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5 Ways To Improve Remote Employee Engagement
by SelectOne on Mon, Sep 16, 2019
In 2017, The New York Times reported that 43% of working Americans spent time working out of office, and Forbes.com recently noted that “as of 2018, remote work, telecommuting and workplace flexibility have officially become a global industry.”
Despite the rising trend of businesses hiring remote workers, many managers and business owners struggle with keeping these employees engaged. Here are the top five ways you can improve remote employee involvement.
1. Maintain Open Communication
While many remote workers feel that they are more productive without in-office distractions like water cooler talk, you still want to promote conversation on both the personal and professional level to avoid a sense of isolation. Find ways to chat about nonessential, nonbusiness topics through apps like Slack, HipChat, or Google Hangouts.
Get to know your remote employees, and allow them to know you! You should also have an easy-to-use way for employees to contact you about professional problems or questions, either with an app or through email or phone.
Because remote employees work on their own time, be sure that you are flexible about your availability to discuss projects, answer questions, or just have small talk. Additionally, you may find that setting up casual meet-ups for members of your team to hang out and relax together is an effective way to keep remote employee engagement high.
Despite the rising trend of businesses hiring remote workers, many managers and business owners struggle with keeping these employees engaged. Here are the top five ways you can improve remote employee involvement.
2. Promote Teamwork
Even though everyone on your team may not be in the same physical office space, you want to promote a sense of teamwork and camaraderie with remote workers through communication (as noted above) and also in how you assign tasks and engage workers.
Setting up teams with team leaders is a great way to go about this and can help foster a sense of community within the larger business. In addition, making sure remote workers never feel that they are unsupported or alone is essential: let them know they have a team to fall back on for help and collaboration.
3. Don’t Minimize Work
If you employ both in-office and remote workers, be sure to treat all your workers equally. This may seem obvious, but you want to avoid treating remote workers’ projects as less important than those of employees who are physically in your space.
This also means not assigning menial tasks to remote employees, but also trusting them with larger projects. If a worker feels respected and trusted, they are much more likely to be productive and stay engaged. Employees want to feel useful and essential.
4. Emphasize Accountability
Recent studies show that 77% of full- and part-time remote workers self-identified as being more productive when working remotely due to less stress. Because these employees wanted to maintain their remote position, they also focused more on the work and logged better hours and completion times for tasks.
To help your remote employees sustain their work, emphasize time management and accountability, and offer ways for your workers to easily track their assignments and progress. Knowing that you are checking in on them doesn’t have to equal stress, and should instead help to create a culture of reliability and work to strengthen teamwork.
5. Celebrate Success
Be sure to observe and recognize when a remote employee is succeeding. This could be done personally, one-on-one with the employee over video chat or conference call, or you can celebrate as a team through a chat app or email.
Showing employees that their work is meaningful to you not only encourages productivity and heightens engagement, but, if done in a public form, also lets workers feel “in the loop” when it comes to their colleagues and gives them goals to strive towards. Recognizing excellent work also clarifies your expectations for all employees and serves as motivation for future projects.
Want more tips on recruiting employees, hiring smarter, and improving employee relations? Check out these resources from SelectOne or contact us today for a consultation.
Jump To: Everything You Need to Know About Hiring Remote Employees
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