The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the 9 to 5 office working arrangements across numerous industries in the world. Work from the home arrangement was treated as a forced one in the initial months of the pandemic and gradually it has become the new normal, with employers finding the flexibility of the working schedule impressive. They have realized that when given permission to work from wherever they wish and supported with efficient work-at-home infrastructure, the productivity of employees will increase. They believe maintaining in-house teams is more expensive than maintaining remote teams. Another advantage of remote working is that the workers from any part of the world can be hired and they don’t need to be based near the office.
However, engaging the remote workforce is not an easy task for many employers, especially for the ones that are working with a remote workforce for the first time. The mobility of remote workers proves the legitimacy of these concerns. It is hard to make them all work from the same location. They are scattered and continue to scatter across different parts of the world. Moreover, the modern workforce includes multiple generations and the feature invites communication-related issues because the communication preferences of each generation might vary from the other. But that doesn’t mean it is impossible to engage with remote employees. Here are five effective ways to build and measure remote workforce engagement.
Define Goals And Deadline With Clarity
You can say your remote employees have been optimally engaged within a definite period of time if they meet all the goals and deadlines you defined for them. The responsibilities of the employees have to be clearly defined and each goal has to be measurable as it helps facilitate the continual checking of their progress. Holding regular one-to-one meetings, encouraging every form of team communication, and sharing calendars are some of the ways you can reduce anxiety and performance tension among the workers. All of this will discourage slacking in the workforce.
Encourage Pro-Activity
If your employees are consistently asking relevant follow-up questions, know that they are optimally engaged. That means you have to remain proactive and communicate with them frequently to ensure that they do not feel disconnected. Instead of waiting for them to raise any problems, ask questions via phone, email, or video conference about how you can help them stay connected, remain productive and engaged. You do not really need any tech tool to find out whether or not your employees are properly engaged.
Use The Right Employee Engagement Tools
Technology can be used as a tool to measure employee engagement. Start off by measuring how smooth the communication flow between remote teams is. To address various enterprise-level communication needs, there are different communication tools available including Zoom and Skype. Team members that are always absent in Zoom meetings are most likely to be disengaged from the particular project. There are other tech tools like workflow automation software, project management tools and scheduling apps that offer greater insights into the operation of remote teams. These tools can help you calculate the hours when your employees are highly productive and active, the amount of time spent on deep work and the ways to help every member improve their focus span.
Encourage Knowledge-Sharing
By promoting a culture of knowledge-sharing within the organization, you are allowing the employees to help one another to develop professionally and make them responsible for each other’s productivity. No one can be lazy at their job knowing that someone in the production line is waiting for the piece of information he/she alone can provide. Some of the information has to be compressed before sending via mail and so encourage the employees to download file archivers like File Unzipper for compressing files and easily opening them. Because unzipper is completely free, you won’t need to worry about budget spending.
Have The Proper Collaboration Tools
Below shared are two popular remote work collaboration tools that can be helpful to measure employee engagement:
- HipChat, a hosted group, and video chat tool. This tool allows employees and managers to share screens to collaborate easily in addition to facilitating real-time collaboration. Tracking employee engagement is quite easy while sharing a screen with them.
- Slack, a tool that facilitates the creation of open channels for various tasks and projects. Every member of the team can do real-time tracking of the progress of every project.
Whatever is it that you do, know that it is much easier to keep happy workers engaged than keeping a disoriented and unhappy workforce engaged. Rewarding your workforce is important to keep them connected and motivated. Pay them adequately and respect the work arrangement they have chosen for themselves, provided the targets you set are met.
