Remote work is a growing trend, and for good reason. It’s a lot easier to manage a team of people from all over the country or the world, and there are a lot of benefits as well. However, as with any working method, there are often where the lack of a face-to-face connection can take a toll.
Even though a lot of companies are adopting a remote work policy, a lot of them struggle to keep their employees engaged. By far, the biggest barrier to remote work is the lack of communication. When employees are not sitting right next to each other, it’s hard to catch them up on the latest happenings at the office.
People love to work remotely, but the lack of face-to-face interaction between employees can often lead to disengagement. When people are disconnected, they become far less engaged at work, which can lead to lower performance, more wasted time, higher employee turnover, idle employees, and frustrated bosses. To avoid these problems, you need to make sure your remote employees are engaged every single day.
It’s easy for remote workers to become disengaged and lose focus on tasks and projects. This means their company is missing out on the potential benefit of their time and expertise. How can you ensure your remote employees are happy and engaged? At the end of the day, it comes down to positive workplace culture and human connection. Here are the tips for keeping your remote workers engaged.
Create a roadmap
The more employees we have working from home, the more we rely on our remote employees. When you’re planning to hire more remote employees, you need to know what keeps your current employees engaged and engaged. Use your remote employees to help you uncover what keeps them engaged and add new recommendations to your roadmap.
Remote employees need a roadmap to stay engaged, focused and productive. That’s why we’ve created a document that outlines how to develop a set of remote policies and procedures.
Communicate
People who work from home, remote employees, feel disconnected from their employers, and struggle to keep up and keep motivated. These remote workers can feel like their skills and knowledge go to waste and it’s hard to keep them engaged and excited about their work. The company needs to communicate with them regularly and know what their purpose is, and how this applies to the company and their role. If you’re a remote worker, it’s important for you to understand where you fit in the company and how you can help the company, even if you’re not physically present.
Collaborate
Remote or solo work is a great way to work from anywhere in the world. In fact, large companies use remote workers to get a competitive edge. But when you come from a remote location, you have to have a lot of strategies to keep your employee engagement high. You have to be able to set goals, have a plan in place to motivate, and provide a space to collaborate. And you have to limit distractions in order to keep your employees in a positive mood in a working environment that they may not be used to.
Encourage and Reward
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it is a reasonable assumption that remote employees have a lot of free time on their hands. After all, for most of them, the bulk of their workday consists of a few scheduled meetings or a couple of hours a day spent reading emails and responding to them in a timely manner. Thus, the best way to keep remote employees engaged is to incentivize them with various rewards for their efforts. To keep remote employees engaged, evaluate their work with regular feedback, set goals, provide recognition, and make sure the remote work experience is comfortable.
Weekly Meetings
Remote employees are only as engaged as their workplace is. If your team is already successfully using tools like Slack, Trello, and Google Hangouts, then keep doing the same things. However, it’s also important to find ways to keep lost-in-the-woods employees engaged. Having a weekly meeting, doing a quick web conference, or even sending out a few emails can all help you keep your remote team connected.
Hire The Right Employees
A quality remote work policy helps a company to hire the right kind of people and keep them engaged, be it a part-time employee, a contractor, a freelancer or a remote employee. A good remote work policy will help a company to create a roadmap of both the work and the personal aspects of a remote employee, while at the same time it will help a company to maintain a healthy working atmosphere.
Find Out What Motivates Your Workers
Managers are often faced with the challenge of motivating their employees to stay in touch with the company when they are working remotely. As well as being able to easily communicate with team members, managers are also responsible for providing them with the tools and resources they need to be productive. However, it’s also important for managers to recognise the importance of the relationship between managers and their remote employees, and to pay attention to what motivates them.
Make Sure Your Workers Know Their Goals
Clearly, before any good plan can be put into action, everyone needs to be on the same page. That means that the work that is being produced, that the goals are being set, and what the company’s expectations are.
Assigning Tasks Smartly
While an employee is often happy to work from home, remote workers can get bored and disengaged if their work never changes. Because of this, it’s important to assign tasks smartly and provide constant motivation for remote workers.
Reward Good Performance
We all know how important it is to keep employees engaged and happy at work, but we also know it’s hard to do. One of the most efficient and low-cost ways to do this is by rewarding your employees. However, if you’re not careful it can easily backfire.