[DiggyJohnson]

Extremely well put, I don’t often see a comment matching my perspective / experience so closely in these discussions.

I believe that the challenge of onboarding for remote teams in more fundamentally difficult than is acknowledged. I’m not so sure that the best remote-first culture and process can ever match a good in-person onboarding experience.

[Olreich]

Do everything the in-person one does, and ensure there’s a team meet up sometime in their first month, with a cultural emphasis on getting to know the new folks.

It’s fundamentally difficult to onboard. What makes “remote” onboarding hard is the same things that makes in-person hard: you basically need to hover over the new hire and ensure that they aren’t getting stuck on anything and that they are getting comfortable with asking for help and that existing team members are helping them.

The thing that makes remote more difficult is that it’s harder for a team lead to see if the new hire is getting helped: passive surveillance is harder when you aren’t sitting nearby. I think you can easily mitigate that by being a good leader and making sure to have routine check ins throughout the onboarding, starting at twice or three times a day for the first couple of days and slowing down over the first couple of weeks until you hit a weekly cadence or the new hire is thriving.