Revolutionizing Remote Onboarding with AI: Insights and Innovations

00;00;08;02 - 00;00;20;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Welcome back to Long Distance Worklife, where we help you lead, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Marisa Eikenberry, fellow remote worker. And joining me is remote work expert and my co-host, Wayne Turmel. Hi, Wayne.

00;00;20;11 - 00;00;24;05
Wayne Turmel
Hi. I'm here until I am replaced by our robot overlords.

00;00;24;08 - 00;00;45;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Every time. but, listeners, so some of you who have been listening to this show for a while, you heard us talk about zoom and some of the AI stuff that's being added to all kinds of different platforms and not just zoom itself. And so we wanted to take a little bit of that and talk about AI and onboarding and how those two could kind of come together.

00;00;45;22 - 00;00;54;28
Marisa Eikenberry
And in true AI fashion. we decided to get a little meta and ask, I believe it was copilot right wing.

00;00;55;00 - 00;01;26;29
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. So here's the deal. we have been playing with various things, you know, what is it that we're worried about? Right. And one of the hardest things for remote and hybrid teams is onboarding employees. Right? And I have sat through enough HR, software, webinars, taking the bullets so you don't have to. Dear listener. And one of the things that they say all the time is, well, it can help with onboarding.

00;01;27;05 - 00;01;29;11
Wayne Turmel
And me being me went, okay.

00;01;29;11 - 00;01;32;16
Marisa Eikenberry
How right. Tell me.

00;01;32;18 - 00;01;50;23
Wayne Turmel
Seems a reasonable question. and so, as Marisa says, we we decided let's see what AI has to say about this, and then we will respond. And so, as it turns out, I was using copilot.

00;01;50;25 - 00;01;51;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;01;51;25 - 00;02;00;07
Wayne Turmel
a lot of people who don't work with this day in and day out assume that ChatGPT is the.

00;02;00;10 - 00;02;01;26
Marisa Eikenberry
Guy who built.

00;02;01;28 - 00;02;17;10
Wayne Turmel
It. It's the one that they know. It's the Kleenex, right? It's their whatever. You're on the generic Xerox of the, AI world. And in fact, I had dinner the other night with somebody who uses three services.

00;02;17;12 - 00;02;17;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Oh, wow.

00;02;18;02 - 00;02;48;01
Wayne Turmel
That GPT, she uses Google Bard, and she uses Microsoft Copilot, and they all have their charms. So this is not a recommendation. I will tell you that I use copilot for the simple reason that my free ChatGPT account ran out, and I just didn't feel like paying for it. Whereas because I am a Microsoft office 365 user, I get copilot for free.

00;02;48;04 - 00;03;14;03
Wayne Turmel
Done. Sold. Sign me up. The other thing that copilot does, which I like, and this is as close to a recommendation as you're going to get folks. Is that what I like is that copilot gives you the source from which they drew the information. So if it's an article, some of it, for example, you look and go, oh, that's paid content, right?

00;03;14;04 - 00;03;31;05
Wayne Turmel
So I need to pay that. Take that with a grain of salt. I like having the the source content available. so we did. The question was. And I asked very politely because I'm very, of course, machines.

00;03;31;08 - 00;03;34;15
Marisa Eikenberry
I mean, I said thank you to our echo all the time.

00;03;34;18 - 00;03;54;15
Wayne Turmel
Alexa and I, I am extremely, extremely kind. but the question was, what are five ways I can assist in onboarding new employees? This is a very real problem that people are having, right? And so they came up with five ways.

00;03;54;17 - 00;04;06;07
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. And so like I was going to say I'm looking at the first one right now. And one of the first ones it talks about is time efficiency. and how, you know, onboarding takes a while. Like we've all been there.

00;04;06;09 - 00;04;31;09
Wayne Turmel
Well, it does take a while. And there are even the obvious, even the less obvious things. Like, I know my boss told me this yesterday in the three hour orientation brain dump that I was given, but I can't remember. Where do I find X right? Right. AI is great for hey copilot! Where the heck do I find that?

