| > In an office it's easy for a new hire to ask a question or get someone's attention. When remote, how does the company communicate culturally? Is there an expectation for response times? If not, what internal tools and resources are there that allow a new hire to self-solve common issues? I'm a solution architect and I've been working last 3 year remotely for my current employer and I never meet anybody from my team in person. You may joke, that they are AI-generated avatars :) We have a team chat in slack where all questions / important updates are posted and this works fine. If one faces some issues with local environment setup or access, usually somebody reacts in 15 minutes or so.
You may argue that your new colleague do nothing this 15 minutes, but from the other side (a) he have to continue trying / google and as a result he learns (b) experienced engineers are not disturbed in the middle of current task.
Also, we have a daily 1hr-long zoom call to discuss on-going questions. I never faced cases when I contact somebody through direct messages during his normal working hours and I have to wait for response till tomorrow. Usually my colleagues respond to me in 5, maybe 10 minutes. Also, usually I can schedule a zoom call for the same day if I need this. Regarding an expectations for response time and the company communication culture, the idea is to try do all your best to help other and do not slow down others intentionally, because "we work remotely". Not sure that it's possible to set some SLAs to distinguish responsible remote employees from those who abuse remote work opportunity, but you definitely will "feel" this difference if you communicate with remote colleagues intensively. >Also, figure out parts of onboarding are best done synchronously or asynchronously Do all the onboarding synchronously and talk to a new hire as much as it's required. This shows a good attitude.
Still, the synchronous onboarding can be remote. |