By Techintern.io
We’ve put together this guide to help a remote company manage a new intern and provide a great experience. These tips were developed using a combination of remote working guides from other companies, past experience from both managers and interns, and some of the feedback we’ve received so far. We hope this will help you run your own successful remote internship program!
What do students want?
Meaningful work, good communication, regular feedback and opportunities to learn.
What can the company do?
The company can communicate expectations, maintain connections/build camaraderie, monitor productivity without micromanaging and give feedback.
- Set guidelines around communications (frequency, means, and ideal timing around team chats, video calls, expected work hours, etc)
- Standards and rules can help ease communication for everyone, even though it may seem a bit like bureaucratic overhead. They help keep work and personal life separate, by setting expectations for when you’ll be pinged to help on a work issue.
- Planned casual social video chats for team members (lunch, chats, social games).
- Remote work really hurts the team spirit because it enables interns to see new coworkers as strangers, rather than new friends. Planned chats and water-cooler banter go a long way to bringing that back.
- Structured weekly check-ins on progress.
- It’s easy to lose track of an intern when they’re still learning the ropes. Creating a plan for how to check-in with them will help them feel engaged with the team, and unblock them sooner. This can initially be in the form of calls, and gradually shift to status updates and messages.
- Give bi-weekly feedback and encourage the student to act on that feedback.
- One-on-ones are a fantastic learning tool for in-person interns, and just as much so for remote ones too. They’ll need a bit more planning due to remote schedules, but don’t let that stop you! A good guideline is 1:1’s every week for the first month of the internship, and then biweekly for the remainder.
What can the student do?
The student should be encouraged to set personal goals and develop positive daily habits.
- Creating a daily checklist of items in the morning. Cross them off as they are completed.Sending a written copy of daily standup updates in the team chat, on top of mentioning it during the team standup meeting.
- The best thing an intern can do is to provide more visibility into their work. After all, it’s easy to lose track of the bigger picture when they’re so focused on learning something in a new environment. Keeping things visible ensures that the intern is held accountable for their work, and acknowledged for their contributions.
- Asking for help to the team when they get blocked.
- This seems like a small thing, but it’s very difficult to shake that sense of “my peers will be annoyed when I keep pinging them” as an intern. A great remote internship should provide a space where the student is comfortable enough to share their questions, and use them to contribute effectively.
- Looking over pull requests or adjacent projects they aren’t tagged on, and contributing comments where appropriate.
- A lot of an intern’s learning about an organization’s structure and their role in it comes from the casual conversations they have about company initiatives, or from chats with teammates about it. Looking over work that they’re not directly responsible for is a good way for remote interns to get that same understanding of an organization, and build a sense of belonging.
- Set up a document/notepad to jot down questions and ideas during the day to bring up or reflect on later.
- As remote schedules aren’t always aligned within a team, jotting questions down in a place where teammates can answer at their convenience is important to help ensure a collaborative environment. Notion is a great tool for this. You and your intern can have a shared notion board to keep track of notes and questions that may arise. This is especially useful in 1:1’s and allows for more transparency.
Useful Remote Tools