00;04;31;12 - 00;04;45;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. Well, and and I know that some people are also doing, like, employee handbooks or something. Also make documentation. So that way you're not asking Susie every five minutes where something is because she might kill you if you ask too many questions.

00;04;45;28 - 00;05;18;16
Wayne Turmel
Now, I actually one of the things that we need to preface this with, because I ran into somebody who was a little confused and not everybody who listens to this clearly is an expert in such things. Some of us who speak on it are barely experts on such things. but it was clear if your company has a paid account and the AI is tied to your internal network and your internal content.

00;05;18;18 - 00;05;19;18
Marisa Eikenberry


00;05;19;20 - 00;05;21;07
Wayne Turmel
It will find anything.

00;05;21;10 - 00;05;22;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Yes.

00;05;22;10 - 00;05;45;19
Wayne Turmel
And if I am a new employee and I don't even know the name of something, and I don't know exactly where it is on the drive, and it's hidden over here. And by the way, you don't have to be a new employee. I frequently, because we have 13 people. I've been here ten years. KPMG, Google Drive is insanely dense with content.

00;05;45;23 - 00;05;47;11
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. It's massive.

00;05;47;14 - 00;05;55;21
Wayne Turmel
It's massive. And not everybody uses the same thought process as to where that file is.

00;05;55;22 - 00;05;57;24
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;05;57;27 - 00;06;12;00
Wayne Turmel
and so if I'm looking for what is the password to get on to our corporate zoom account to lead a webinar, we've got several accounts. Right. Where the heck is the password for that?

00;06;12;02 - 00;06;17;15
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Because you might look for it in a place that wasn't where I put it.

00;06;17;18 - 00;06;48;10
Wayne Turmel
I did not know that that information is on the tech team folder. Yeah. Not what I would have thought it'd be under instructor materials, because the instructor might need to know where how to get on. so that kind of thing is great. And when you're a new employee, when you're struggling to learn stuff, you don't always know the question to ask, and you're afraid to ask the question because, you know, somebody just told you this yesterday, right?

00;06;48;13 - 00;06;51;23
Marisa Eikenberry
Like I said, you don't ask too many questions or Susie will kill you.

00;06;51;25 - 00;06;59;09
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, exactly. so that's actually a really, really powerful tool just right there.

00;06;59;12 - 00;06;59;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;07;00;02 - 00;07;10;19
Wayne Turmel
The ability to do that. Now, again, you know, if you if you are not if you're AI is not connected to the network, you're going to get somebody else's.

00;07;10;22 - 00;07;11;07
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00;07;11;10 - 00;07;29;04
Wayne Turmel
And you're going to get all kinds of useless information. Right. But that's so yes, your your organization. In order to optimize, I must have it reading your network or you're not going to get the value of this.

00;07;29;07 - 00;07;44;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, and real quick, we've talked about this too in our previous episode where you were talking about, you know, my boss just said this in a meeting the other day. If you have, like I set up for like zoom or something like that, it can give you action items or, you know, here's the main points of this meeting.

00;07;44;06 - 00;07;51;04
Marisa Eikenberry
And so you might be able to consult that. and, you know, instead of asking your boss again.

00;07;51;07 - 00;08;02;03
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, absolutely. And especially in Microsoft Teams, you can punch in the date of the meeting and assuming your IT department has set it up, actually find that stuff.

00;08;02;06 - 00;08;02;18
Marisa Eikenberry
Oh, that's.

00;08;02;25 - 00;08;15;08
Wayne Turmel
What what I have started doing is on sales calls is I will say to the customer, do you mind if I run this in the background? Because it's going to take way better notes than I can.

00;08;15;11 - 00;08;22;17
Marisa Eikenberry
Oh yeah. Yeah. And then you get to focus on the conversation. You don't have to focus on making sure that you've typed everything exactly right.

