Remote work has managed to make it much more seamless for people to join a company from any location in the world. This increasingly popular working lifestyle has given people the freedom and flexibility to work from home. It has opened up a way for them to join companies that are beyond their household without having to make any compromises to their personal lives. With the number of companies adopting the remote working culture, they have to learn how to handle these distributed employees.
As the leader of your remote team, you need to ensure your team is remaining in tip-top shape mentally and emotionally. The benefits you receive from prioritizing your remote workers include benefits in financial measures, such as not needing to rent an office space, to intangible ones like increasing employee loyalty, mental health, and company branding.
That is why we are going to offer you some tips that ensure your remote team remains happy throughout their time with your company.
Provide effective communication
One of the most effective ways to keep your remote employees happy is through appropriate communication. As the leader, you should be open, honest, transparent, and, whenever possible, real-time communication. When managing your remote team, it is essential to remember that they are not just some random person at the end of an email or chat exchange, they are a valued member of your team.
Just because none of you are in an office space, that does not mean your employees are sitting at home watching Netflix all day. If you trusted these individuals enough to hire them, trust them to get their tasks done. For the most part, remote workers have proven to be more productive and can get even more done in the average working day compared to employees in the office.
An essential part of ensuring your team remains happy and engaged is, in most cases, communicating a bit more than you would with one of the employees in the office. Your remote workers must be aware of what is happening within the organization. Whether the information is about something short-term or long-term it is, the need to understand what is going on.
Furthermore, offering some time to keep up to date with each other and gossip about random topics can help them bond and remain content. When a team member becomes shut off from the back channels of internal communication, it can severely impact how they feel and how connected they are to everyone and the organization. Remote employees need to be looked after. Just because they are off-site, that does not mean out of mind.
The types of communication that should be encouraged include everything from messaging, emails, video calls, or even phone calls. Make sure you consider their time zones since not everyone on your team is likely working during the same hours as you are. It could also be just as severely impactful as someone's productivity when a remote employer is periodically interrupting them, so keep that in mind.
However, neglecting your remote employees is one of the fastest ways to make them unhappy and lose them to a competitor. Keeping your remote team happy means communicating with them transparently and sincerely.
Recognize excellent work
Praising team members for their hard work can be effortless in an office setting, but for remote working, it can be more tricky for managers to thank and reward their employees in front of the rest of their colleagues. These types of praises are valuable motivational boosters that ensure your work is recognized and content. Additionally, they make the rest of the team feel good as a result, and other team members will want to achieve the same level of results to receive praise and rewards.
Ensuring that your remote team is recognized and rewarded is essential to keeping them happy. Studies have found out that employees who are not feeling recognized by the work are more likely to leave the company by the end of the year.
However, when your employees are working out of the office space, something like this is not easy to pull off. Fortunately, there is an effective way to achieve this, and that is by implementing an employee reward system. For your remote employees, make sure to praise and thank them in a private and public setting. These can be done during one of your weekly or bi-weekly video meetings. That way, your remote team feels included and recognized.
Emphasize culture
The Harvard Business Review posted an article that spoke about the significance of building company culture with remote workers to promote engagement. It can be a challenging thing to pull off when it comes to communicating with your team virtually. To ensure you managed to build a sufficient culture, you need to start by developing trust among your remote employees. The best way to accomplish this is by gathering your remote team members together regularly.
Fortunately, there are all sorts of ways you can ensure your team starts to develop a remote working culture. Take the time to set aside for some team-building activities, such as playing games, coffee breaks, virtual happy hours, lunch, and more. These gatherings can offer your team a chance to bond over and speak about things other than work.
By regularly allowing your remote workers to be a part of your company meetings and other events, a culture will seamlessly begin to develop among everyone on the team.
Feedback
To ensure your remote employees remain engaged, you need to maintain constant communication with them. Managers need to make an effort to make sure that communication is not only occurring when an issue arises. Praise and feedback are an essential part of working with off-site people. Feedback is a necessary part of any successful workplace.
Employees are capable of delivering more effectively when they are properly guided in the right direction. To ensure your team remains efficient in their work, look for collaboration tools that suit the needs of your team. For instance, if you are working on a joint project, tools like Google, Docs, Spreadsheets, and Slides are invaluable and are free or low-cost depending on the type of Google account you decide to use.
There are tons of tools available for remote working, and most of them are built to be accessed on an assortment of devices. That way, you can work with your remote employees and provide them with real-time feedback and communication on a project. That results in everyone being happy, more engaged, and holds a substantive part on join projects.
Time management
One of the most significant obstacles that remote workers need to deal with is managing their time more effectively. While they may have more time on their hands to take care of household chores, drive the kids to school, grocery shopping, go to a doctor's appointment, and more, they still struggle with scheduling proper work time into their day.
As a manager, you need to assist them with dealing with their scheduling issues. The best way you can do so is by setting up tools, tips, and training that can help remote workers better manage their time. That shows that you and the rest of the management cares, and it gives them the resources they need to help them maintain their job.
Implementing these tools will make a massive difference for your remote employees.
Get to know your remote team.
There are times when a remote team member can feel lonely and isolated from the rest of the world. That can cause them to become depressed over time, which leads to a severe impact on work productivity. As the leader of your remote team, you should take the time to help them get rid of those feelings by setting up a time to chat with them one-on-one. Take this time to hear about their worries and learn more about their lives.
If that remote employee was in the office space, everyone would be able to notice their depressed mood, get wind of their situation, and offer any words of encouragement or advice they may need. However, remote employees do not have the luxury of these types of scenarios, and as such, efforts need to be taken to get to know them.
You could also encourage your remote employees to get to know each other as well. Virtual coffee breaks have become increasingly popular among remote teams. They offer a chance for people to pair up and catch up while drinking a nice cup of coffee while chatting informally.
Measure work performance
Performance is something that needs to be measured in every role and function. Remote employees will be concerned about what their managers think about them. They will grow increasingly worried about not being seen as a product, where in most cases, it could be seen as the opposite. As the team leader, it helps to ease those worries about remote productivity when you can see how productive your team members are being.
Fortunately, there are monitoring tools that offer you the chance to track everything concerning their work. These allow you to know who is working hard and when you should take the time to praise them. Furthermore, you could also recommend some of them to take a break if they seem to be taking it too far. While you do want them to remain productive, you do not want them to burn out from working too much.
Conclusion
Organizations that run a happy remote team shall see incredible results for their business. The remote employees will continue to remain productive and remain content with staying with a company they know is willing to treat them right. These tips will ensure you can keep your team happy with being a part of your company.
