Employer's Guide to Remote Internships

Despite being a rewarding experience, hiring interns or graduates and doing it well can be a lot of work at the best of times. We’ve gathered some of the key tips to help ease employer stress when onboarding new talent!

Set up and set expectations

It’s important to ensure that your intern will have everything they need to get the job done. Before the internship, consider making a list of everything they will need for an effective workstation. This will likely include a reliable internet connection (use this website for testing). There are multiple ways to support your employees with their internet connection - e.g. internet dongles, wifi extenders, or buying mobile data for them to use. If your intern is likely to be working from home permanently, you may wish to check your organisation's policy on providing home office equipment such as a desk and chair. 

If your intern is going to spend some time in-office, you’ll also need to consider how you will introduce your intern to the space. They may already be comfortable with their fellow employees (woohoo!), but you can help them feel more comfortable. Make sure to give them a tour of the facilities and talk them through access cards, kitchen rules, and anything else that applies to your office space. 

The same applies if you are returning to the office after a period of working from home. It can be easy to forget that they’ve never worked in your office before when they’ve already been on the team remotely for a few months!

Structuring the internship 

Be sure to plan out internship projects at a broad AND specific level before the internship begins. Consider outlining the overarching goals you are hoping to achieve with your intern, and how their efforts will make a difference in your organisation. It’s a win-win - you can rest assured that your talented intern is delivering valuable stuff, and they’ll know that their work is valued. 

With a remote intern, it’s important to ensure expectations and targets are clear from the get-go. Create broader projects/targets that the intern can see at the beginning of their internship, and help your intern to find their confidence by creating a defined structure for the first week and month of the internship. It can be difficult for an intern to know how well they are performing at the beginning, and even trickier under remote circumstances. Communicate clearly and positively to set workload expectations. It may be helpful to reiterate that they are only expected to learn the ropes in the first few months or so! 

Help your intern to avoid sweating the small stuff! 

A remote onboarding experience can be especially challenging - operating outside the office means that the intern loses the opportunity to learn by observation. In an office environment, it’s natural to go to lunch when everyone else does. But what happens when we can’t see our coworkers? Help your intern to understand basic dynamics, like how long they can break for lunch, and how to clearly separate work hours from personal hours (e.g. wearing business wear or taking set break times). It may be especially useful to run over extra tools that can help with time management (we like Toggl and Trello for timesheets and collaborative to-do lists!). 

It can be really helpful to encourage or arrange virtual coffee dates with close team members to allow them to get to know each other outside of more “formal” meetings. 

Be there for your intern

This almost goes without saying but - don’t just chat about work! Your intern will feel more understood and safe to raise issues or hurdles if they feel respected as - ya know, a human!

Regular contact via daily 1:1’s for the first few weeks can be really helpful as it will allow you to work with your intern to plan their day/week of work and give them the opportunity to ask questions - there are likely to be a LOT!

If there is a platform on which to ask questions (such as Slack or Microsoft Teams) then ensure your intern is clear about this. You may also want to suggest they save questions for 1:1 time to ensure your own productivity! 

Working remotely means that you may find it more challenging to assess their workload. Help your intern to understand how to prioritise their task list effectively and manage the expectations of those in your wider team. 

We’ve also prepared a handy (and downloadable!) checklist of key tasks to complete before your intern starts their internship - check out the Employer Toolkit here.