Keeping employees motivated and happy when working from home can be difficult. Many companies that have deployed a remote work strategy have noticed a decline in overall engagement. Fortunately, adhering to some of the best practices can help businesses keep their remote teams engaged while working remotely. Below are tips that help accomplish engagement between groups while working remotely.
Keep your remote team frequently updated
In a remote environment, communication is often a challenge. A team is required to know the status of the company, projects, and more to stay up to date and be inspired and motivated. Therefore, employers and managers need to find creative virtual ways to recognize their employees and their efforts, appreciate them, and keep them motivated.
Therefore, teams that have hosted company-wide meetings have found much success in keeping their remote teams engaged. You can benefit from conducting routine show-and-tell virtual meetings so that employees can embed this practice as work culture and benefit from it.
These meetings can be essential in addressing the previous progress of a team, and they can also help workers stay dedicated and aligned to the company’s ultimate goal. The meeting can, in other words, be essential when trying to make sure the workers remain on the same page and work towards a common goal.
If you want to keep your team dynamically engaged, you have to schedule weekly team meetings where they can discuss their thoughts and communicate about issues. These communications can scope beyond work-related discussions and be more personal to create a friendly and trustworthy gesture.
Check-in regularly with team members
To keep the remote team engaged, managers need to ensure that there is no disconnect between the team members. One of the common challenges of leading remotely is not being able to check in with your direct reports regularly. Managers are more frequently engaging with their employees by default when working from the office.
Real-life interactions also help them notice whether an employee is stressed or stuck in a situation without them complaining. Leading a remote team means that team leaders need to be more intentional with their time on the direct reports.
Team leaders also need to be more considerate about their time with their workers. If you are leading a remote team, give them more importance. You can even interact with them by using an office snack service, sending each team member complimentary snacks to symbolize gratitude. Conducting one of one virtual meeting with each employee makes for an ideal option to encourage growth from the remote workers.
Use video
Make sure to use video as much as possible and make it enjoyable for the workers. Keeping your remote team engaged can be challenging, but leveraging video can help make meetings and announcements more engaging and exciting. Team leaders can create short videos and send them to the team, updating them on the initiatives and updates. Choosing video over voice messages helps you choose a more attractive option.
Final thoughts
Engaging your remote team dynamically requires team leaders to choose virtual alternatives for activities, increase the number of intentional meetings, and resort to creative video messaging tactics. It also encourages you to create stronger relationships between team members, even if they are working remotely. Some companies have also used remote executive assistants to help with the engagement issue.
