Check out these ActivTrak-approved tips for making sure remote employees are engaged and invested in your organization’s vision — no matter where they are.
With the pandemic-driven shifts in the traditional workforce and workplace expectations, remote team engagement and productivity are top of mind for managers. Attrition rates reached an all-time high in August of 2021 with over 2.9% of the United States workforce quitting their jobs. Dubbed “The Great Resignation,” it highlights how employee values are shifting. In addition to higher wages, employees want more flexibility, a better work-life balance, and a healthier work environment. Managers must prioritize remote team engagement, but managing remote team engagement is a little different from managing face-to-face employee engagement in the office.
To help managers and team leads bring out the best in their remote employees, we’ve come up with a few tips for boosting remote employee engagement. These insights – combined with ActivTrak’s remote workforce productivity and employee engagement software – can help managers keep remote workers motivated, engaged, and excited about the organization’s vision.
Choose where to start:
- Why Remote Team Engagement is Important to Your Business
- What You Can Do to Boost Remote Team Engagement
- How ActivTrak’s Employee & Engagement Software Can Help
Why Remote Team Engagement is Important to Your Business
Employee engagement is a measure of how invested employees are in their jobs and in their organization, and it’s a key factor that drives motivation and workforce productivity. When your organization is filled with highly engaged employees, your team members perform better, retention increases, and productivity increases by 21%.
However, gauging levels of employee engagement can be a challenge with remote teams. Gallup reports that the most common struggle for remote workers is loneliness, meaning managers must proactively recognize the individual challenges and find solutions to make remote employees feel less isolated and more connected to their organization.
Before taking action, managers must first take the pulse of their workforce to measure current engagement levels of their remote workers. The ActivTrak platform is the perfect place to start, as it records data on multiple employee engagement metrics and renders actionable insights related to your team’s productivity. With ActivTrak, managers can gain a clear understanding of distinct productivity barriers and accordingly engage remote employees within their organization.
What You Can Do to Boost Remote Team Engagement
Every organization is unique, but there are plenty of evergreen strategies that make a world of difference in improving remote employee engagement.
- Emphasize communication
Communication in a remote workforce comes in many different forms. According to Gallup’s research, remote employees are more likely to be engaged when there is frequent and constant communication, meaning managers should use as many communication channels as possible to effectively connect with and engage their remote teams. These can include:
- Channels dedicated to improving work processes
- Channels for virtual culture-building, like Slack channels where employees can talk about their pets, celebrate birthdays or work anniversaries, or just build camaraderie
- Channels for organizing virtual engagement activities like virtual team happy hours or “water cooler” video calls
- Channels for one-on-one check-ins with remote team members
With the help of ActivTrak’s employee engagement software, you can turn routine one-on-one check-ins and conference calls into opportunities for proactive interventions. Our platform brings early indicators of disengagement to the surface and helps you identify different factors, like team burnout or workload imbalances, that comprise overall engagement levels. Armed with these insights, you can have more dynamic, substantive, and productive conversations with your remote teams on how to help them stay engaged, all without relying on guesswork or work environment surveys.
- Emphasize trust and flexibility
The flexibility of remote work can lead to better mental health, well-being, and overall happiness in remote employees, which leads to higher remote workforce productivity and engagement. However, an employer mustn’t undermine this flexibility with micromanaging behaviors.
Managers should show they trust their employees to continue doing their best work remotely. Allowing a remote worker to set their own schedule for the workday to accommodate children’s school schedules or elderly caregiver needs, for instance, can make them feel well-supported and motivated. As long as remote team members are producing high-quality work and meeting deadlines, providing flexibility is a clear path to improving remote employee engagement.
ActivTrak’s collaborative and transparent approach to remote workforce management gives you the data you need to help employees work wiser without compromising your remote employees’ trust or privacy. The employee work data gathered is a means to present factual, data-driven insights and intelligence to support sound decision-making to help remote employees work wiser. Communicating, openly and often, with your remote team members about how you’ll use remote workforce technology data to help boost remote team engagement is critical to building trust, and a healthy company culture in your virtual office.
- Give remote teams the tools they need
Managers should equip remote employees with all the required tools, technologies, and resources to empower them to do their best work from anywhere. Consider offering remote workers a stipend so they can curate their workspace so it helps them stay happy, motivated, and engaged.
It’s also important to carefully choose the resources that your team uses. Having too many tools and applications in your technology stack can make work frustrating for remote teams, and using the wrong tools can cause remote engagement and productivity to suffer. ActivTrak can help you determine which technologies are being under and over-utilized in your organization so you can make informed resourcing decisions, and discover which technologies best support your remote team.
How ActivTrak’s Employee & Engagement Software Can Help
We understand that improving remote team engagement is no easy feat. With ActivTrak, you can unlock data-driven remote workforce insights that will help you measure employee engagement and improve your team’s well-being through targeted enablement.
ActivTrak’s dashboards and employee productivity reports uncover trends in your remote employees’ work habits that’ll help you see who’s engaged or who may be on the verge of employee burnout. Remote team members can also gain visibility into their own work data and trends, empowering them to take their engagement into their own hands and optimize their work habits. Managers can quickly become effective coaches and cultivate a company culture of engagement. The ActivTrak approach combined with these evergreen remote team engagement tips can help your remote employees reach new heights.
Pro-Tips
- Frequent and inclusive communication is the key to remote team engagement.
- Trust and flexibility will give your employees more reason to be happier, productive, and engaged.
Managers must have a deep understanding of the needs of their remote employees in order to discover the tools and resources that are right for them.