7 Ways to Engage Your Remote Workforce Virtually

It’s more important now more than ever to ensure your employees are happy and engaged in their work.

Remote working is the new normal we are adapting to. Our home is now playing multiple roles in our life. It becomes our office during the day, and when work is over, it wraps us in its comforting arms and becomes our relaxing home again. However, it’s important to ask ourselves—does being in the same place for both work and relaxation impact our productivity?

The most certain answer to this question is yes. For some, it impacts their productivity positively and negatively. This implies that some of us are more productive while remote working and some of us are less productive. Of course, there are different factors that determine our productivity while working from home, but our engagement at work is perhaps the one that impacts it the most.

So, if you ever find yourself worrying about your employees’ productivity while working from home, you should start directing your efforts to engage your remote workforce. According to Gallup, highly engaged business units experience a 17% increase in productivity. This is simply because engaged employees are more productive than disengaged ones.

Although employee engagement is easier when you are working in the same physical environment, it is not difficult even when you are working distantly. You just need some effective and actionable ways to engage your remote workforce virtually.

Let your employees rejoice in your appreciation

We all love it when we receive appreciation from our managers and bosses. It makes us feel so good and also inspires us to improve our performance even more. As a result, our journey of self-improvement gradually leads us to engagement. So to increase engagement with your remote employees, you should let them rejoice in your appreciation.

You should appreciate them for every little effort they put into whether they bring an innovative idea for your organization’s growth or they start working punctually every day in the morning. Whatever little good you find in them, appreciate them for it and the more you do it, the more engaged your remote workforce will become. Gallup has also highlighted this finding in one of its reports.

You can easily appreciate your employees virtually via video conferencing or voice calls. There is no need for you to be actually present with them.

Help your team collaborate easily with smart collaborative tools

“Teamwork” is an effective strategy for employee engagement. According to a survey conducted by the ADP research institute, employees who felt like being members of a team were more than twice as likely to be fully engaged. This is because teamwork binds your employees together, reduces their workload, and enhances their happiness—all of which lead to higher engagement.

But, due to the prevalence of remote working, your employees may not actually be working together as a team and this might be impacting their engagement and productivity. This makes it important for you to help your remote team collaborate well despite working from distant places.

Although you may think that collaborating remotely is a really challenging task, some smart collaborative tools can make it really simple for your team. These tools offer a variety of features such as creating to-do lists, assignment of tasks to particular team members, progress tracking, Gantt charts, and a lot more. All these features together enable your remote team to work together without any troubles. Asana, Trello, ProofHub, and Slack are some examples of popular collaborative tools that you can utilize.

Let fun eradicate all the seriousness for some time

There is one huge difference between working in the office and working from home—it is that your employees don’t get to communicate with each other as much as they did while working in the office. Prior to work remotely, they spent some time each day chatting with each other, laughing together, and enjoying each other’s company while working.

But these elements have gone missing due to remote work and a dense seriousness that has engulfed many remote employees. It ends up causing massive negative impacts on employee engagement because it makes employees feel lethargic and lacking energy.

So, to restore your remote workforce’s engagement and productivity, you should help them come out of the seriousness. You can do this by organizing some fun activities virtually on a regular basis. You can play a variety of games with your employees via video conferencing. Bingo, Charades, and Pictionary are some popular examples. As they play these games, they’ll start feeling happier and energized, which will lead them to be more engaged in work.

Have cordial conversations with your remote team on a regular basis

Employee engagement is defined as the emotional connection and commitment your employees feel towards your organization. A strong emotional connection builds between your employees and your organization, but only if they have a strong emotional connection with you, which depends on the frequency and quality of conversations you have with them. If you don’t interact with your employees regularly and cordially, they won’t be engaged and their productivity will remain low.

Of course, it can be difficult to have regular, cordial conversations with your employees when working remotely, but to engage your remote workforce you’ll have to go this extra mile. To accomplish this, you can make use of conference video calls. But remember to keep your daily interaction with your employees informal in nature. Otherwise, your employees will feel like coming to a virtual office meeting.

You can schedule these interactions at any time of the day—morning, mid-day, or before departure. But, it is usually considered best to have cordial interactions with your employees in the morning as it charges them up for the day.

Let your remote employees enjoy some special perks

Remote working during the current times is an extremely challenging task. Family members are staying home due to the pandemic, there is a greater need for household hygiene, and your employees have to take care of the entire family while shouldering work responsibilities. Under such circumstances, there are greater chances of them becoming disengaged.

However, if you shower your empathy on them you can keep them engaged despite everything. To do so, you can offer perks such as flexibility, some extra time off, and a sense of autonomy to your employees.

Flexibility

When you offer flexibility to your employees, you assign them their work targets in the morning and let them complete their work anytime during the day. This gives them the opportunity to maintain their work-life balance while remote working. They no longer have to perform multitasking to shoulder both household and work responsibilities together. As a result, they become more engaged in work and their productivity improves.

Some extra time off

If you give your employees one or two paid leaves each month, chances are they’ll be more productive and better engaged in work. This is because a break from work helps them refresh and get back to work with more energy.

If you usually offer one paid leave during the office days, then you should try to offer at least two leaves to your remote working employees as they have to shoulder heightened responsibilities while working from home during the pandemic.

Give them a sense of autonomy

Micromanagement is disastrous for employee engagement. It makes the employees feel frustrated. They feel as if they have no sense of control on their work and become disengaged. Rather than micromanaging your employees, you should give them a sense of autonomy. Let them do their work as and how they like, without much intervention from your side.

Help your remote employees with stress management

The pandemic is a cause of stress for all of us and stress is bad for employee engagement. This finding has been highlighted in Towers Watson’s Global Benefits Attitudes survey. It states that out of the employees suffering from high-stress levels, more than half reported being disengaged. This is because stress causes damage to their physical, emotional, and mental well-being. As a result, they have to continuously navigate their inner struggles and cannot be engaged or productive.

So to engage your remote employees you have to help them with stress management. For this, you can conduct virtual group meditation sessions via video conferencing on alternate days of the week. If you know how to meditate, you can guide your remote employees on meditation. If you don’t know how to meditate, you can play guided meditation videos on YouTube and meditate alongside your remote employees.

Encourage your employees to utilize the Pomodoro Technique while working

If your employees tend to work for long hours continuously, they are more likely to be disengaged and less productive. This is because working for continuous long hours results in mental exhaustion which obstructs employee engagement. To combat this, you could encourage your employees to utilize the Pomodoro Technique and work in segments.

The Pomodoro technique helps your employees set a work duration of 25 minutes and then take a break for 5 to 7 minutes. After completing four consecutive pomodoros, they can take a bigger break for 20 minutes if they wish.

Employee engagement is the solution to your problem of having a remote workforce which is low on productivity. Once you engage your employees, you’ll no longer suffer this problem, and the above mentioned virtual ideas for employee engagement will help you do so.

Jessica Robinson finds her peace in penning down intriguing and captivating blogs for her readers. She has been creating the finest pieces of content for over a decade while working at The Speaking Polymath. Further, she accredits her finesse in writing to her alma mater, The University of Melbourne, from where she completed her degree in professional management.