Ways to Keep Your Team Inspired

Since the time remote working witnessed a boom, many businesses observed that is not the same as working in the office, especially when it comes to remote employee engagement as such employees have new distractions at home and feel detachment from the office. Though difficult, remote employee engagement is important. This article discusses the same and helps businesses know the ways to exploit to keep their remote team inspired.

Engaged Remote Employees – The Benefits

Traditionally, employee engagement serves as a means to connect with the team. Now, it also involves motivation, friendship, loyalty, and fulfillment. Firstly, leverage the latest technology for remote employees’ engagement. It makes every team member feel both professionally and emotionally attached to the business, which leads to higher productivity, better results, and a healthier environment. Engaged employees are vital for keeping other employees motivated.

Keeping Your Remote Employees Engaged

1. Conduct Weekly Monday Meetings

Provide directions and guidance to your team that just started working remotely. Conduct weekly Monday meetings to start the week and provide your team a great viewpoint of what you expect of them. Meetings are also important to know about other projects' progress. Such meetings let you delegate tasks to employees while measuring their workload. It does not just let employees connect with you but also raise any concerns they have.

Tips to run effective meetings

• Conduct Formal And Informal Meetings

Always begin your Monday meetings informally chatting and connecting. Give a few minutes to the team to inform them what they did over the weekend and whatever else is going on in their personal lives. This ensures your team is relaxed and comfortable before you start discussing the work and responsibilities. Also, make your employees more responsive. Once you break the ice between yourself and them, it will help them see you in a better light. They will count on you to help them, which helps build genuine bonds with the team.

• Do “All-Hands” Meetings

In these meetings, your whole team is gathered to talk about the topics related to them all. Such meetings remind the team of the company culture, values, direction, and planning. These meetings also engage the teams by giving members a chance to interact and know each other and form a friendly bond. This gives you a solid team with solid relationships. As per research, if people have their good friends at work, their productivity and engagement increase.
You can do these meetings at least per quarter via Google Meet.

2. Build Interpersonal Relationships

Interpersonal relationship among your teammates is the most important factor to ensure engagement. One way to ensure this is to encourage the employees to work in smaller teams or groups or even pairs. This develops a bond among the team members. This also brings more synergy and creativity to their work. However, while ensuring your employees create the kinds of such relationships on their own, place a solid teamwork ethos on board that they should rely on.

Consider the Time Zones

One of the advantages of working across various time zones is that you can send work to your team before you go to sleep. They work on the same and send it back to me when I wake up. This makes a kind of windmill effect, advancing the project even when other members are sleeping or offline. This means the schedule of work is never dead, and the team is working towards something as a group, bit by bit. Another benefit of remote workers is associated with cost savings. For instance, suppose you launch a blog and want to hire someone to handle it. The blog itself will be cheap to run, but the manpower cost will quickly add up. If you get the manpower remotely from less expensive markets, you can save the cost by 50% or more.

Best Software for Remote Employees Engagement

1. Slack

Slack is one of the most commonly used software to manage remote teams. It is like a virtual office and lets managers form multiple channels for various purposes to avoid unrelated work distracting team members not relevant to that purpose. With Slack, you can make virtual calls between team members, and set up meetings. It lets employees update what they’re working on, and call each other if they need any information or help. This tool helps keep the employees engaged because it is easy to use for all kinds of team members.

2. Google Meet

Just like Slack does voice calls, Google Meet does video calls. It has risen as the most effective video calling platform and has an easy to use interface. If you have your Gmail account, you can make a public or private call and connect to your remote teams with calls or meeting links. Switching from voice to video calls is easier in Google Meet. It has a built-in sharing feature and offers the best quality video and audio calls. The tool is lightweight and doesn’t consume much data. If your remote team is huge in number, still the voice calls will be clear.

3. Project Management Software: Asana vs. Trello

Keeping employees engaged is not only about making them feel happy and fulfilled—it’s also about keeping them focused. A 2013 study showed that up to 70% of employees in the United States were actively disengaged in their jobs, and it’s not much better elsewhere.

Employee engagement also means keeping employees focused, and not just fulfilled and happy. One of the studies conducted in 2013 shows that 70% of the U.S, employees were disengaged. To avoid this, it is required to keep employees comfortably busy. It can be done by visualizing them working in the office. For this, take help from project management software like Trello and Asana.

Both these tools highlight tasks as per project as well as a responsible employee. Remote workers keep the status of their tasks updated and can get assigned for other tasks in real-time. Trello, though, is more functional in specific tasks while Asana focuses mainly on the complete projects.

Remote Employee Engagement: At a Glance

Keep these points for your remote team:

• Your team members are human. Though they are working from home, they still seek encouragement.
• Working remotely seems lonely for many. Talk to your team members about personal life too sometimes.
• Remote workers usually have fewer distractions. Encourage them to show more productivity.
• Keep regular check-ins with your team.
• Divide tasks into bite-size pieces, and ensure the team updates the status via project management tools like Trello or Asana.
• Conduct meetings every week to set expectations for remote employees.
• Conduct both formal and informal meetings
• Conduct meetings with your team once per quarter
• Encourage team collaboration and working together.
• Use different time zones so that remote teams can keep the ball rolling without being not restricted to a single time zone.

Eventually, the remote team’s effectiveness is vital to the organization's success. Engagement is a major element of effectiveness, though it goes wrong, it harms output in a manner that’s hard to quantify.

With this being said, you should focus on the engagement for building and engaging the remote team. In the end, engaged employees tend to work faster and better, and make a healthier working environment too.