8 Steps To Creating A Virtual Employee Onboarding Program

It was a Wednesday early in the pandemic and Kelly Chuck, who spearheads the curriculum for LinkedIn’s onboarding program, had just started noodling some ideas for a possible virtual orientation. Then she was told that LinkedIn was asking its Bay Area workforce to start working from home and she needed to have a virtual program in place for the new hires who would join the company — the following Monday.

Kelly understood what was at stake. An effective onboarding program boosts productivity, engagement, and retention. She had to figure out how to make sure new hires felt welcomed and excited in the absence of office tours, team meals, swag bags, and meet-and-greets with new teammates.

Kelly was not alone. She had counterparts in every corner of the business world who were tackling — or just about to tackle — the exact same challenge.

So, Kelly overhauled LinkedIn’s one-day onboarding program with input from her immediate team and from global colleagues who had already started dealing with changes driven by COVID-19. She quickly developed a weeklong virtual program, which was rolled out the following week with 42 new hires from all over North America. Since that virtual program launched, Kelly and her team have gone back to the one-day format and have made continuous tweaks and refinements.

If your company is struggling with how to create a virtual onboarding program, here are eight tactics that Kelly and her colleagues used that may be helpful:

1. Reconsider your onboarding schedule

Initially, Kelly decided to take what had been a one-day program and spread it out over a week, offering the programming in shorter bursts over a longer time frame. But the extended curriculum collided with smaller, more technical training programs — like engineering bootcamp and sales training — that many new hires were expected to roll into early in Week One.

So, Kelly agreed to reconsolidate her weeklong program into a single day. The first thing she did was reexamine everything in the program using what have become her three critical questions:

• Does it make people feel like they’ve made the right decision in joining LinkedIn?
• Does it make them excited about the company’s mission and vision and how their new job aligns with that?
• Does it help them build relationships that they’ll feel like they can expand on?

“If I had time in the program that wasn’t directly contributing to one of those three areas,” Kelly says, “I took it out. For example, we’re not going to talk about transportation, food, or anything else that can be covered in an email or follow-up video. Really, we just want new hires to walk away feeling very excited.”

Here’s what LinkedIn’s current Day One onboarding schedule looks like: