How To Increase Employee Engagement In A Remote Workforce

Employee engagement is seen, by many – if not all – HR executives and business owners as the golden standard of business success. According to Gallup, “engaged employees” as staff members who are involved in, are passionate about and dedicated to their work and workplace. If your employees are not engaged and being fully invested in their work, you can take steps to improve this.

Put another way, if your employees are engaged, they are less likely to leave your organisation because they feel that they are not being fulfilled in their jobs. Unfortunately, with the new reality of our work-from-home culture that we find ourselves in, employee engagement is likely to suffer as our workforces are not working from the same environment and are thus less likely to buy into the common workforce culture.

This means that in order for you to keep your talent in your company, it is now – more than ever – extremely important for you to find ways of keeping them engaged. Here are some ideas which you can put into practice.

Keep In Constant Contact

The first – and possibly the easiest – thing that you can do, in order to keep your remote workforces engaged, is to keep to the routines that you had in the office. With hi-tech computer tools and programmes such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, keeping in contact has become so much easier as you don’t need specialised equipment as was the case with first-generation video conferencing technology.

If you have weekly team meetings, keep these but conduct them via Teams or Zoom. The same goes for staff meetings or performance appraisals. Make sure that your employees know that if they need to chat to you face to face this is always possible even though you are in different locations.

Keep An Open Door And Transparent Policy

If your employees don’t trust you, they won’t be engaged in your company and, as a result, won’t give you their best. Although it’s difficult to maintain an open-door policy in a digital environment, send out regular emails to staff members informing them of whatever is happening in the company – be it good or bad. Rather let them hear it from you first as opposed to via the grapevine.

Show Them That You Care

When you’re all in an office environment, it’s extremely easy to let your employees see that you care about them – and not just about the work that they do. So, if it was your practice to leave surprises on their desks for holidays such as Valentines Day, carry on doing this for your remote workforce. Although this may take a bit more effort, it will pay dividends in the long run.

Keeping a remote workforce engaged is no mean feat and they may want to check this site or do other more exciting things than work, given the opportunity. It takes dedication and a commitment to what you’re trying to achieve. However, having a remote workforce is ultimately the best type of workforce to have as your employees see that you trust them to carry out their jobs – under minimal supervision.