Do you know that employee engagement drops by 40% when employees go completely remote? When a company makes a decision to go completely remote, employee engagement drops by 40% .
Most employees have been working completely remote over the last 2 year so that’s something to really think about. Many remote employees feel excluded from basic workplace communications. So the best thing you can do to manage your remote employees is to maintain the level of communication and trust.
Today’s teams are spread across the country and around the globe. Many have colleagues they have never met face-to-face or even spoken to on the phone. The most successful team is when remote workers make each other easily accessible and highly engaged.
25 Ways To Keep Your Work Employees Engaged
1. Application Anchors
If you want to engage your remote team, one of the most brilliant things you can do is 5 minutes before the end of the meeting say,”Leave your Zoom screen, your laptop station and go find an object somewhere in your house, apartment, car, that represents one application you are stealing from this meeting or one action you want to take leaving this meeting.”
For example- You may have somebody go find an earphone to say ‘After this meeting, I realized that in my role of leadership I need to be more deliberate about listening to you before I speak’.
The brain is wired to take visual data and encode it into long-term memory. This is such a powerful way to close a meeting on a high note. This will become an engagement activity and employees will get to learn from each other.
2. Make Expectations Clear
If you have been managing a co-located team or if you are new into managing a remote team, one of the biggest transitions is that the timelines around expectations have to shrink. The level of clarity of who’s doing what, what the deliverables looks like, what your feedback on their work is, all of that has to be taken to a much higher level.
We need to look at a week to two week check ins and milestones on who is doing what and when. We need to create a system where the team is working and fulfilling each other’s expectations.
3. Make Feedback Plentiful
You need to over communicate feedback and that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to over communicate constructive feedback. What it means is that for a lot of people it’s hard when you are working alone and distant so it’s tough to know if you are doing a good job or making progress.
Progress is a powerful human motivator and most of us have been conditioned to judge progress based on the feedback that we receive. Constructive criticism during that one-on-one is okay but we need to double down on positive progress oriented feedback.
Make sure your team knows how to give feedback to each other instead of just getting feedback from the managers only.
4. Make Friendships Easy
The research in the last 10 years shows that work friends really do make us more productive. Finding things in common with 2-3 individuals on our team and building a friendship out of that, is one of the powerful things you can do.
Do this not only to create a sense of purpose and motivation but to create engagement as well. Employees will feel like they have a sense of social support even inside their team.
5. Establish Clear Goals
A chaotic workflow or no work methods in place will raise employees’ stress levels and then have them looking for the next work opportunity as soon as possible. Aim to clear a roadmap of what an employee needs to take care of within a given timeline and keep teams accountable for their work even with minimal supervision.
Employees wanting to advance professionally, go into a management position, or just grow their personal brand are some of the key milestones that anyone is looking to get from their workplace. If you can’t offer these opportunities, your employees will be less motivated to put their best foot forward.
6. Internal Communication Policies
Make sure you are guaranteeing that face-to-face interactions are a daily occurence. Continuous communication keeps every single member of your team aware of what’s going on within the company.
This has them stay consciously connected with their colleagues. 20% of people who are currently working remotely consider that difficulties with collaboration are their number one issue. But the reality is that these problems need to be solved by the employer. It’s the company’s responsibility to provide all the tools and policies needed for work within a distributed to the team to be no different than office work.
7. One-on-One Meetings
Personal one-on-one meetings ensure no one is feeling isolated or left out. Managers get just enough time to focus on what every single individual has to say. A person-to-person interaction let’s you engage with your employees and actively listen and solve every single struggle or wish they have.
This shows them that you care about them as people not just workers.one one hand it’s the single most important thing you can do to show your employees that you are willing to listen and help them achieve their goals.
8. Make Bonds Easy
Propose virtual team building activities you can via zoom. Grab lunch together or sip on a cup of coffee like you would in a break room or maybe an after work happy hour while discussing all the crazy things that are happening with your lives.
No need to work issues to disturb these downtime meetings. Specifically, think of ways to engage your employees and help them experience new activities they might only have access to once in a lifetime.
9. Workplace Culture
Create a real workplace culture even remotely. Dedicate a part of your company’s efforts to building a real remote culture for your workers. Create a common purpose and then lead by example.
Everything should be done based on an overarching goal but to start working towards this goal is ultimately the manager’s role to guide people and pose as a role model.
10. Reward People
Employee recognition has been linked with engagement for decades now. It’s human nature for anyone to expect at least a thankyou. Hold special events like workcations and remember to celebrate every single birthday and milestone.
All of these add up and make your remote employees feel like they are a part of a real family instead of just another place where they get to interact with people.
11. Employee Engagement Surveys
Honestly speaking, no employee is ever going to be honest about their experience when you are directly talking to them. Anonymous employee engagement surveys were created to solve this problem.
They help you to pose questions you wouldn’t be able to get a sincere answer for. For instance, How would you like us to improve the company culture? What’s the number one aspect you wish we would change about the company? What would determine you to leave the company?
