Onboarding Remote Employees: 20 Tips & Best Practices

How will you help them feel connected and confident early on, especially when they can’t absorb the company culture by osmosis, like they would in an office? This is the exact gap that we focus upon, first-hand. New hires often wonder, “Am I doing this right?” or “Do I really belong here?”

One practice that’s worked beautifully for our team is something we call “First 30 Stories.” During a new hire’s first month, we pair them with different teammates, across departments, for short, 20-minute conversations focused on personal stories, not just job descriptions. Each chat starts with one simple prompt: “What’s one lesson you’ve learned working here that shaped how you approach your role?”

This approach does two things. First, it accelerates belonging; new hires quickly see the human side of the company. Second, it gives them a context-rich understanding of how the organization actually operates beyond their immediate role.

When people feel seen and supported from day one, everything else—performance, collaboration, and trust—follows naturally.

Onboarding remote employees is a crucial factor in the hiring phase; it can significantly impact someone’s experience and their long-term success with your company.

From my experience at DistantJob, my fully remote company, I learned that the hardest part of onboarding is not the technical aspects; it is ensuring that the person feels like they are part of the team right from the start. When working remotely, people don’t have the option to stand up and ask a neighbor a question or socialize with others around the water cooler.

While there is no perfect way to onboard new staff, I can share a best practice that I use inside my company (and it’s something you can apply right now).

I call it the buddy system on steroids. I insist that every company we work with assigns an onboarding buddy to every new employee. This buddy can’t be the manager, and preferably, the buddy should be a coworker in a similar position that’s been with the company for at least 6 months.

Now, here comes the key part: You need to structure the buddy system to work well. This means a minimum of 15 minutes per day for 2 weeks of informal, non-structured time where the new employee feels comfortable asking any question no matter how silly it sounds. The role of the buddy is to offer tips, make intros to other people within the company and, in general, act as the translator of the company culture.

Here comes my secret weapon. To ensure that the buddy performs well, we integrate this task into our employee performance review process. The buddy is incentivized to make the effort and will be recognized when she does a good job (potentially rewarded in front of the company as a company value ambassador).

The result: remote employees are integrated with the company 40 percent faster than before.

At the end of the day, yes, remote is the best way to work, but you can’t expect the process to work if you don’t make the effort to integrate your new employees into your company.

The hardest part of onboarding remote employees isn’t tools or training—it’s connection. Most companies throw new hires into a stack of links, documents, and Slack channels and call it onboarding. But information alone doesn’t create belonging. People don’t integrate into teams because they read a handbook—they integrate because someone helps them feel part of the work and the culture.

One practice that has worked exceptionally well for my teams is running a 90-Day Onboarding Map with Ownership Weeks. Instead of overwhelming new hires with everything at once, we break the first three months into progressive responsibility:

Week 1: Learn the system

Week 2: Contribute with guidance

Week 3: Own one outcome

By Week 3, every hire—no matter the role—takes full ownership of a small but meaningful deliverable. Something visible. Something they can point to and say, “I built that.” It might be documenting a process, closing a first support ticket, auditing a campaign, or launching a micro-feature. The goal isn’t perfection—the goal is momentum.

We pair this with onboarding buddies so they’re never solving problems alone, and we replace boring checklists with async video walkthroughs that feel more human. The biggest payoff comes from a simple Friday ritual: reflection and learning. New hires answer three questions—What did you build? What did you learn? What do you need?—and share it with the team. Suddenly, onboarding becomes a team sport instead of an HR task.

The impact: people ramp faster, confidence builds earlier, and culture is absorbed through action rather than theory. Remote onboarding doesn’t fail because people lack resources. It fails because they lack rhythm and connection. When you give them both, they don’t just join the team—they accelerate it.

Onboarding remote employees isn’t just a logistical hurdle—it’s an emotional one. When new hires can’t walk through an office, bump into teammates, or casually overhear how decisions are made, they risk feeling like outsiders from day one. The challenge isn’t just about getting them up to speed; it’s about making them feel like they belong, fast. And in our experience, the key isn’t more Zoom calls—it’s creating intentional connection points that replace what would’ve happened organically in person.

Early in our remote hiring journey, we treated onboarding like a checklist: tech setup, role training, intro meeting, done. But after our third remote hire in 2021 gave feedback that she felt “like a guest, not part of the company,” we knew we had to rethink everything. That’s when we introduced what we now call the “First 5 Days Culture Sprint.”

