Onboarding Remote Workers: A Hassle? Maybe. A Barrier? No.

from the Atlanta Fed

As the need for social distancing recedes and government restrictions ease, most people look to regain some notion of normalcy in their day-to-day lives. At the same time, many workers have come to like their office away from the office. And the COVID work-from-home experiment has gone well enough for it to stick around, possibly in a hybrid form. Those are key conclusions in a recent study (by three of this post’s authors) titled “Why Working from Home Will Stick.”

One frequent concern we hear about remote work is the challenge of hiring and onboarding new employees who rarely – or even never – set foot on the employer’s worksite. Yet our evidence suggests that these challenges are modest and aren’t a big barrier to finding, onboarding, and integrating new employees.

During the past two months, we asked executives participating in our Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) about their experiences hiring remote workers and integrating them into their organizations (see the three charts below). The share of new hires who work almost entirely from home (rarely or never stepping onto business premises) was 15.8 percent, a figure nearly identical to the share of all paid workdays performed at home in earlier pandemic-era snapshots from the SBU. Moreover, the share of new hires varies across industries, just as we’d expect based on research by Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman that flags which jobs can be performed remotely. The Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (whose data underpin our aforementioned recent study, “Why Working from Home Will Stick”) also suggests that new hires are at least as likely to work from home as the general population.

So as we see, new hires are working remotely to the same extent, and in the same proportion across industries, as incumbent staff. These findings suggest that integrating and training new remote workers isn’t a big barrier to hiring. But it must be a pain, right? Otherwise, why all the fuss?

And here, the unanimity dissipates. Of firms with new remote workers, 60 percent say the integration process is more challenging. On average, SBU respondents say it takes about a month or so longer to fully integrate remote-only employees, though the spread about that average is pretty wide – ranging from six weeks less to six months longer.

If you’re at a firm that finds it challenging to onboard remote employees, perhaps you’ll find some solace in the fact that most of your new staff appear not to notice. In the The Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, 42 percent of workers hired into fully remote positions during the pandemic say that adapting to their new jobs has been neither easier nor harder than adapting to in-office jobs before the pandemic. The other 58 percent are distributed similarly over “easier” and “harder” (see the chart).

Stepping back and taking a broader look, many observers wonder why aggregate U.S. employment remains 6.8 million below its prepandemic peak, despite record numbers of job openings. On the list of potential reasons for this shortfall – such as lingering concerns about the virus, generous unemployment benefits, inadequate childcare options, and more – it appears you can cross off the difficulty of onboarding and integrating remote workers.

About the Authors

	David E. Altig, executive vice president and research director in the Atlanta Fed’s Research Department,
	Jose Maria Barrero, assistant professor of finance at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México Business School,
	Nick Bloom, the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University,
	Steven J. Davis, the William H. Abbott Distinguished Service Professor of International Business and Economics at the Chicago Booth School of Business and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution,
	Brent Meyer, policy adviser and economist in the Atlanta Fed’s Research Department,
	Emil Mihaylov, research analyst in the Atlanta Fed’s Research Department
	Nick Parker, the Atlanta Fed’s director of surveys