Businesses are now continuing their operations, thanks to the remote employees. However, from hiring remote employees to ensuring their productivity and engagement, dealing with the remote workforce has its challenges. Against this backdrop, one of the biggest concerns for businesses is “How to engage remote employees?”
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What is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement is the emotional commitment the employees possess towards the organization and its goals. In other words, employee engagement is similar to making an employee feel content at their work.
Employee engagement revolves around the concept of boosting employee comfort by creating better facilities for them.
Why should organizations engage remote employees?
With the pandemic making matters trying, the world has seen a rise in remote workers. Since a higher proportion of the existing workforce opted for remote work, it became essential for employers, managers, and organizations to improve employee engagement.
Here is why it is crucial to engage remote employees:
To aid their well-being: Studies indicate that remote workers face higher stress than regular workers due to the lack of face-to-face interaction with colleagues and peers. This disengagement and lack of interaction can drive them towards reduced productivity and affect their well-being.
Employee Productivity: Engaged employees are likely to be more productive, display consistent results, and bring more enhanced revenue.
Better Success Rate: As per Harvard Business Review, an engaged workforce would create at least double the success rate. Plus, the employees are more likely to provide a choicer quality of work.
Talent Retention: An organization with robust employee engagement can retain valuable talent and function superior as an organization.
Tips to Engage Remote Employees
For an organization to create an engaging environment, it needs to perform numerous activities from time to time to keep up the employee morale.
With that said, employee engagement need not cost a bomb to the company. Simple measures can make a huge difference in engaging employees.
Most organizations struggle to find the appropriate solution when posed with the dilemma – “How to engage remote employees?”. Here are some ways, methods, and activities that apply to any organization to engage their remote employees.
Stay Communicated with Video Calls
The remote workforce needs just as much engagement as the regular workforce. Working from home has forced everyone to work in isolation. With work moving away from offices, remote employees find it hard to stay in touch with others.
Scheduling more calls and video calls helps the employees to stay in touch with each other. However, an organization must remember to moderate its count of meetings. While too many might make the remote employees feel antsy, too few can create a communication gap. Striking a balance is the key here.
Provide Collaborative Tools
One of the biggest concerns for remote employees has been the lack of context and clear goals. Such a lack of clarity leads to a loss of engagement and motivation to work.
A simple key to engaging the remote workforce is to make them more collaborative by using technology. A powerful collaboration tool would help the teams to stay connected as well as aids them in reaching goals.
Rewards are Vital for Remote Workforce
Another vital aspect of engaging the remote workforce is to create an environment of enduring value and mutual respect for employees. Just like traditional work environments, a remote workforce requires motivation and upliftment.
The best way to engage any employee and workforce is by appreciating them. Rewarding hard work and results would create an environment that is naturally motivating. In the same way, rewarding remote employees creates an uplifting work culture and makes it more encouraging.
Prioritize Communications among Team Members
To engage a remote workforce, the digital workplace of the organization should be open for communication. Prioritize the creation of clear communication channels – horizontal, vertical, and downward.
Unlike in brick-and-mortar offices where people could reach out to other departments should communication channels not work, the same is not feasible for the remote workforce.
Hence, creating a network of open communication channels would allow a consistent flow of information. Additionally, an effective communication system would let employees establish better relationships with their given teams.
Devise Healthy Work-Life Balance
Organizations often ignore the role of work-life balance in creating an engaging work environment. Ensuring that employees obtain a healthy work-life balance helps them stay happy and engaged.
Work from home kind of scenarios brings multiple factors into play. Consequently, leaving room for flexibility has become extremely important. Nothing makes employees happier than the freedom to work and reach goals.
Organizations must offer flexibility to help the employees find the right balance and pace for their work. Furthermore, autonomy in decision-making and work schedules motivate and engage the remote workers.
Provide Corrective Feedback
Most employees feel motivated to work with corrective feedback than with praises. Creating such a system of providing suggestions and improvement tips to the employees aids remote workforce engagement.
Boost the employee morale with TGIF Meetings
A quick fix to “How to engage remote employees?” is to create a weekly meeting that lets the remote workforce talk candidly. TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday) Meetings would help teams and departments to reconnect with other team members.
They would also create space for some fun activities. Fun games destress employees while the fun trophies they win help raise their morale. The fun trophies allow the employees to look forward to specific events and lets them enjoy their work.
Such meetings should be consistent and happen at least once every 15 days, while involvement could be up to employees. Some activities in TGIF meetings for effective engagement of remote employees can include:
- Question and answer sessions to clear out doubts; this would create transparency among the team members.
- Playing virtual games with team members to keep up the spirits.
- Sharing personal thoughts regarding ongoing projects or offering advice about the same.
Leverage Small Talk
Trying to solve the – how to engage remote employees’ mystery – without considering their emotions and mental state would never work. Managers need to remember that the remote workforce would need more than just regular updates on projects.
Small talk does magic for remote employees. It allows them to unwind and understand that the higher-ups care about them, their mental health, and personal well-being. Management that does not ask about the employee well-being may appear negligent, and the remote employees may not feel motivated enough to work in such an organization.
Tips to Create Remote Employee Engagement Strategy
To ensure the remote employee engagement plan is sturdy, here are some quick tips:
- Communication is always a crucial part of the engagement. Hence, facilitate clear communication channels.
- Encourage remote workforce through appreciation, promotions, and rewards.
- Team leaders, managers, and higher-ups should motivate the teams to participate in meetings and activities.
- Facilitate collaboration through a variety of means – traditional and creative.
- Provide flexibility to workers through systematic changes and innovative procedures.
As the world moves towards remote work, the need to find the right balance of work and fun has become significant in today’s time.
As the COVID-19 variants still test the world, remote and hybrid work appears to stay here for a while. Workplaces have no choice but to devise ways that let their employees stay productive and healthy.
Who are we?
At Cloudely Inc., we helped many organizations with their remote workforce needs. We offer expert staffing services to global businesses and can handpick candidates with precision.
Our advantage? We understand technology and can step into your shoes to hire and vet technical experts for your business needs.
Get in touch with us at hello@cloudely.com to know more about our staffing capabilities. Follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates.
