Imprinting Interrupted? Examining the Role of Remote Onboarding on Newcomers’ Work Socialization

Socialization of new employees, involving the imprinting of workplace norms and practices, has long been recognized as a driver of organizational performance through mechanisms such as employee-workplace fit. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a rapid, and potentially long-run, move to remote working practices for organizations that has interrupted the well understood processes of socialization that occur through face-to-face onboarding. Drawing on unique interview data (n= 30) from employees who started a new role during the pandemic, we build an inductive model of the effects of remote onboarding on newcomer socialization experiences. We explore a multi-stage model of how a lack of early physical and social immersion in the workplace triggers processes of individualization and reduced workplace identification for newcomers. Further, we highlight how these processes are driven by the degree of digital mediation, and attenuated by organizational investments in technology, the initial resources provided to the new employee, and the employee’s prior experience of remote work. We find that in contexts of high digital mediation newcomers experience reduced access to both formal and informal resources, such as opportunities to shadow colleagues or to form social connections. The absence of these resources heighten experiences of work intensification and lead to a reduced orientation of the employee to their new workplace. We discuss the implications of these insights for the research on imprinting and socialization, as well as the practice of remote onboarding.