If we look back on the industrial revolution as being characterised by a global and economic transition towards widespread manufacturing, it’s interesting to imagine how future generations might look back on the early 2020s. With more people working from home than ever before, and businesses increasingly adopting hybrid working policies, it’s fun to think that our present era might one day be thought of as the remote working revolution.
Opinions on the merits of an increasingly remote workforce have certainly been mixed. The reality is that the question of whether virtual workers are more or less productive than their workplace-based counterparts is incredibly complex, and will depend not just upon the industry and the nature of the job role, but the working styles, personality types, and individual circumstances of each employee, as well as the tools they have access to and the culture cultivated by their managers and business leaders.
Can Remote Teams be Effective?
In a recent study into the skills required to thrive in remote work, researchers concluded that of paramount importance in equipping remote employees for success was an organisation’s ability to eliminate unfair treatment and biases against those workers. They outlined the importance of personal preference, suggesting that “leaders should craft policy that empowers individuals to feel like they have genuine control over their choice to engage in remote work”. They found that while some participants reported that remote collaboration posed challenges (such as maintaining team rapport) other participants found it to have offered a benefit in that same area. It seems reasonable to assume that while a degree of this difference can be accounted for by workplace culture, personal preference will also play a role.
Another study into the efficacy of remote work from leaders’ perspectives recognised that while previous research has suggested that working online may be more effective, managers tend to perceive online working as resulting in decreased performance and lower managerial control. Notably, their research showed that “Managers who have more contact with employees are most aware of the benefits of working remotely”.
The evidence seems to suggest that remote collaboration can indeed be productive provided we focus on building a culture in which our remote employees can thrive and feel supported. In this article we’ll explore how to engage remote employees through 10 strategies:
- Managing Remote Employees
- 1. Check in Regularly
- 2. Avoid Over-Communication and Use Tools Strategically
- 3. Use Video Calls Where Possible
- 4. Set Clear Expectations
- 5. Praise Your Remote Employees
- Virtual Team Building
- 6. Team Building Activities
- 7. Inclusive Celebration
- 8. Opportunities for Personal Connections
- Remote Collaboration
- 9. Set Objectives Collaboratively
- 10. Provide Channels for Feedback
Managing Remote Employees
As we’ve already established, the more contact we have with our remote teams, the more value we see in remote working. It therefore follows that one of the most impactful things we can do to support and get the most out of our teams is to maintain regular communication with them.
1. Check in Regularly
One of the more obvious ways to maintain regular communication is through daily check-ins. These don’t have to be formalised and there is, in fact, value in keeping them casual, as the idea is to replicate those informal relationship-building conversations we might have in the office throughout the day. The goal is not to check on task progress but on personal well-being. Employees who feel cared for and supported on a personal level demonstrate increased satisfaction, engagement, and productivity.
2. Avoid Over-Communication and Use Tools Strategically
Regular communication is imperative, but there is a danger of over-communicating. With so many digital tools at our disposal, getting it right is essential as interactivity plays a crucial role in the workplace. Setting a task over email and then immediately following up via instant message or an audio call places increased demand on our employees, is ineffective, and can often lead to annoyance and disengagement. Pick the appropriate tool for your message and avoid replicating messages across channels.
Email, for example, is ideal for setting tasks or keeping a written record of discussions, while instant messaging is more appropriate for troubleshooting or informal check-ins. Video calls are ideal for more complex requests or sensitive conversations.
3. Use Video Calls Where Possible
One of the chief challenges for remote collaboration is the lack of contextual cues conveyed through body language. This can lead to misconstrued messages, which the Harvard Business Review cites as impacting anxiety levels, morale, engagement, productivity, and innovation. When having important conversations with remote colleagues – especially those relating to feedback, performance, wellbeing, or progression – we should do so via a video call to help reduce the likelihood of misunderstanding. It’s good practice to have video calls with remote employees as far as is practicable, utilising interactive displays. This helps to build rapport through the visual cues and informal conversations that are absent from written communications or audio calls.
4. Set Clear Expectations
Sometimes it’s necessary to communicate in writing and, when doing so, it’s helpful to establish norms and set clear expectations for your team members – especially if your workplace operates flexible hours in addition to remote working. Adding notes to our email signatures is an easy way to do this. Some common examples include ‘I choose to work flexibly and send emails outside of office hours but I don’t expect a response outside of yours’ or ‘Any brevity in my email is a result of sending this from my phone and is not intended to convey displeasure’. It can also be useful to clarify whether we expect a response to an email or direct message. Maintaining consistency and predictability is a great way to help our teams understand our ways of working and what is expected of them.
