Are you thinking about how to keep your remote team happy? Job flexibility has long been seen as the primary factor in engaging employees. According to a survey, more than 50% of employees claimed they would leave their current job for another job that would offer more flexible options.
In fact, there is a directly proportional link between an increase in employee engagement and the opportunity of getting to work on one’s own terms – but not on a full-time basis.
Also, top employee engagement rates have been noted when up to 40% of work time is spent at the office with the rest of the team.
That said, employee engagement not only corresponds to the work process but also in connection to how employees view their potential employer and how the respective employees bond with the rest of the team.
While you might immensely benefit from the following Effective Remote Team Building Ideas for Your Company, you ought to know that remote work can bring in certain engagement challenges. If this is your first time working with a remote team, you should know that the potential challenges are entirely different from the ones that you may encounter in a typical office setting.
What Makes Remote Employees Less Engaged
In order to understand the potential challenges of working with a remote team, you should know what makes remote employees less engaged. Even before the pandemic brought out a global remote work experiment, 2/3 of remote employees were already disengaged.
Well, who is to blame – you have team members scattered all around the world, and everyone is experiencing their own set of problems with remote work. Also, your usual communication might be constantly disturbed by external distractions and lagging internet connections.
However, there are certain strategies that you can integrate into your business operation framework to improve certain things.
How to Improve Engagement of Remote Employees
Let us have a look at some ideas that can help you alleviate certain problems and improve the engagement of remote employees.
1. Establish Clear Goals
Sometimes, a chaotic workflow – or worse – the absence of work methods- can raise employees’ stress levels. Unable to cope with the stress, they might start looking for other work opportunities, which is why you should aim to offer a clear roadmap of what an employee needs to take care of within a given timeline.
It is also your job to keep teams accountable for their work – even with minimal supervision.
You will also clarify to your remote team that there are the following larger goals at play, which basically are steps that every person aims to achieve during their career:
- Advancing professionally.
- Acquiring a managerial position.
- Growing one’s personal brand.
As you might have noticed, these are simply one of the few milestones that anyone is looking to get from their potential workplace. In the absence of such growth opportunities, your potential employees will be the least motivated to put their best foot forward.
Happy employees are typically the ones that are able to come up with the best innovative ideas and help your business in return. All because they can see that you care about their goals and not only about your business goals.
2. Improve Communication
When it comes to a remote team, communication is the key to success. That said, ensure that you guarantee that face-to-face interactions are a daily occurrence. There are countless ways you can make this happen – Slack and Skype are just a few examples.
The thing is that continuous communication keeps every single member aware of what exactly is going on within the company. The better the communication, the more likely your remote team will stay consciously connected with their colleagues and their goals.
Nearly 20% of remote employees consider collaborative difficulties as their number one issue. In reality, the employer must solve collaborative and communication problems. In other words, it is the responsibility of a company to provide all the tools and establish policies needed for work within a distributed team to be no different than office work.
To prevent potentially unproductive situations, such as if an employee is not bothering to check their message or they are losing track of their tasks and failing to meet deadlines, you must distribute a clear guideline that includes actionable details that anyone can turn to when they cannot find something.
