Long-term Remote Onboarding : The feeling of connection to the team while working remotely due to a pandemic

Sammanfattning: The Covid-19 pandemic has forced organisations to review their working methods and adapt to the prevailing circumstances. One such change has been the need to increasingly allow employees to be onboarded and work from home. An onboarding process that is only based on digital communication has proven to be less effective and lower the understanding of the work role. Furthermore, the biggest challenge with remote onboarding is often to introduce employees to the organisation's culture and teams. This essay thus aims to describe and analyse remote onboarding in regard to the feeling of connection to the team, based on the perceptions of new employees. The research question for this thesis is thereby: - How does employees experience remote onboarding during Covid-19 and how does it affect the feeling of connection to the rest of the team? The study has an exploratory purpose and is of a qualitative approach. The empirical data has been collected through semi-structured interviews with 15 participants who have been employed during the pandemic and experienced remote onboarding. The results of the interviews have been analysed on the basis of theories about onboarding, learning and socialisation process. The results of the study show that it is valuable to reflect on how meetings in the digital context can replace the physical meetings. Regarding the design of the onboarding process, it must beensured that the interaction space usually offered on-site must be able to be replaced digitally for a new employee to get a sense of connection to the team. The discussion of the results has also shown that knowledge exchange can be linked to organisational learning, and this is closely linked to certain aspects of how a new employee can adapt to the organisational culture and have a successful remote onboarding and socialisation process.