Onboarding a distributed global support team – same or different?
Distributed teams face somewhat different onboarding challenges: how do you train and foster team members who you may never meet in real life? And what about different cultures from your own? Some remain the same though: how long do you give to new hires to understand your brand and then excel in your environment, and how do you recognize if someone will just never work out? For the past seven years, when we first introduced real training for our team, our process have been constantly evolving to find the right type of training and coaching for different learning styles, to elevate our trainers and coaches who came from among us, and to involve more than just the trainers to distribute the load and to quickly foster cooperation and relationship among our team of 150 who are distributed among multiple offices in multiple states and countries like the US, Ireland, Estonia, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, and the Philippines.
Conversation starters! – How long is your onboarding period and why? Who is involved? – Do you teach technical topics all at once or do you do it in phases? – Do you have a staging environment? – Do you face language and cultural differences/difficulties?
I will share what worked and didn’t work for our brand and team – and until then, one piece of advice: do your best to hire the right candidates 😉
Takeaways:
Learn to apply and adjust your current onboarding processes to apply to remote locations, and learn to identify potential pitfalls when it comes to training in different shifts, locations, and among people with different cultural backgrounds – all this to maximize your training experience to set up the right people to succeed as quickly as possible within your organization.