00;08;22;17 - 00;08;48;24
Wayne Turmel
And by the way, it does a really, really good job. Yeah. everything I've done, teams, zoom. you know, any I that's attached to WebEx at any I that's attached to that has been trained really well to take good notes. And you will remember who gets what action item and who raised this issue and like that.

00;08;49;01 - 00;08;50;03
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;08;50;05 - 00;08;58;00
Wayne Turmel
so for time efficiency first thing. Yeah. Copilot told me time efficiency. the answer is yes.

00;08;58;02 - 00;08;58;27
Marisa Eikenberry
Okay.

00;08;59;00 - 00;09;00;20
Wayne Turmel
Okay. You dig that?

00;09;00;23 - 00;09;18;26
Marisa Eikenberry
So what about, the next one it had was personalization. So it said you can utilize AI and machine learning. Onboarding programs can be tailored to match the specific skill set and needs of a new hire and personalized training and materials and resources. I'm failing to see your AI helps with this, but maybe you can.

00;09;18;29 - 00;09;27;19
Wayne Turmel
Well, that like everything else. I mean, you and I were talking earlier. You know, the answer you get depends on the question that you ask.

00;09;27;21 - 00;09;29;09
Marisa Eikenberry
Oh, of course.

00;09;29;12 - 00;10;20;03
Wayne Turmel
So if as you are creating orientation materials, if you are creating an employee handbook and you label things as or you tag them as useful for beginners, useful for onboarding, useful for orientation, for somebody who's looking for that will find what they're looking for versus somebody else who's just looking for general information. personalization. What I can do this is both the beauty and the terrifying thing, okay, is the more you use it and the more it knows you, the more it will find what you are looking for or what is useful to you at the beginning.

00;10;20;03 - 00;10;38;21
Wayne Turmel
It's going to be in general, new hires want to know this, right? It's going to be more specific. The machine will learn. Oh, this is Wayne. He's in accounting. He works with these particular clients. And so the searches will get infinitely more granular.

00;10;38;27 - 00;10;40;09
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, that makes sense.

00;10;40;12 - 00;11;12;18
Wayne Turmel
So when they say personalization, it's not. You know, I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave. It's not like that. Right? We're not we're not going there. And if you are under 40 or not a nerd, it's a movie reference. Just stick with us. Well, so what is this personal personalization? That's what it's talking about. The more it interfaces with you and learns who you are, the more it will exclude extraneous information and give you the stuff that is really relevant.

00;11;12;25 - 00;11;22;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, well, it sounds like two from the, basically someone has to set up the stuff ahead of time for the AI to even see it correctly.

00;11;22;28 - 00;11;38;15
Wayne Turmel
Everything is in the setup and where that becomes really important is actually the third thing that, yeah, it came up with, which is 24/7 support, which is all about chat bots.

00;11;38;18 - 00;11;39;20
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;11;39;23 - 00;11;57;06
Wayne Turmel
And you know, your boss is not always going to be available to you when you need them. you know, the person you're asking may be in Singapore and when you're starting your day, they're going to bed. I mean, there's realistic we need information when we need it.

00;11;57;08 - 00;12;20;09
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? And we know how powerful chat bots can be anyway. I know that we have one on the desk site right now. so just personality testing.com. And for those of you who have heard us talk about this before, like our support team is two people and we have to sleep sometime. so the chat bots been really helpful because we've put stuff into it to say, here's how we say this.

00;12;20;09 - 00;12;29;16
Marisa Eikenberry
Here's all these videos, here's all these transcripts. So it's learning off of us, and it can answer a lot of these questions that we're asleep and can't answer it right now.

00;12;29;16 - 00;13;00;04
Wayne Turmel
Well, and I just came back from a conference of HR and learning technology and oh my gosh, like, even since last year's ATD conference, which is the last time I walked in Expo floor and saw this stuff, they are so much more sophisticated and personalized and you can set the level of formality. You know, do you want it's super friendly and chatty or do you want, you know, give me the facts and give me what I'm looking for.

