Successfully onboarding remote developers
Companies that follow the distributed ideology have a competitive advantage upon filling positions much faster, due to group diversity. In order to realize the full benefits for this type of work relationship, teams also need to be quite mindful of the onboarding process.
A well-defined process can get your employee turnover at a minimum, thus accelerating productivity and overall collaboration.
But what is the best strategy to onboard a remote developer? Based on our experience we have found that we need 2 types of integration based on our company structure.
1. Upstack integration
As the work that we do suggests building scalable development teams for fast-growing companies, first of all, we need to properly integrate our new developer in our company policies.
We strongly believe at Upstack that our engineering teams can solve any business issues, but only if they are empowered with the knowledge to do so. This means that we need to invest in providing developers with a full understanding of our company policies first of all.
For this we developed Upstack’s Wiki Pages, a blend of information, starting with basic questions that the client or the developer might ask and ending up with success proved work methodologies from Agile Software Development.
The developer gets in contact with the Pages in a “1 to 1” meeting with our famous Success Managers. This character is one of the vital parts of our structure. He’s the person in charge of managing the relationship between developer and company and developer and client.
In this first meeting, the Success Manager explains to the new developer most of our internal procedures regarding:
- setting up his Upstack account and platform access
- setting up payments and invoices
- explaining overlap procedures
Of course, we try to give our new hires direction and actionable items from the beginning in order for them to find immediate success and be reenergized about their decision to join our team.
2. Project integration
Some hiring managers often throw their developers right into hands-on work without any assistance. While remote hires may make it through the fire, it may take a longer time for them to obtain critical knowledge that other team members have. By providing guidance and assigning targeted work, here at Upstack we not only enable developers to get acquainted fast with work, but also we allow them to thrive.
For this, we facilitate at the very start of a project the basis on which we need to work. Of course, we have integrated the agile methodology inside Upstack, thus making every step scalable and information more effective in being understood by our engineers.
We consider the first step in a project integration the technical set-up that needs to be taken into account:
- setting up the assets needed to start the project
- addressing all the right questions in order to better understanding and proper direction
- keeping open a continuous communication channel for 2 weeks
The initial project kickoff meeting is one that is attended by both client and developer/s along with various members of the Upstack core team. The goal is to not only smoothly kick off a project, but ultimately to ensure that the experience and knowledge that we have within Upstack can be used to create a fully working process expediently. One of our core advantages is that our teams hit the ground running, and we do so by ensuring that our clients and developers have the best guidance and total support and that we offer it when it is needed.
The same goes as for the first’s on their very first project at Upstack. And by this we mean:
- first daily stand up
- first invoice
- first payment
Last, but not least, what remote companies need to take into consideration is to embrace the cultural diversity of their remote developers. We believe that culture should be a 2-way street, with all team members encouraged to participate and provide feedback. When remote employees feel like they are contributing to the success of organizational culture, their loyalty to that organization will continue to grow.
