6 tips on how to onboard an offshore team successfully

Onboarding your offshore team or team member is one of the most important steps involved in your outsourcing journey, second to recruitment. If you don’t nail this part of your outsourcing journey, your setup won’t be a success.

Whether you’re new to outsourcing or you’ve had an experience with it before, it’s worth exploring the onboarding process to ensure you know what is involved and what is required of you. 

A quality outsourcing provider will have systems and processes in place to guide you through this process, however, here’s an overview of what is required in an onboarding process.

1. Have training materials ready to go

   Make sure that new employees have the right materials and knowledge required to complete their job e.g. induction plans. It’s important that you have strong systems that guarantee quality output - these systems will ultimately empower your offshore team to succeed despite being remote.

2. Be welcoming

   Make new employees feel welcome. Encourage them to build valuable relationships with colleagues and managers. There’s nothing worse than starting a new job and not feeling welcomed by your new team - it’s discouraging and sets a negative tone from the offset. Ensuring your new team members feel part of your organisation will only benefit their quality of output.

3. Be strategic

   Ensure that newcomers know the organisation’s structure, vision, mission, goals, key developments and culture. They need to identify with these key components in order for your organisation to succeed in offshoring. Regardless of their role within your organisation, they should have a clear understanding of the common goal of your business that they will be contributing too.

4. Set expectation to maximise output

   Make it known how your team members will be managed in a remote setting. Be prepared to conduct regular WIP meetings whilst staying on top of regular project management. Track deadlines and deliverables every week and stay on top of feedback and guidance. Remember, outsourcing isn’t a set and forget strategy, you need to be prepared and willing to manage your team on an ongoing basis.

   Tip: Utilise communications tools like Zoom or Skype to conduct regular WIP meetings and implement project management tools like Monday or Asana to track deadlines and deliverables.

5. Be patient

   Like anything, hiring an offshore team or team member can come with it’s challenges. If you’re new to outsourcing then it’s important you remain patient both with the process and your new offshore team. Remember, you need to make sure they have the materials required for them to learn their new role.

   There will be hurdles along the way but with patience and persistence, you’ll learn from these challenges and your team will ultimately become stronger on the other side.

6. Be positive

   Don’t let the small setbacks set you back. As I mentioned before, there will be hurdles that cross your path, however, don’t let these hurdles determine your outsourcing journey - it all begins and ends with your mindset. Having a positive mindset can ultimately benefit the outcome of your outsourcing journey.

   It’s also important that you leverage your outsourcing partner/client experience team to assist with any issues you may have along the way. A good outsourcing provider will have excellent systems in place for triaging issues and resolving.

Integrating your offshore team with your onshore team

The integration of your two teams is also a vitally important aspect involved in the onboarding process. If you want to learn more about the integration of your onshore and offshore team, follow the three key steps in this blog.