How to Create a Winning Remote IT Onboarding Experience
You should absolutely create a winning IT onboarding experience
IT needs to become employee-centric
Whether it’s an app, a website, or an analytics tool, every single business prioritizes their customers’ digital experience. But what about the digital experience of their employees?
Before the pandemic increased the urgency for a flexible workplace that could handle remote work, employee-centric IT was a much lower priority. But if you want to keep your top performers engaged and capture talent across the globe, you need to have experience-centric IT that helps all people—not just your customers.
Equipping employees with the right software and hardware at the start has a direct correlation with better employee experience, engagement, and retention. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced great onboarding. (Source) The top strategic business priority areas for CEOs have shifted in response. Prioritizing their workforce has risen from fifth in 2020 to third in 2022, according to Gartner. (Source)
Winning remote onboarding is critical for growth
"The war for talent is over. Talent won." - Ime Ryan , PWC US Chairman
34% of 4% of remote-capable workers want to work remotely full time, 60% want to work a flexible hybrid schedule, and only 6% want to work in a traditional office-centric setting says Gallup.
80% of new hires who receive poor onboarding plan to quit according to Paychex.
On average, it costs a company up to 9 months of an employee’s salary to replace them—for someone making $60,000 per year, that comes out to $45,000 in recruiting and training costs (SHRM).
3 major challenges IT leaders must overcome
We’ve covered that a good onboarding experience for remote workers is crucial, so why isn’t every business providing one? Employee onboarding has a lot of pieces to it, from HR and IT handoffs to all the granular processes of getting an employee up and working. This is what’s getting in the way of delivering a seamless onboarding experience:
1) Lack of clear policies and processes
Work logistics and expectations should not be assumed—they should be written down. Documenting and providing centralized access to essentials like policies, processes, guides, training videos, and company mission statements will help new hires align with their responsibilities faster and feel like part of the team from day one. This should also help mitigate HR or IT getting deluged with common questions that can be answered in one of your onboarding documents. Before the employee’s start date, it is also important to establish who the onboarding point of contact is. When one person owns the new hire relationship, it makes it easier to figure out who is best to assist when a problem occurs. Speaking of…
2) Disjointed cross-functional communications
HR, IT, InfoSec, facilities, people managers, and other stakeholders all get involved in equipping workers. So, the systems and workflow processes for every department must be built on a foundation of accessibility and interconnectivity. Otherwise, trying to coordinate problem-solving when something goes wrong in a remote employee’s onboarding experience takes time away from doing your actual job. For example, if a remote worker isn’t given access to all the apps they need on day one, then day two is filled with multiple, separate email chains of different employees trying to “make it happen” for the new hire.
3) Time-consuming physical logistics
With remote work, IT employees had to turn into logistics and procurement
professionals; they are now responsible for shipping laptops, desktops, and all the computer accessories that go along with them. They have to track shipping labels and document serial numbers while being ready to answer frantic emails about someone’s laptop not arriving on time for their first day of work. And equipping remote teams at scale is made even more difficult with a global workforce that requires contracts with different vendors and shipping carriers.
What we’ve learned from our customers at Firstbase is it takes about 500 IT hours per year to handle end-user computing logistics for every 100 remote employees. It is unfortunate that so much time is taken on something that does not grow the business.
The answer is a cloud architecture
IT’s talent is not best spent being laptop shippers. In the same way businesses consume digitally-managed servers from cloud providers (where they own and manage the facilities and server farms), businesses should consume digitally-managed hardware and physical operations of onboarding and other employee equipment processes. In essence, end-user computing turns into a cloud-based tech stack. The new stack should provide the following:
Self-service employee experience
Employees get to order from a catalog of inventory to best do their job from anywhere.
SaaS automation
All the workflows and administrative controls from IT and HR are visible and trackable, while all software and communication tools are integrated with their necessary counterparts for seamless communication.
Outsourced physical operations
Facilities, procurement and logistics teams, and the necessary supply chain relationships are outsourced so your business doesn’t have to think about it.
What a winning IT onboarding looks like
This is what your organization needs to consider to make their employees feel welcome, valued, and properly equipped to do their best work
1. Customize your new hire welcome
To help foster authenticity in a virtual environment, the onboarding experience should be personalized. Customize your own welcome message in Firstbase to help them feel more included during what is usually the first touchpoint that new hires have with your company.
2. Provide a smooth self-service experience
Give your new hire the option to select the equipment that they want from a curated catalog. In Firstbase, it’s easy to manage which items your employee can select. To make it easy, we suggest creating packages based on their department (e.g., Marketing), since different roles have different needs. This helps reduce your environmental footprint (less shipments) and save money (less unnecessary equipment)—for example, a designer may need a desktop monitor in addition to a laptop, but a content writer that lives in Google Docs may just require a laptop. You also have the option to send previously used equipment to promote sustainability or enable admin controls to check that items are appropriate before they ship.
3. Limit back-and-forth logistics woes
Full visibility into where each order is at every step of the way is critical, especially if you are hiring at scale. Once a new hire submits their equipment package, they will receive real-time processing and delivery tracking notifications, limiting the timeconsuming back-and-forth of new hires emailing IT asking when their package is going to get delivered.
4. Support the entire equipment lifecycle
At some point, your employee may need to upgrade or replace their equipment. If someone has a damaged monitor and is eligible to upgrade her MacBook Pro, for example, admins can initiate these changes quickly. It’s as simple as logging into Firstbase and selecting the new items so that your employee will receive an email informing them that the request is being processed.
5. Have a single view of inventory management
Want to view the locations of the computers that are currently being deployed? Need to double check how many MacBook Pro 13 inches are left? You get full visibility into all your inventory tracking needs: who has it, where, the serial number, the condition, the supplier, etc.
Firstbase users also enjoy procurement flexibility. You have the ability to either lease equipment, supply your own equipment, or purchase through Firstbase.
6. Make offboarding just as painless as onboarding
As important as having a great onboarding experience is, offboarding is equally as important. When an employee decides to move on, there is an opportunity to protect profit margins by recouping expensive items for reuse. Use the Firstbase platform to pick which item(s) you want them to ship back and, in case you need to reach out about something, add contact details like personal email or cell number. Just like with onboarding, the soon-to-be-ex-employee will receive an email with all the details they need to get started—all without leaving their home.
The employee will receive an email prompting them to confirm their address, learn what equipment specifically needs to be returned, and make any pertinent notes (e.g., they will be away on vacation so cannot ship anything until a certain date). From there, they will receive a return kit from the Firstbase ops team—no need for the employee to get their own box or print their own shipping label. Once the returned items are received in the warehouse, the Firstbase operations team will then grade, repair, and then reinventory your equipment so it’s ready for reuse.
The Firstbase Advantage
Firstbase is the industry pioneer and leader in transforming employee equipment processes for the distributed work era.
Firstbase built the industry’s most powerful, global platform that combines delightful employee experience and self-service, streamlined SaaS automation across administrative workflows and asset management, plus powerful integrations with Workday, BambooHR, Namely, ServiceNow, Oomnitza, and other leading HRIS and ITSM/ITAM platforms.
The Firstbase platform executes all your physical operations and logistics to support workers from before day one through to offboarding. And Firstbase offers a vendorneutral, flexible procurement approach. Purchase or lease from Firstbase, or simply ship us your equipment. Finally, Firstbase can not only handle your new equipment, but your legacy fleet as well. LEARN MORE
