Setting Teachers Up for Success with Virtual Onboarding

Excellent teaching starts with an excellent teacher onboarding experience. These days that means creating a virtual onboarding program for teachers to welcome them and provide a thorough and immersive orientation experience. It’s your chance to make a great first impression on your new hires, and it’s their opportunity to learn your school’s or district’s culture, focus, challenges, and support structures.

Quality doesn’t have to mean in-person. With the right strategies and tools, you can design an onboarding experience that tells teachers they’ve chosen the right place to work and prepares them for classroom and career success.

In this blog, we’ll cover the benefits provided by a virtual onboarding process, how to create one, and how you can use it to set new hires up for success, regardless of the circumstances.

Benefits of Virtual Onboarding for Teachers

Teachers can complete virtual onboarding anytime, anywhere

Giving teachers the freedom to complete their onboarding process anytime, anywhere is an obvious benefit while we’re social distancing and working from home. But even during normal times, the flexibility of an online onboarding process helps new teachers get the foundation they need in a way that works best for them.

The period between accepting the job and starting work is a challenging time of change for anybody. Your new teachers may be finishing their schooling commitments, completing an internship, or wrapping things up at their current employer. In some cases, they may be moving to be closer to their new job.

Offering a virtual onboarding experience shows new hires you value their time, and it also lets them complete their orientation and form submissions at a time when they can devote their full attention and get the most out of it.

At Boerne ISD in Texas, Chief Human Resources Officer Dr. Elaine Howard says they provide a “pajama onboarding” process to every new hire. She says, “They can complete the entire process at home, in their pajamas.” Boerne ISD made the shift years before her state’s COVID-19 response forced schools to close, and she says taking all onboarding forms online saves them around $8,000 in paper supplies and postage costs.

Hear more about the Boerne ISD virtual onboarding process in this webinar >

Virtual Onboarding Improves Information Accuracy

A digital onboarding solution that gives new hires ownership over their information submissions can increase accuracy by removing the chance for handwriting to be misread during data entry. Your new teachers can fill out their information once, be prompted to confirm accuracy, and then that data will automatically populate throughout connected tools like your HR, and finance software. This can mean everything from correct teacher name spellings to the first paycheck being sent out on time, to the right address.

Teachers can also move through their onboarding forms much faster when their basic information and demographic data auto populates. Filling out this same information, like name and address, across multiple paper forms during onboarding is a familiar frustration—but you can move beyond it forever with virtual onboarding and digital employee records.

Today’s teachers expect tech-savvy employers

A virtual onboarding experience helps you communicate to new teachers that your district uses technology to make their lives easier and support career success. The option to complete onboarding on their schedule, without requiring an in-person visit, gives new hires the flexibility today’s workforce has come to expect.

Howard says new hire expectations played a role in their decision to digitize their entire hiring and onboarding process. “Our workforce demands tools and resources that simplify and enhance the employment experience,” she says. Virtual onboarding is more convenient for their new teachers and allows them to review orientation materials at their own pace.

How to Create a Virtual Onboarding and Orientation for Teachers

The first step to taking onboarding online is moving to a digital employee records system built for K-12 schools and districts. This forms the core of your remote operations capability, from virtually onboarding new hires to accessing records and completing workflows online.

To streamline onboarding, your records system should connect seamlessly to your applicant tracking, professional development, and finance tools, too. This way, information in the records system automatically populates throughout your entire edtech ecosystem, meaning the new hire only needs to enter it once.

Kennewick School District in Washington shifted to paperless onboarding, and Human Resources Specialist Levi Martin says it helped them make the process more about welcoming and supporting their new hires than dealing with paperwork.

Since onboarding paperwork can be filled out online in advance, their first meeting with school staff can focus on orientation and answering any questions they have. Martin says, “It was a big win not having to spend a lot of time just telling people how to fill out forms.”

Hear how Kennewick School District moved to paperless onboarding in this video success story >

Make Virtual Onboarding More Personal with Video Introductions

Shifting to digital onboarding and orientation doesn’t mean sacrificing more personal introductions. You can use recorded videos to welcome new teachers and introduce them to leadership, staff, and even some of your veteran teachers who will serve as mentors to those just beginning their career. And since the videos are recorded, you don’t have to schedule introduction meetings—nobody’s calendar is impacted no matter how many new hires you need to onboard in a given week. Add these videos to your onboarding checklist to ensure every new hire gets a proper welcome.

Virtual meetings can also be an important part of your digital onboarding process. With introductions and orientation taken care of with recorded videos, you can schedule live video conferencing sessions with new hires to personally greet them, offer any needed assistance with completing the onboarding process, and discuss any questions or concerns they have.

The Right Tools for Virtual Teacher Onboarding

Virtual onboarding gives you more opportunity to track progress, but only if your tools can take new teachers from job offer to their first day at work remotely. That means having the right set of digital onboarding tools that work together as a single onboarding solution.

With PowerSchool talent products, you can create, deliver, and manage all HR documents using Employee Records, then track each new hire’s progress in real time. With Applicant Tracking, you can also ensure that basic information entered as part of the application process automatically populates on onboarding forms, so new hires only need to confirm that it’s correct. And with Professional Learning, you can assign, deliver, and track new hire training to help teachers prepare for their first day.

PowerSchool’s talent tools also connect with your finance software to simplify workflows across your teams and make it easier for new hires to complete payroll-related tasks like setting up direct deposit.

Onboarding Remotely after Schools Reopen

The simplicity and efficiency of virtual onboarding make it a smoother path forward even after schools reopen. Districts like Boerne ISD already moved to digital processes for the convenience, efficiency, and improved accuracy it offers. Those will still be huge benefits in a post-social distancing world.

If your school or district has quickly adapted to remote operations to make it through the current situation, consider taking a close look at how virtual onboarding can help you continue offering new teachers and employees a better, more flexible onboarding experience. Remember that it can also reduce your staff’s workload and improve accuracy while simplifying workflows. Setting the stage for a new hire’s smooth introduction to your school or district can pave the way for their success, now and in the future.