00;13;00;06 - 00;13;22;27
Wayne Turmel
And incredibly sophisticated and deep searches and the ability to figure out what you meant to say, which is not, you know, if you go into Google right now, if you go into Google and you say, I want to know this, and I can't think of an example. Yeah, but I want to know this. It will give you exactly what you ask for.

00;13;23;00 - 00;13;26;06
Wayne Turmel
But that may not be what you really want to know.

00;13;26;09 - 00;13;30;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. You're going to call it X. We're actually called something else.

00;13;30;22 - 00;13;46;02
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. If I call it, where is the customer service file for x, y, z customer. And your organization calls it a, service response file.

00;13;46;03 - 00;13;49;22
Marisa Eikenberry


00;13;49;24 - 00;13;51;09
Wayne Turmel
You know, a Google get a.

00;13;51;13 - 00;13;52;04
Marisa Eikenberry
Couple.

00;13;52;06 - 00;14;30;16
Wayne Turmel
Engine is it's going to struggle a little bit to come up with what you need. Whereas what I'll give you a, a non work example because I just stumbled across this and you know some of the people who listen to this know that I write novels in my spare time. And so I was because I've got a book coming out, I was trying to figure out some marketing materials and they and I said, you give me five comparable titles to the Johnny Lycan Werewolf Pi series.

00;14;30;19 - 00;14;31;23
Marisa Eikenberry


00;14;31;25 - 00;14;53;19
Wayne Turmel
And the results were really odd, and they were really kind of uneven. And some were historical fiction and some were this somewhere that So I took a second shot at it. And I said give me comparable titles to the urban fantasy Detective Noir or Johnny Lycan Werewolf Pi series.

00;14;53;26 - 00;14;54;18
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;14;54;20 - 00;15;07;19
Wayne Turmel
I got exactly the seven. comp titles which were most popular. Most recent. Exactly the list I needed.

00;15;07;22 - 00;15;14;26
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, I mean, we've known for a long. So that's specific. You get it? It helps a lot.

00;15;14;28 - 00;15;22;02
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, but A.I. is getting a lot better at. Oh, I see what you were trying to say.

00;15;22;04 - 00;15;22;14
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;15;22;21 - 00;15;25;07
Wayne Turmel
So it's getting better at that.

00;15;25;09 - 00;15;26;20
Marisa Eikenberry
And it's like, oh, human.

00;15;26;20 - 00;15;41;01
Wayne Turmel
It's not that. Well, it's funny because a lot of us look at chat bots as, oh, great, I have to deal with a chat bot because they can't be bothered hiring a human who can actually interact with me.

00;15;41;03 - 00;15;41;28
Marisa Eikenberry
And that's not necessary.

00;15;41;28 - 00;16;00;06
Wayne Turmel
And there is some of that. Yeah. To be fair, to be fair, there is some of that going on. but it it is more than that. You know, having a human to answer your questions is great until you've actually dealt with a human.

00;16;00;08 - 00;16;02;05
Marisa Eikenberry
Yes.

00;16;02;07 - 00;16;25;18
Wayne Turmel
There is no guarantee you're going to get what you're looking for. and then, of course, the fourth thing was data driven insights, which is right. It will find the if the data is out there, it will find it. And crunch it and give it to you, probably in ways that you don't expect. But that feedback, the accuracy and the speed of that feedback.

00;16;25;21 - 00;16;54;16
Wayne Turmel
And then you can go back and say, tell me more about this is going to be just impressive and huge. which brings us to the last thing that copilot said, which is it's about engagement. AI can create a modern and engaging onboarding experience, making new employees feel valued and accelerating their assimilation into the company culture. And I say,

00;16;54;19 - 00;17;05;21
Marisa Eikenberry
I was going to say this one sounds like we're right. Waving a flag like we're with you of, you know, four. But this one might.

