New Employee Onboarding in a Virtual Workplace
Throw a virtual welcome party for a new team member. Get started in minutes!
Remote company culture and new employees
Let’s think about a scenario of a company that has a physical office first. A new team member, let’s call him John join the company. What an exciting moment! He is a Software Engineering that will be taking care of the back-end in one of the crucial projects within your company. It’s John’s first day in the office. He selects a desk, chats with a couple of people from his team, and over the next couple of days will meet other company employees serendipitously. He will bump into them in the kitchen, meet them on the way out of the office, or during social events that have been organized by the HR department in your company.
A pretty easy and simple situation right? Not so easy if you’re running a company that works fully remotely. If employees of your company are distributed around the globe or even within the same country, most probably you won’t have a physical office where they can meet face to face on a daily basis. Most of the communication happens in goal-oriented meetings that are scheduled ahead and are there to focus on the task. If John would be to join a company with no physical office, he might get to know a couple of the colleagues that he is working directly with. Unfortunately, networking with other employees outside of his team won’t be that easy - there is simply almost no physical situation in which this might happen that can arise organically.
John becomes a worker bee.
Onboard your new employees with a virtual workspace on flat.social
Remote teams use flat.social to socialize, collaborate and throw virtual parties! Create a permanent meeting space where each guest can move around, talk with others in proximity and hide for gossip in private rooms. It’s fun, creative, and unstructured and nourishes the connections between your team members.
Following the previous example, John’s onboarding becomes much easier once he can meet his peers that work on other teams as he travels smoothly through different floors and rooms that are contained within his company’s virtual office.
Whether it’s an organized event or an impromptu catch-up,flat.social adds a physical layer to your distributed team that acts as a glue and a platform for spontaneous moments to blossom.
What is a virtual workspace?
A virtual workspace is a simulated office space that sports communication and collaboration tools that replicate the experience of a physical office space. It can act as a collaborative hub for teams that work remotely and don’t have physical HQ where they can meet in person daily.
Setting up an online workspace is one of the best things that can be done to deliberately bring the team together and provide a space to interact - from fun coffee catchups to more serious meetings like daily stand-ups and retrospectives.
How to setup a virtual office with flat.social?
It’s really simple - you only need to create a permanent project room (takes less than minute) and distribute the link to your team.
1. Sign up for free & create a virtual space on flat.social
2. Customise the space and brand it with your team’s logo
3. Add the link to the calendar invites. The link to a flat is permanent and never changes which makes it easier to join in.
4. If you wish, connect the virtual space with your Slack workspaceand set up recurring reminders that will notify your team about the event.
Ideas for onboarding new employees
Organise a welcome day
A new employee joining a company is a reason to celebrate! A great idea to welcome them into the team and company is to organize a welcome day in a virtual office on flat.social. Allow other people to come in whenever they have a moment to say hi and connect.
Recurrent coffee breaks
While the welcome day might put the new hire in the spot light, organising a virtual coffee breaks that happen every week is a great way to make it a bit more casual.
Movement and Interaction
With flat.social participants are not chained to a grid of tiny squares like they would in a classic videoconference. Instead, they can move around the rooms like they would in any multiplayer game.
Learn more about movement & interaction
Rooms & Activities
Your new virtual spaces can consist of multiple different types of rooms. Each room can be different - a mini-game, activity or something special for your team.
Dependently on the type of room, you will be able to host from 10 to 100 simultaneous guests.
See rooms & activities available
Spatial Media
By default each guest can only hear & see others around. Spatial audio and video allows for more natural and spontaneous conversations that are based on proximity, not on the loudest guests.
Want to speak with someone? Simply fly up!
Learn more about spatial audio & video
Collaborative, real-time whiteboard
Add colorful drawings, images, stickers, sticky notes and much more. Whichever room or activity type you choose, you can use it as a real-time collaborative whiteboard.
Build your own space
Build your own virtual space for your team or event by selecting from many of the available rooms and activities.
Each room is special and can be placed in whichever position you want. Fancy a quick retreat on the beach? Simply add the beach elements into your space :)
Physics 💫
Expression
It's so much more than just a plain video-chat. Guests in a flat.social meeting can express themselves through a variety of virtual gestures and customizations on how they present themselves.
From becoming a godzilla to doing a frog dance, it's all built to be playful and interactive.
Presentations and Screensharing
Engage your guests with interactive presentations and talks by using the spatial screen sharing and broadcasting features! Whether you're giving a talk or want to present something with a real-time video stream, sharing the live screenshare will be an experience that seamlessly integrates into the virtual space.
Frequently asked questions
What are the fun features of flat.social?
From flying around to playing football and doing a frog dance, there is plenty! We built those features to make flat.social the most fun place to organise an event online. Read more features that we built.
Is there a need to install anything?
No need to install anything new. It all runs in the web browser both on desktop and mobile. Safari and Chrome are doing great, Firefox is catching up!
Do you support simultaneous screensharing?
Yep, a number of participants can screenshare at the same time. Those can be positioned next to each other or distributed in various locations around the virtual space.
How much does it cost?
Check out thepricing page to see free and pro plans available.
Can I use it as an alternative to ZOOM or Microsoft Teams?
Sure, if all you do is fun and creative meetings! (we sincerly hope so:)
Over the past 3 years we learned that while ZOOM and Microsoft teams are amazing tools to keep you productive, they're not optimized to to keep a group of people connected, engaged and happy.
Hence, flat.social was created. It does not aim to be a complete replacement - it's an addition for when the priorities switch from productivity to human interaction. It's here to bring smile and show that spontanous creative moments and connections can happen without having to travel to an office or an event venue.
How do participants move in a flat.social meeting?
Meeting attendees can use WASD keys like in multi-player games or drag themselves around with a mouse.
How do I speak to all of the guests at once?
The experience is spatial by default - only ones around will hear you. You can however use the loudspeaker feature to speak to everyone at once. It's useful if you want to make an announcement or managing a larger workshop where attendees are distributed around the room.
