Remote work is on the rise. Globally, 70 percent of people work remotely at least once a week. The advancement of technology has made remote work more popular. While working from home has been reported to boost productivity, it also brings its own challenges, often relating to potential isolation and time management. Another challenge for remote work has to do with how remote employees can be engaged effectively. Managers, therefore, need to prioritise employee engagement and teamwork to make their organisations thrive.
Here are five proven ways to engage your remote employees and make them feel like they’re an integral part of the team:
Ensure Easy Communication
It’s important to make sure that remote employees stay up-to-date about new projects and other company news. There are a number of tools, applications, and websites that can facilitate effective communication between employees:
Slack: A cloud-based team collaboration tool where communication is carried out in channels. These channels can be organised by team, project, or topic. Slack conversations are accessible to all employees, so searching and finding information is fast and easy.
Trello: A web-based project management application, Trello is designed for managing several recurring projects of different clients at the same time. Its organisational board is separated into lists and each list consists of one or more tasks. You can create a different board for each client, choose a deadline, and track all tasks from their creation to invoicing.
Google Docs and Sheets: Don’t forget about this Google application as it enables remote employees to create, edit, and collaborate using the same documents in real time. To ensure that your communication is as smooth and engaging as possible, it’s important to be clear and understandable in your writing, especially when you’re communicating to employees working remotely. You need to ensure that messages are always polished before they’re sent. There are several useful tools and services such as Grammarly or Readable, if your writing requires editing or proofreading.
Recognise Achievements
Employee recognition matters – especially when your employees work remotely. Employees who are recognised for their achievements are more satisfied and more likely to stick around. Recruitment processes are time-consuming and expensive and it’s in everyone’s best interest that your employees are happy and motivated to continue in their jobs.
It’s definitely an easy way to make your remote employees feel valued and appreciated. When managers show appreciation for their employees, it has the tendency to make employees appreciate their managers more, too.
Focus on Effective Goal Setting
If you want to have independent and productive remote workers, you must be able to communicate your company vision, mission, and goals effectively. Establish short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals for each remote employee, and discuss it with them personally. It’s ideal to have employees who feel like they’re part of the company culture but can also succeed independently.
Maintain Personal Connection
In order to have a better connection with your remote workers, you have to recognise their strengths, weaknesses, and interests. Employees who maintain a personal connection with their employers are more likely to feel connected and engaged. However, to build a personal connection, it’s not enough to only check up on the progress of your remote employee – you need to share individual experiences in a personalised way too. This means sending information based on each employee’s individual circumstances whether they’re in the office or outside. As in any relationship, strong employee engagement also requires transparency and honesty.
Organise In-Person Events
Another great to keep your remote employees engaged is to provide them an opportunity to come together and get to know each other. This addresses the potential isolation which is a common challenge for remote employees.
Such events have a positive impact – they enhance communication, engage your employees, allows them to network with their colleagues and strengthens their membership in the work community.
If you would like to read more about remote work, you can check out our earlier post – how to stay engaged when working out of office.
Working remotely is a trend that won’t be losing its popularity any time soon. It’s therefore useful to know how you can make it as effective as possible. You can follow these tips to keep your remote employees motivated and engaged. And when properly managed, remote work can benefit your employees and the company. Remote employees have fewer distractions and have better control over their work environment which can improve their productivity. For companies, this means more profit. Given this, it’s time that remote work is recognised as a standard practice as opposed to being just another office perk.
Author: Josh Carlyle – Experienced Writer & Marketing Professional.
Photo credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