5.Praise Your Remote Employees
Much of managing a remote workforce is about making time to fill in the gaps that are traditionally occupied by those day-to-day conversations, and praise often falls into this category. As we’re leaving the office, it’s not uncommon to say to a team member something like, “Thanks for all of your fantastic work today” or “Great job on that report”. It’s important to carry that into the digital realm for our remote workers, but we also need to remember that what in an office might be public praise is often a private conversation online. Make the space to ensure that employee contributions are recognised communally – this could be through group chats, weekly team meetings, or even through employee reward schemes for the team.
Virtual Team Building
Working remotely can be an isolating experience and, while it’s important to keep strong channels of communication open between our remote workforce and our leaders, so much of our support and sense of wellbeing in the workplace comes from our peers. We need to make sure that we’re facilitating team collaboration not only among our remote teams but also within our hierarchical ones.
6.Team Building Activities
Dedicating time to team building is perhaps even more important for remote employees than for those who are in the office and have more opportunities for informal interactions. Our office-based team-building activities should always be accessible to online collaborators, and this is where equipping ourselves with technology that enables both virtual and in-person collaboration can make a huge difference.
Problem solving activities such as escape rooms, for example, are a common team building activity and interactive displays are a great way to marry the accessibility of a virtual escape room to the camaraderie of an in-person one. They allow remote and office-based staff to communicate in real-time, with the former able to see everything the latter can see. Escape rooms are just one example – with virtual campfire or virtual cocktail-making classes, we can have kits delivered to our remote participants to incorporate a kinetic element alongside the virtual.
7. Inclusive Celebration
A big part of workplace culture is recognising our professional achievements and personal celebrations. This might be sharing a birthday cake, signing a group card for a colleague who has earned a promotion, or having a pizza party to celebrate reaching a sales target. These occasions are no less important for our remote employees and not only must we ensure that we’re celebrating their achievements, but that we are including them in our office-based celebrations, as these are key team bonding moments. Consider using virtual group greeting cards, or making use of delivery service and virtual conferencing to include remote workers in pizza parties.
8. Opportunities for Personal Connections
Research by Gallup suggests that those of us who have a ‘best friend’ at work are seven times more likely to be engaged than our colleagues. For co-located teams, there are plenty of opportunities to build these relationships, from water cooler conversations over a shared interest to spotting a colleague reading our favourite book on their lunch break.
To cultivate opportunities for camaraderie in the virtual sphere, we need to carve out dedicated spaces. Video conferencing software can be used to facilitate virtual book clubs, gaming events, or Friday evening drinks, while special interest channels on applications such as Microsoft Teams or Slack allow colleagues to discuss shared interests, offer advice and knowledge, or find someone near them to meet up with.
Remote Collaboration
Alongside team building opportunities and clear communication pathways, the key to inspiring engagement in remote colleagues is ensuring they have the opportunity to contribute to business goals and help define their own operations.
9. Set Objectives Collaboratively
Setting clear, formalised objectives has been shown to improve workplace engagement, but this increases when employees are empowered to contribute to the decisions that define those goals. If remote employees are led to feel excluded from decision-making processes, this can increase the sense of separation they may feel from office-based teams. As with our co-located employees, we must ensure that we’re allowings remote employees to set their own objectives, lead team discussions, and contribute to strategic decisions.
10. Provide Channels for Feedback
Communication cannot be effective unless it is two-way. Maintaining clear channels of communication with our remote teams means enabling them to provide feedback – both to managers at an operational level, but also by contributing to strategic business decisions. Being one step removed from office-based operations places our remote workers in a unique position to provide feedback from a partially-removed perspective. An annual survey of your remote workers not only gives them the opportunity to provide feedback on business strategy and the nature of their roles but enhances their sense of purpose and control over how they carry out remote work which, as we saw at the very beginning of this article, is crucial to engagement.
Things You May Not Have Considered About Remote Employee Engagement
It can be tempting to look at remote employee engagement as a challenge to be overcome, but it’s worth recognising the inherent benefits that remote work affords our workforce.
For example, remote working immediately removes a barrier to office work that may have previously excluded groups such as disabled people, carers, or simply those geographically removed. Evidence also shows that junior or more introverted members of the workforce feel much more comfortable contributing to discussions online than in person, and are therefore more likely to make their voices heard.
It remains to be seen whether the early 2020s will be remembered as the remote working revolution, but what’s clear is that we are already moving to a more diverse, inclusive workforce which has been demonstrated to improve productivity and creativity.
Supporting Your Remote Workforce
Supporting our remote employees with their sense of belonging, well-being, and ultimately their engagement offers long-term benefits for our business in retention, diversity, creativity, and productivity. These objectives can be met through regular and clear communication, opportunities for relationship-building at a lateral and hierarchical level and involving remote employees in strategic business decisions.
For the hybrid workforce, it means ensuring that our remote employees have all of the same opportunities as our in-person employees, and don’t feel excluded. Having the right technologies in place can help you overcome the marriage of the virtual and the physical workplace. Contact Promethean today for a free demo of our ActivPanel LX for the workplace.
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