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Remote Internship Program – Contingency Plan Template

Pivoting your internship program from in person to remote? Use this contingency doc template to organize your team’s plans.

Objective

Our goal is to plan and execute a robust remote 12-16-week summer intern  program at X. Interns will be assigned real projects and make a real impact while supporting teams across different functions of the organization while being 100% remote.

Internship start and end dates:

May 4 – Aug 21 (16-week program)
May 18 – Aug 7 (12-week program)

June 1 – August 21 (12-week program)

June 15 – September 4 (12-week program)

Key stakeholders:

  • Legal 
  • Finance / Comp / Payroll
  • Communications 
  • IT / Business Tech / Workplace
  • People Operations / HR / Onboarding 
  • Benefits / Mobility / Immigration 
  • Diversity & Belonging 
  • Engineering DRI 

Legal:

  • Are we able to support remote interns?
  • Would we need to create a separate Code of Conduct for remote interns?
  • Would we need to resend new offer letters to interns with different verbiage about hours and liability to return laptops, and etc? 
  • Any issue with offering students the option to opt-in or out of the program? 
    • Opt out – are we obligated / should we pay the interns a certain amount?

Finance / Compensation / Payroll

  • Navigating taxes for remote interns in different locations domestically and internationally. Any restrictions or guidelines?
  • If we cancel, how do we pay out interns that aren’t on the payroll?
  • How will we determine and adjust compensation packages? 
    • Should we provide a standard comp package across all technical roles? 
    • What to do, if anything, about any relo/housing stipend?

Communications

  • How should we properly convey all of our program logistics to the incoming hires? 
    • What is essential and non-essential to share? 
    • How often should we commit to sending updates? 
  • How do we best keep in touch with the students during the program? 
    • Do we offer a manual with one source of truth? 

IT / Biz Tech / Workplace :

  • Do we still have enough hardware to send to X interns?
    • If so, what laptop models will different interns need? 
    • If so, what are the logistics / time it takes to get hardware to new hires? 
      • Domestic vs. international 
  • How to track laptops?
  • Who would be running point for their team on shipping logistics?
  • Any issues or concerns with remote IT onboarding? 

People Ops / Onboarding:

  • What will People support look like for a remote program? 
  • Will the intern be assigned an HRBP? What is their relationship to them?
  • What will a remote new hire orientation look like? Logistics? 
  • If we need to push out start dates, what is the earliest that interns can start? 
  • When should we trigger background checks? 
    • If no response from schools, should we ask interns to provide transcripts?

Benefits / Mobility / Immigration 

  • Updated intern benefits for remote interns? 
  • How will this impact their benefits if interns are working remotely from a different city we hired them for?
  • Are international students allowed to work from their respective countries? 
    • Ex: China and India’s labor regulations permit this. As for Singapore, conditions apply.

Diversity & Belonging

  • How can we partner with our diversity team to make sure our program remains inclusive?  
  • How can we leverage our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for our program? 
  • Learning & Development opportunities 

Engineering Partner / Leads

  • How do we ensure a consistent technical program across the board? 
  • How can we best prepare engineering managers for a remote intern? 
  • Project expectations – Should we adjust the scope of an intern project to make it more reasonable and suitable for remote work? 

Timeline

End of March – Schedule meeting with stakeholders to run through high-level logistics

Early April – Send out official program update to incoming interns 

Mid April – Drop dead date (Should we continue with all-remote, in-person, half/half,  etc.?) For countries outside of the US, decision to resume on-site work depends on Govts’ directives. 

Late April – Finalize all program logistics and details, ship hardware for May hires

May – Intern program begins 

About the Author

Adri Durante

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