Onboarding a remote hire when there's no desk to walk them to

• Access, ordered — Email, chat, docs, code or point-of-sale, password manager. Assign one owner per item so nothing waits on 'someone'.
• Hardware confirmed — Track the delivery date, not the order date. A laptop arriving on day three costs you a week.
• A written first week — Day-by-day, with times and names. Uncertainty is the main cost of remote starts.
• A buddy who isn't the manager — Someone to ask the small questions people won't take to their boss.

In an office, a new hire absorbs how decisions get made by overhearing them. Remotely you have to stage that on purpose.

• Daily 15 minutes — Same time each day with the manager for the first week. Short and scheduled beats 'ping me anytime'.
• Shadowing sessions — Two or three calls or shifts they join purely to watch, each with a note on what to look for.
• Read-only week — Point them at the last month of decisions, tickets, or customer notes so they learn your vocabulary.
• One shipped thing — A small, real, reviewed contribution by Friday. Nothing settles a remote hire faster.

Remote managers over-index on activity because they cannot see effort. Give the hire a checklist they tick off themselves and the question stops being "are they working" and becomes "are they moving through the plan".

Keep it to items with a clear done state: read this, meet this person, complete this training, hit this count. Anything vaguer turns into a status meeting.

At the end of the first month, ask what they still do not understand about the business. Add every answer to the template so the next remote hire starts a month ahead of this one.