00;17;05;24 - 00;17;17;07
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. It's like, does this help engagement? And I'm still not entirely sure that people's default should be to the machines.

00;17;17;10 - 00;17;19;09
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00;17;19;12 - 00;17;43;20
Wayne Turmel
now, some of this may be just cranky old white guy who's saying, well, I'll use it when I need it, and the rest of the time, you know, let me interact with humans. But there is, especially in the onboarding process, which let's not forget, this is what we're talking about here, right? The onboarding process is where the relationships get built.

00;17;43;20 - 00;18;17;18
Wayne Turmel
It's where people decide the level of engagement that they're going to have with their employer and their coworkers and their team. And while there may be people who say, I would rather deal with copilot than Bob because Bob is mean to me in meetings, realistically, I think we need to not default, especially in the very early days, weeks, months of, of a, new hire or bringing people on or orientation.

00;18;17;23 - 00;18;22;23
Wayne Turmel
I think we still need to get them to connect with the people.

00;18;22;25 - 00;18;24;12
Marisa Eikenberry
Absolutely.

00;18;24;14 - 00;18;52;27
Wayne Turmel
And and so we need to be really, really leery of that. That's kind of where I'm so. So that was it. We asked, hey, give us five ways I can assist in onboarding. And with all the caveats that we have mentioned. And they are not to be underestimated. Right. There's five ways they can help. Four of the five I don't disagree with.

00;18;52;29 - 00;19;06;21
Wayne Turmel
I think they need to be done thoughtfully. They need to be done intentionally. All of that good stuff. The engagement piece, I don't know, but what else is I going to say?

00;19;06;24 - 00;19;08;25
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Exactly. Well, and we.

00;19;08;25 - 00;19;17;29
Wayne Turmel
Asked the I. Yeah. It's like if you come to me and say, you know, what do you do with this? I'm going to say, well, let me help you here.

00;19;17;29 - 00;19;18;08
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00;19;18;12 - 00;19;34;17
Wayne Turmel
And who doesn't want Wayne helping them for corn sake? Well, oh, how how. Okay, here's here's something I doesn't do. It's. I don't get snarky. It doesn't do sarcasm worth a darn.

00;19;34;20 - 00;20;00;07
Marisa Eikenberry
I was like, I can't get snarky. It depends on how you run the Gpt3. But but listeners, if you've worked with any sort of onboarding things with AI or if you've seen it in your company or stuff, please let us know, because we would love to hear from you on that. And Wayne, thank you so much for this conversation, and thank you for putting this into copilot, because my default is ChatGPT.

00;20;00;09 - 00;20;21;17
Marisa Eikenberry
so but this was a really great conversation. I'm really excited to continue talking more about AI and how it can help with remote work. And listeners, thank you so much for listening to Long-Distance Work Life. For show notes, transcripts, and other resources. Make sure to visit Long Distance Work life.com. If you haven't yet, subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss any future episodes while you're there.

00;20;21;19 - 00;20;36;22
Marisa Eikenberry
Be sure to like and review! This helps us know what you love about our show. Feel free to contact us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our show notes, and let us know that you listen to this episode, or suggest another episode or another topic for Wayne and I to tackle in another episode.

00;20;36;25 - 00;20;47;03
Wayne Turmel
And for the record, we like nonviolent, respectful, counter opinions. Don't be afraid to, tell us where you think we're wrong.

00;20;47;06 - 00;21;10;06
Marisa Eikenberry
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Because we would love to do an episode about that. And in some cases, we may try to change your mind. We'll see. But if you want to know more about how to work with and manage remote teams, please check out the Long Distance Leadership Series, which you can learn more about at Kevin eikenberry.com/l d l s thank you for joining us.

00;21;10;06 - 00;21;17;26
Marisa Eikenberry
And as Wayne likes to say, don't let the seasons get you down. Hey.

00;21;17;28 - 00;21;18;05
Marisa Eikenberry
You.