Here’s how it works: before a new hire even touches their core job responsibilities, we schedule five themed onboarding days focused on immersion. Day 1 is “Our Story,” where they meet with the founder or leadership to learn why we do what we do. Day 2 is “The People,” including casual 1:1s with teammates they won’t work with directly. Day 3 is “How We Communicate”—we walk through everything from how we use Slack to how decisions are documented. Day 4 is “Unspoken Rules,” where we talk openly about company quirks, past lessons, and real culture moments. Day 5 is “Your Voice,” where they reflect on what surprised them, what excited them, and what questions they still have.

One standout example: after implementing this structure, a new marketing analyst told us she felt more connected by Day 3 than she did at the end of six weeks at her last in-office job. The shift wasn’t in what we taught—it was in how human the process felt.

A 2022 Gallup study showed that structured onboarding increases retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%. But structure without soul still misses the mark. Our Culture Sprint injects personality, values, and belonging from the start.

The lesson? Onboarding isn’t about overwhelming new hires with information—it’s about designing an experience where they feel trusted, included, and seen. Because remote doesn’t have to mean distant—if you build connection by design, not by default.

We try to schedule on-site visits as early as possible upon hire and throughout a remote employee’s career. Remote work can often feel isolating, and I believe this helps new employees feel more connected, understand the company culture better, and build relationships with their peers and managers.

I found it helpful in my own experience—when I began employment with Ice Air, I was working fully remote for the first three months. It wasn’t until I had my first site visit that I was able to embed into the culture and build relationships at a more genuine level.

Onboarding remote employees becomes effective when the process feels personal, not procedural. A strong practice is assigning each new hire a dedicated “integration partner” — someone who isn’t their direct manager but understands both the culture and workflows deeply. This peer connection helps new employees build confidence faster, ask candid questions, and adapt to the company rhythm without feeling isolated. The combination of structured training and real human connection makes the remote onboarding experience far more seamless and engaging.

One practice we’ve designed — and plan to continue refining as we grow — is a living onboarding roadmap that breaks down the first 90 days into manageable, transparent milestones.

In my prior operations leadership role, I saw firsthand how hard it is to onboard remote team members without structure. So as we build Grounded Light Counseling, we’re creating a system that avoids the chaos and guesswork. Our roadmap includes linked SOPs, weekly learning goals, and space for feedback at each stage.

But what really sets it apart is tone. We write everything in a voice that reflects our culture: warm, clear, and human. It’s meant to reduce anxiety, not create more of it.

Even as a growing team, we’re choosing to onboard with intention, not improvisation.

We started making personalized video intros for new remote hires at Magic Hour, using our own AI tools. The change was immediate. New hires could finally put faces to names, which made jumping on a call way less intimidating. Investing in small personal touches like this early on is what makes new people feel included instead of just another name on a screen.

In an era where talent is globally distributed, the quality of a company’s remote onboarding process has become a direct predictor of retention and long-term performance. While many organizations have mastered the logistics of shipping laptops and setting up accounts, they often fail to address the more subtle, human challenge: helping a new hire feel like they truly belong. The risk is not just a slow start, but a quiet disengagement from an employee who never fully connects to the team’s rhythm, norms, and purpose.

The fundamental gap in most remote onboarding is the failure to distinguish between explicit and implicit knowledge. We are diligent about transferring explicit information through documents, checklists, and training sessions. Yet we leave the transfer of implicit knowledge—the unwritten rules of how influence works, how decisions are made, and how conflict is handled—almost entirely to chance. This is the organizational grammar that new hires in an office absorb through observation, but which remote employees can struggle for months to decipher.

To bridge this gap, we’ve implemented a practice we call the “Work-in-Progress Tour.” For the first two weeks, a new hire is paired with a seasoned team member whose primary role is not to assign tasks, but to provide access. The new hire is invited to observe a variety of unpolished work moments: a collaborative debugging session, a brainstorming meeting for a nascent project, a candid 1:1 debrief after a client call. Their job is not to contribute, but to watch how the team thinks, negotiates, and solves problems in real-time. This structured observation demystifies the culture in a way no handbook ever could, revealing that true integration comes not from being told how things work, but from seeing it for oneself.

By ensuring that we check in at each step of the onboarding process with remote employees, not just sending them material and assuming that they’re getting on with the onboarding process without any hiccups, we can create a more effective experience.

Essentially, you’re then mirroring the onboarding approach that would be occurring in person, just in a remote manner.

Establish a strict remote onboarding process that is different from your in-house/office-based onboarding processes.

I don’t even recommend amending current onboarding protocols. This is something you need to set up entirely differently as the nature of a remote role and how employees are onboarded is completely different, so your processes need to reflect this.

We’re a fully remote team spread across multiple time zones, and one of the hardest things about onboarding new hires remotely isn’t training — it’s culture. In a physical office, culture seeps in through osmosis: overheard jokes, the way people disagree, what gets celebrated. Online, that stuff vanishes unless you deliberately rebuild it.

