How to Engage Remote Employees: 6 Ways to Get Virtual Teams Excited About Work

We would recommend agreeing ahead of time how much time you’re going to spend working together, and how much interaction there’s going to be—find something that works for you. Focusmate advises people to keep the small talk down to a minimum, but then again, they are putting strangers together, and you might prefer a different set of rules. As we’ve said, there’s lots more to explore here as well, whether that’s putting a soothing background on your laptop while you work, or using a Pomodoro timer to schedule your working sessions and your breaks. You get certain features (including 15 minutes per day of coworking video chat) for free, with a premium account costing $9 a month.

This means leaders need to be extra conscious of how their remote teams are doing and take proactive steps to promote employee wellbeing. No matter where your employees are, managers are tasked with helping them do their jobs successfully. Collect facts and trivia about people on your team (and even the company in general) and see how well you each know your coworkers. https://remotemode.net/ This is a fun way to learn more about each other and build team spirit with some healthy, low-stakes competition. Make sure you’re getting value out of them by running effective virtual meetings—whether those are one-on-ones, group collaboration sessions, or team meetings. The number one way to effectively manage remote teams is to prioritize effective communication.

The 7 Best Tips on How to Prioritize…

At work, it’s being able to ask someone on a team for help or for a brainstorm; to use their expertise to help you achieve something at work, or offering yours to help them complete a project. Intra-organizational social capital can even motivate an employee to succeed https://remotemode.net/blog/tips-on-how-to-make-friends-when-you-work-from-home/ and stay at a company over time. Yet when you’re on a team, working within a company, your full-time job doesn’t solely consist of independent work. You rely on your team to work together to reach goals, finish projects and even strategize for the future.

This not only allows you to monitor and support individual employees’ performance, but it also gives you a clearer picture of the entire team’s performance so nothing falls through the cracks. Since remote employees aren’t coming into your office, they won’t necessarily come equipped with all the tools they need to be successful. Before they even start work, make sure they have what they need to get started, such as Wi-Fi capacity, user logins, and access, conferencing tools. You might even include a stipend for workers to use to set up their own work-from-home office and desk station. Just because you aren’t all gathered in an office doesn’t mean you don’t have a team or company culture. That’s why it’s important to focus on building a healthy and productive culture from the start.

Make collaboration essential to your success.

The best way to do this is to put a standing meeting on your calendar,  perhaps once a week or once a month, depending on preference. Developing your remote employees requires strategic planning, honest communication, and consistency. This means dedicated check-ins are even more critical to building trusted relationships with your remote employees and taking the pulse on their work performance.

• We would recommend agreeing ahead of time how much time you’re going to spend working together, and how much interaction there’s going to be—find something that works for you.
• Luckily, with the right technology and employee engagement solutions, managing remote workers can be just as rewarding—and productive—as managing an in-house team.
• Where once we were all required to commute each day, back and forth, to a communal workplace in order to do our jobs effectively, this is no longer a hard and fast rule.
• According to an AARP survey conducted in May, 36 percent of remote workers 50 and older said being isolated from coworkers is difficult.

Kantor says she sees a trend among her hybrid workplace clients in which teams or even the entire workforce are in the office on the same days. Everyone may be in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or the marketing team may be in office from Monday through Wednesday and other teams may have their own in-office days. She advises that both employers and employees be “purposeful” about choosing their in-office days for productivity reasons, but also to reinforce workplace relationships.