compliance to the more social side of things, there are a wide range of solutions available to all sorts of employers – do your research thoroughly, identify the solutions that are most relevant to your business in particular, and integrate them into a system that covers all your bases, not just one or two.
Please note this is a contributed post.
