Onboarding Outsourced Employees: The Best Practices for Employers

Congratulations! You've now recruited and outsourced the employees that you need. But your work doesn't stop there, and to ensure the success of your outsourcing ventures, the next crucial step is onboarding your offshore team members.

Through onboarding, you can orient your new hires about their roles and responsibilities and your organisation and culture. Your employees who get effective onboarding can also efficiently adapt to their positions and surroundings and are more likely to stay in your company, with a study for Glassdoor by the Brandon Hall Group reporting that a strong onboarding process improved new hire retention by 82%.

Whether you already have experience in outsourcing or have never done it before, educating and involving yourself in employee onboarding is critical to understanding what's involved and expected of you.

Learn more about employee onboarding and what you need for the process below! A top-notch outsourcing partner should have the tools and processes in place to support you during this process.

What is Employee Onboarding?

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The process of giving new hires the tools they need to settle into your organisation and their roles is known as onboarding. It allows businesses to make a positive first impression and helps them feel more comfortable with their new jobs.

Usually, an HR representative oversees the onboarding process, involving relevant departments and personnel to provide a good employee experience, improve job satisfaction, and position the new employee for success.

Other advantages of a well-executed onboarding process are boosts in productivity and engagement. When your staff have the resources they need, a clear understanding of their responsibilities, and your corporate culture, they can perform their job functions quickly and smoothly.

7 Employee Onboarding Steps To Ensure Maximum Efficiency With Outsourced Employees

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A global team can use several approaches to onboard remote staff members, with most being good options.

Onboarding external talent, on the other hand, comes with its own set of difficulties. One of them is overcoming culture- and geography-based barriers. Another challenge is making the outsourced or offshore member feel a sense of belonging in their team.

Here are some areas that, in our opinion, are significant for onboarding new members of an offshore team.

1. Build Your Onboarding Programme

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Numerous factors influence your onboarding process, such as your business's industry, company culture, objectives and goals, and the specific team your new hire is joining.

The typical components of an onboarding programme include:

• Company orientation, with information on organisational procedures, regulations, and practices, employee handbooks, benefits such as leaves, and more.
• Technologies and systems training, like setting up equipment, introduction to essential software for internal communication, collaboration, project management, and others that employees need to perform their jobs.
• Company culture introduction, such as information on regular events and social gatherings, communication standards, and meeting occasions and methods.
• Training programmes for compliance, work safety and overall wellness and well-being, technical skills for job-specific proficiency, and soft skills such as communication, teamwork, critical thinking, etc.

2. Welcome Your Outsourced Employees

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First impressions do matter!

A warm greeting at the beginning of your employee's journey with your company and set the tone for the entire onboarding process. Here are some things that you can do:

Send out heartfelt welcome messages.

Provide personalised introductions and welcome notes to your new hires. This small gesture of kindness can go a long way towards making your employees feel valued and motivated to join your company.

Give a briefing of your organisation's mission, values, and culture.

Present your company's history, mission, vision, values, and other aspects of your company culture to align your new hires with the business goals and objectives and create a sense of belonging.

Introduce relevant team members and stakeholders to one another.

Help develop relationships between your recently hired team members and your company's stakeholders by facilitating introductions. This step also helps inform your new hires — and even existing employees — who they can contact for their needs.

3. Establish Key Result Areas (KRAs) and Expectations

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Clear and straightforward communication is one of the cornerstones of a successful outsourcing relationship. This involves ensuring that employees understand what is expected of them, like processing quotations daily, sending out a predetermined amount of bills, answering a certain number of phone calls, or other tasks.

Even if you or your management has a close relationship with your in-house colleagues and regularly evaluates their performance, managing offshore personnel can be different. Here is where Key Results Areas (KRAs) become excellent tools for laying out expectations since they are the quantitative or qualitative outcomes necessary for the duties and responsibilities listed in a job description.

During onboarding, work with your latest team member to establish their KRAs and expected productivity for a specified period. Don't forget to have routine check-ins to give feedback and handle any issues.

4. Discuss Training and Development Plans

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It makes sense that a company would want things to proceed rapidly after deciding to outsource. This also applies to the training process. After all, the more time you spend training their new hires, the more resources you consume, whether for the time lost doing work or the expenses needed to provide them with good development programmes.

The good news is that, with a comprehensive strategy in place, an outsourced worker shouldn't require any more training than an already existing employee.

Those eager to succeed in their new jobs usually populate offshore talent pools, which means these workers are more enthusiastic to participate in training and development initiatives.

For instance, Filipinos and Indians greatly value their work. Foster this motivation right away during employee onboarding, and doing so guarantees that your outsourced employees feel welcome in your organisation.

You can prepare a simple spreadsheet to serve as a framework for their training, complete with details for the programme topics, the people in charge, a directory of the necessary materials and resources, the training methods (e.g. if it's asynchronous, face-to-face sessions, online courses, etc.), and timelines.

5. Share Your Company Culture and Integrate New Employees Into the Team

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According to Steve Jobs, "Great things in business are never done by one person; they're done by a team of people."

Getting new members involved in their respective teams, your organisation, and your corporate culture is essential for developing rapport and encouraging teamwork. When people work towards a common goal, then success follows.

You can start the conversation about your organisational culture with details on regular events and gatherings, communication standards, and meeting information. The following agenda can be establishing personal connections with coworkers — through official welcomes, training sessions, mentorship appointments, etc. — to dismantle barriers and foster unity.

Doing these steps not only familiarises your new hires with their colleagues but also enables your existing employees to recognise their team members' capabilities and potential contributions to their work life and towards achieving shared goals.

6. Orient Them About Your Feedback and Support System

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Providing feedback is an essential part of an employee's experience because it makes employees feel valued, appreciated, and an integral part of the business. When you nurture those feelings in your team members, they are more engaged with their work and your organisation, affecting their productivity and overall performance.

As early as during onboarding, inform your new hires about your process and systems in place for employee feedback and the support that they can get. It's also critical that their colleagues and managers are aware of these systems so that they utilise them effectively.

7. Monitor and Evaluate Your Onboarding Process and Progress

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You can only ensure your onboarding's effectiveness and improvement through continuous tracking, monitoring, and evaluation.

So, track the development of your new talent against predefined goals to make it simpler for you to identify areas where they could need more support and apply necessary changes to the onboarding process based on feedback and observations.

Aside from that, you must also determine and keep track of the success metrics of your onboarding process, such as onboarding satisfaction, training completion rate, time to productivity, and new hire retention, to facilitate tracking the effectiveness of your programmes and identifying areas that require improvement.

A seamless onboarding procedure is crucial for your organisation and outsourced staff to succeed. By doing the steps above, businesses like yours can ensure that your employee programmes help your new hires effectively integrate into your company and be accepted, motivated, and prepared to contribute directly.

Join Forces With Unient for a Smooth Onboarding Process

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Even in the best circumstances, onboarding is complex, especially when integrating outsourced employees into a company.

Having the right offshore partner helps immensely in tackling issues, resolving challenges, and enhancing processes and procedures.

To help evaluate the best partner for you, start by asking your employees for their opinions regarding your employee onboarding processes and discover which parts worked well, need to be removed, and can be improved.

At Unient, we know the difficulties of collaborating with an offshore outsourcing partner, such as being exposed to unfamiliar individuals, new processes, and paperwork that may reduce productivity. Because of this, we've optimised our onboarding procedures to be quick and easy for your organisation and offshore staff.

Talk to our Solutions Experts today to learn more and get customised solutions.