5 Essential Tips to Help Keep Your Remote Teams Engaged

Posted on 09/14/20 By Lorman Team

As an aftermath of the pandemic, most companies are switching to remote work. Remote working poses another challenge that businesses need to address: How to engage remote employees, maintain productivity, and make people feel connected.

It's easy for remote workers to feel disconnected when they have to work alone at home. If your company hasn't had experience with remote work before, here are some virtual employee engagement ideas to help you navigate through the transition as smoothly as possible.

Employee Engagement Ideas for Remote Workers

According to a study published by Harvard Business Review, companies with a high level of employee engagement see a 22% increase in productivity. In fact, employee engagement is such an important factor that a whopping 71% of questioned managers pointed it out as one of the main driving forces behind their company's success. 

If your company is fighting a high employee turnover rate, the root cause may lie in employee disengagement. Happy, engaged employees are less likely to leave their job and more likely to be motivated by the common goals.

To retain talent and avoid high hiring costs, it's important that business owners know what keeps their employees engaged and fix any problem in a timely manner.

1. Virtual Team Builders

Working remotely means that your team may lack the opportunity to personally communicate and build connections with one another. And as they say: a team is only as strong as its weakest link.

There are many virtual team building activities you can use to break the ice (especially for new workers) and strengthen the bond between team members.

2. Make Collaboration and Communication Efficient and Fun

Workers who are used to an office environment may find regular virtual meetings boring and unproductive. To combat this, consider adding some fun elements to the daily meetups. Some ideas include asking team members to coordinate via the video conference room for a funny pose. Different teams can even compete for the most voted pose. These online games for remote teams should form the base of your company culture, so that when an outsider looks at the photos or attend a virtual meetup, they can have a sense of how it's like to work at your place.

Here are some remote employee engagement ideas your team may love:

• Picture sharing
• Bucket list sharing and challenging
• A peek into one another's house
• Show and tell family pets or interests and collections 
• Virtual birthday celebrations

3. Show Appreciation

Your best employees need to feel appreciated and valued to continue putting in their best efforts. Showing appreciation is a very important aspect of a strong and positive company culture.

A virtual office celebration can offer an opportunity for managers to publicly praise individual achievements as well as for team members to jointly celebrate their accomplishments.

4. Make Remote Onboarding Activities Memorable

New hires may have a difficult time adjusting to the company culture if they have to work remotely from the beginning. The first few onboarding days can determine employee satisfaction and retention, so as a manager or owner, it's your duty to make these onboarding activities as memorable and captivating as possible.

Having a structured and organized onboarding process can help a confused new hire navigate quickly through the new environment and start contributing. Again, online team building games can be used to help new hires form faster relationships with existing team members.

5. Give Your Employees Autonomy

Managers need to understand that micromanaging is not helpful when it comes to building an effective remote team working strategy. A good approach is to assign projects with clear deadlines and let the employees work on them freely, with daily reporting back to you. Trying to track employees' activities by capturing their computer's screen periodically can backfire if your employees hate having a pair of eyes watching over their back even when they are sitting at home.

As telecommuting is becoming more ubiquitous, companies need to figure out a way to effectively manage their remote teams. Above are five simple yet powerful tips that you can implement right away to boost employee engagement and satisfaction.