One thing that’s worked surprisingly well for us is what I call “reverse shadowing.” Instead of having new hires silently watch senior team members work, we flip it — senior folks watch them. For their first week, new hires record short Loom videos or voice memos narrating what they’re doing, what feels confusing, what feels fun. Then the team watches those clips asynchronously and leaves comments like, “Yeah, this part always trips people up,” or “Love how you approached that.”

It does two things: first, it helps us catch all the invisible friction points in our onboarding that would never show up in a checklist. Second, it gives new hires permission to think out loud — to show how they learn, not just what they’ve learned. It turns onboarding into a two-way dialogue instead of a one-sided info dump.

It’s a little unconventional, but it’s made our new hires ramp faster and feel genuinely seen right out of the gate. In remote work, that’s half the battle.

Among the most difficult aspects to manage with remote onboarding is ensuring people form a real connection with the business and the team. It is easy for new hires to have the impression they are joining a list of names on a screen instead of a living, breathing team of individuals with a shared purpose. At Digital Silk, we place a lot of importance on helping people feel seen and valued from day one. We want new hires to feel part of the culture beyond the tools and training. We want them to know who we are and what we stand for.

A simple and powerful practice we have adopted is our ‘welcome email.’ Each new team member sends an ‘introduction’ email to the company that shares not only their professional history but also some of their passions and hobbies, and maybe even a fun fact or two. This takes an already obligatory step in the onboarding process and gives it the potential to become a real conversation starter; people in the company reply and connect with the new hire over shared interests. It’s a small gesture, but it helps set the tone that we hire whole people, not just resumes, and that our community matters just as much, if not more, than the capability to perform functions.

We don’t do virtual happy hours or onboarding handbooks. At DualEntry, for our remote team, Discord is the office. New hires join it like walking into a building—each channel is a room with a purpose: focus rooms, quick huddles, conference calls. You can literally “walk in” to ask a question or shadow someone. No scheduling, no formality, just presence.

It works because it recreates proximity without performance. People drop in and out as they work, and that constant low-latency communication makes remote feel fast, not distant. The key isn’t more structure; it’s ambient access. You don’t onboard people with slides; you onboard them into the flow of work.

Onboarding remote teachers across time zones is tough, so we built a 30-Day Cultural Immersion Pathway. New hires watch a personal welcome from our CEO, meet three “culture buddies” from different regions, and finish with a live curriculum deep dive. This mix of personal and professional connections helped new teachers feel included faster and cut time-to-first-lesson by 15%. Connection first, process second—that’s the key.

At PlayAbly, the biggest change was stopping our one-size-fits-all remote onboarding. We now use AI to create a custom plan for each person, so marketers don’t get the engineer’s guide. This means they get the right information, not a pile of irrelevant stuff. The confusion dropped and people started making real contributions faster. Even small tweaks by department make a huge difference, so you don’t need a massive system to start.

New remote hires get overwhelmed on day one. We fixed that by making a short video library covering our lingo and common client requests. They can watch at their own pace, which makes them feel more confident. It’s like having a mentor they can rewatch. My advice is to start by recording a few answers to the most common questions you always hear. It’s the easiest way to begin.

Onboarding remote employees comes with one major challenge: building connection without physical presence. New hires often understand the role but miss the culture, the rhythm, and the small nuances that make collaboration smooth. To bridge that gap, structure and human touch must go hand in hand.

One practice that has worked well for my team is creating a “context-first” onboarding plan. Instead of jumping straight into tools or tasks, we spend the first few days helping new hires understand how decisions are made, what quality means to us, and how their work ties into the bigger goals. Every new team member is paired with a senior colleague who acts as a guide for the first two weeks, not to supervise, but to share how we think, communicate, and solve problems.

That practice has helped us build alignment early. By the time a remote hire starts executing, they already feel part of the team’s mindset, not just its workflow. It builds ownership faster and reduces the friction that usually comes with remote beginnings.

We started having new remote hires show what they’re working on every few months. It’s helped people jump in faster and get to know each other. When someone shares their project early, they see how it connects with what others are doing. The teams work together better now, and new people actually understand where their piece fits in.

When we hire team members in the UK or Europe who will be mainly remote, we usually try to arrange for them to spend their first week in our office, immersed in our culture, meeting the team, and making real connections.

After that initial visit, each new hire is paired with a “buddy” who checks in daily via video and facilitates informal chats with peers in their region. We also host an annual in-person team event so everyone gets face-to-face time. This combination of early physical connection plus ongoing personal contact means remote employees feel a bit more anchored from day one and not so isolated.