How to Welcome to the Team New Employees When Working Remotely

Starting as a new member in a company is an exciting time. You arrive at your new office, shake hands with your new coworkers, get a nice welcome to the team message, and begin onboarding.

At Vengreso, a new person’s first day is a little different because we are a remote company. We don’t own any real estate and there is no central office or co-working space. Instead, we leverage tools for managing a remote team, such as video conferencing and project management tools.

So, what does a first-day-at-the-job at Vengreso look like? We try to make it as special as possible, just like it would be in an in-person office.

To do that, we have a Virtual Receiving Line using Zoom tool. It is a video call where we welcome every new employee of our team, have them introduce themselves, do a virtual high-five with everyone, and we give them good wishes and welcome messages from the most recent people on the team and old timers. Also, we send them a welcome letter.

Check out the video below as we give a warm welcome to our newest Vengresonians from around the world (and share some recent promotions)!

Welcome New Employees to Build a Remote Team Culture

So, why do we do this? I’m glad you asked.

It’s all about developing a company culture and employee engagement that enable teammates to reach new heights and do great things, allowing them to have some form of employee recognition. Qooper mentoring software helps companies run effective mentoring and training programs with its smart matching algorithm helping their employees engage, develop and train.

When managing a remote team we need to create environments where it feels like we’re in the same office and focused on achieving the same goals. Being separated by thousands of miles means that we can’t go to lunch together or chat with a colleague over coffee. This is especially true in a virtual selling environment.

These all-hands video conference calls allow us to see each other across different time zones so that it feels as though we actually work in the same office. These calls build relationships so well that there are some people who have worked with me at Vengreso for years and we’ve developed true friendships, even though we’ve never actually met in person.

Expanding our Remote Team

In the past month, we’ve expanded our team considerably with several new hires for customer success, sales and marketing.

As the world’s largest modern sales training company, we have to continue to meet the needs of our clients and that means bringing on a new team member for the Customer Success Manager (CSM) role to help manage the growing demand and serve them better. After all, to achieve success, we’re completely focused on helping our customers achieve their definition of success.

Something we teach in our virtual sales training is that sales teams need great content that they can provide prospects throughout the buyer’s journey — and that includes our own sales team. Because we practice what we preach, we have reorganized our marketing team to better provide our sales team with the resources they need to be successful.

5 Keys to Managing a Remote Team

Vengreso has been a remote company since the beginning and we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t in managing a remote workforce and a remote selling team. In fact, we created a list of the best remote selling tools for managing a remote sales team (especially in these challenging times).

Let me give you some tips that will help you manage any remote team.

#1: Communication

Communication can be one of the most difficult aspects of managing any team. When you’re managing a remote team, communication is even that much harder. But constant communication is vital for your workers to feel part of the team and to ensure they stay on task. Stay in touch with them every day with group chats, email, phone, text, and video. You can get fresh ideas for your upcoming projects when talking to your team!

The key is to communicate about more than just deadlines and projects. We’re all humans and your team is your most valuable asset. And right now we need to focus on that humanity. Expand your conversations to ask about their families, hobbies, and health. These conversations have a way of naturally coming up when you work in the same office. When working remotely, as a leader, you need to make sure you ask these questions. Moreover, you can share fun questions using a quiz maker and make the communication even more interactive.

#2: Use Project Management Tools

Project management tools are essential to track deadlines, assign new tasks, and communicate status updates. Many even have time-tracking functionality so that leaders can gain more insights into how long tasks take different remote employees.

These provide coaching opportunities to see how employees can improve production. Additionally, it can help you set accurate deadlines and manage workloads.

#3: Video Calls

Texting and voice calls are great but they don’t have the same impact as video calls, where you can see the other person’s face and expressions. After all, 60% of communication is from facial expressions.

At Vengreso, we require everyone to use their cameras during calls (with some exceptions), including our:

• All-hands calls where we impart vision and communicate important information to the entire staff.
• Smaller team status updates and weekly calls.
• One-on-one calls.
• Monthly Vengreso team lunches.
• Daily sales roundups.
• Virtual Zoom water coolers where we simply share life together informally.

#4: Flexibility 

Remote doesn’t just mean work from home. It means flexibility. As a good mentor, you should know that your team members don’t need to be online every day from 9 to 5. If they need to bring their child to soccer practice or run to the supermarket, they can do it. Everyone has different needs at different times, that is one of the most powerful employee benefits.

We’ve also saved many of our team members from tremendously long commutes. In fact, some of our team members from the Philippines were commuting more than four hours a day! Now, by working remotely, they can get that time back to spend it with their loved ones.

#5: Trust

Since managers and employees are not in close proximity, the dynamics of remote work are different from an office environment. You have to empower employees to run with their work. We have established an onboarding process to help ramp up new employees as quickly as possible to full production.

And, we focus on trust. We hire the best people and then we trust them to get the job done and meet their deadlines.

Mastering Digital Platforms 

Managing remote teams successfully, and having employee retention, requires every team member to leverage digital platforms to build relationships based on trust and team communication. Why does that seem to come so naturally to us?

Well that’s what we teach our clients through in our Modern Sales Mastery program.

As the buying process has changed, it is essential that sales managers teach remote sellers how to leverage digital platforms and modern selling techniques to find, engage, and connect with the modern buyer. By implementing a modern selling approach, your sales organization shares content, builds relationships, and nurtures prospects.