12. Delight Your Teams
Delight your teams just like you delight your customers. You probably invest a ton of resources and efforts towards making sure that your customers are happy and you should do the same thing with your team.
Another reason to do this is to welcome somebody for their day to celebrate a work anniversary or big personal event that has happened in your team member’s life. These small tokens of appreciation can go a really long way when it comes to long-term employment happiness as well as retention.
13. Regularly Reflect Together
This is an action that you can do at every single quarter. You will have a retrospective at the very end of the quarters in which you can recap what went well, what didn’t go so well, as well as what you want to improve towards the future.
It’s by carving out this time for reflection that your team is actually able to assess how you are doing and hold everyone accountable to our performance as a team.
14. Schedule Casual Hangouts
You can have events on a regular basis in which you could hangout with other people across different teams in a remote setting. Enjoy some virtual game nights or things in which you can do cocktails together or some other different activities that you might be able to do in small group environments.
A lot of people would show up for these activities because it would give them a place to pause during their day or week, which is often a challenge when you are working remotely.
15. Keep the Team Updated
In a remote environment your team is going to want to know where things are at, both with the company and the status of projects. They would want to feel motivated and inspired to keep going.
If you want to keep your team updated and align, I recommend scheduling weekly team meetings and company-wide all hands.
16. Use Video As Much As Possible
Keeping your remote team engaged can be challenging but leveraging video can help you make meetings and announcements a bit more engaging and exciting.
Its important to turn on your camera and choose video over ‘voice-only’ conversations. Using video during your virtual meetings will help you see your teammates’s facial expressions and connect with them on a personal level.
17. 9 to 5 Schedules Have To Go
When managing remote workforce the focus should be on the output and not on monitoring when employees are online. While working from home, employees tend to break away to look after their household chores. Expecting them to stick to the same schedules as they would in the office might be challenging.
Giving them the freedom to work when they are more likely to be productive is the best way to keep them engaged. Unless their presence is essential at a particular time, allow them to choose their own schedules.
18. Meet your Employee’s L&D needs
When you go remote, your employees will still need to learn new skills along with their everyday work that has to be completed. Investing in learning opportunities for your employees will inspire them to be engaged and remain in your company for a longer time.
While working, remote learning and development for your employees can be done digitally. It’s not ideal to just replace your on-premise training model with online classes where a trainer uses video conferencing software to tutor your workforce.
Investing in an efficient e-learning platform that is deliberately designed for virtual professional development is more efficient.
19. Provide Reliable Tools
Today’s technology is so advanced, we can work from almost anywhere in the world seamlessly. Communications tools or apps like Zoom, Skype for conference calls or video meetings, Trello for Project Management, Evernote for sharing business notes or meeting notes with others.
Zixmail to transport sensitive data over the internet as HR professionals are required to protect the data of their employees. This ensures that everything is encrypted, secure and compliant. Those are just a few of the apps that you can use and with a little research you can find that work perfect for you.
20. Trust Your Team
When you manage a remote team, you have to trust that each person is working towards your common goals. Focus more on the results and quality of their work and less on what they are doing at any given moment.
As their leader, you must behave in a way that shows you trust your team to do their jobs well.
21. Encourage Work/Life Balance
Remote employees may have difficulty establishing a healthy work/life balance right now because they may not have a physical separation between their workspace and their personal space. Employees may feel like they need to be available 24/7 which can lead to unnecessary stress and eventually burn out.
You should communicate to your employees the importance of creating boundaries. Suggest that they work their normal hours and then step away from the computer until it’s time to start working the next day.
22. Perceived Control
We need to give our employees a sense of perceived control. People love autonomy, people love being held responsible for their own decisions. Infact, Netflix embraced this concept many years ago when they created a culture based on freedom and responsibility.
When we give people a sense of perceived control over their outcomes, outputs, time, decisions and effects their decisions have on themselves and the rest of the team then they become more engaged.
23. Connectedness
People want to feel that they are connected to each other. They want to feel that they are connected to the team, progress and results. This craving for connectedness is what’s fueled the growth on things like facebook and other social media platforms.
The more we can create connectedness in a novel way, the easier it is to manage our remote teams.
24. Sense of Vision & Meaning
It is very important that we create a sense of vision and meaning with our people when they work remotely. When we come into the same office everyday and we see our values written on the wall and we are constantly reminded of our goals and targets. It’s easy to create meaning in that situation.
But for people to be truly engaged with the team and their business, they need to find purpose beyond pleasing. They need to find a meaning beyond simply doing the work for the business.
25. Preach Time Management
It is safe to assume that if you are a manager your employees must have definitely asked you ‘How do we manage our time?’. This should be seen as an opportunity to engage with your employees. Your team definitely looks up to you as somebody who manages their time well.
Help them manage their time using time management tools such as Todoist, Time Doctor. Give them tips and training around time management. This will surely increase their productivity as well as increase engagement.
