In a traditional office environment, it is easier for managers to make their employees feel valued because it is easier to keep lines of communication open. Managers and direct reports tend to interact with each other on a daily basis. However, a study says that remote workers feel undervalued and under-appreciated when compared to their traditional-working peers.
With the global lockdown due to Covid-19, more teams are opting to work from home. It has now, more than ever, become important for managers to understand the challenges faced by remote teams and come up with a feasible solution to make them feel valued and appreciated.
Also read: Common Employee Rewards And Recognition Mistakes
So, Engagedly’s expert research panel is here to help you with a few tips to show your remote employees that you care.
Effective communication is the key to establishing trustworthy and strong relations in a team. Though communicating seems easy and interesting, communicating effectively at work is a completely different aspect.
Lack of proper communication among employees can cause issues like employee disengagement and reduced employee morale. Communication at workplace plays an important role in coming up with innovative ideas, solving problems and understanding how other teams function.
Remote employees tend to feel disconnected and demotivated at times. And if the managers aren’t available or aren’t really sharing feedback, the level of employee engagement drops significantly, making it very hard to keep that employee inspired. As a manager, keep the lines of communication open for your remote workers and give them continuous feedback.
Most remote employees feel that they would perform better if their role was clarified to them. In most workplaces, managers do not focus on clarifying their role to their remote workers. Make sure that your remote team members understand their roles and realize their importance in the bigger picture.
Setting employee goals is the first step to understanding your employees’ roles in their organization and what their responsibilities are. So, make sure you set SMART goals for your remote employees and align these goals with department goals as well as organizational goals. Now you have a compass to measure success, when it comes to employee performance.
One of the vital parts of employee goal setting is tracking their progress and actively help them with their goals. You can also choose to use a software that allows you to track employee progress on goals effectively by sending out notification to goal assigners each time the someone checks in on the goal and giving the goal assigners the ability to comment on each goal check-in.
The ability to comment on goals allows both managers and employees to have a discussion about the goal and the progress that is being made. Commenting is an easy way to foster communication without having to formalize it.
Also read: 5 Creative Employee Recognition Tips For 2020
Having frequent feedback sessions with your remote employees makes it easier for you to recognize their efforts and reward their accomplishments. There are various ways to do it: gamification, personalized thank you notes, praising employees in-front of the whole team (Virtual team). At Engagedly, we use Engagedly app which allows to gamify every aspect of an employee’s work. We also use public praise and discretionary points to praise an employee publicly for their contribution.
Using a rewards and recognition software doesn’t only help you with the budget of rewards but also drives employee engagement in the organization.
As a manager, it is recommended for you to create learning opportunities for your employees and help their career trajectory. Employee training is critical for employees to keep up with current industry trends. An HR management software can help you here. They usually have an LMS (Learning Management System) integrated with their system which allows you to promote a culture of continuous learning at the workplace. This practice drives employee engagement and increases overall productivity of the organisation.
Engagedly is offering a suite of products part of its Remote Work Toolkit free to any organization, until Sept 30th, 2020.
The Coronavirus has affected the way we work today and for months to come. Unprecedented events require unprecedented measures. We at engagedly believe it is our responsibility as socially conscious corporate citizens to help equip organizations with additional tools and resources during this time of crisis.
Get in touch with us to know more about the free remote working tool-kit.
