Best Practices for Keeping Your Remote Workforce Engaged

Stay Connected and Productive

When a pandemic or other circumstance forces your team to work from remote offices, it can be challenging to manage and keep them engaged. But, with the right tools and methods in place, it can be easier than you think. We’ve outlined a few essentials below to help keep your remote workforce engaged and productive.

Here are our top ten best practices:

1. Create a sense of belonging: Making your team feel valued and part of the corporate family can play a huge part in keeping them engaged, productive, and aligned with the company goals. They will become great advocates for the company, too.
2. Define clear and achievable goals: Communication can be a little more challenging with remote teams, so it’s vital to be crystal clear when defining roles, responsibilities and goals. Make sure team members know what to achieve & how to achieve it.
3. Create clear strategies and channels to allow your team to communicate freely: Again, communication is key to managing remote teams, and can be challenging. With the right tools and strategies, it becomes much easier to communicate at any level.
4. Check-in with your team regularly, individually and as a group: Put extra effort into your remote teams, especially on a personal level; make sure they have what they need and fully understand of their goals.
5. Use collaboration tools to enhance your team’s remote productivity: Put the right platforms in place to manage your projects and goals. This previous post details a few great options for remote collaboration tools.
6. Ensure the team has all the resources they need: Make sure that your remote workers have access to the resources they need to get their job done. They won’t stay productive if they are unable to access company servers or data stores when they need to.
7. Make online collaboration fun: Remember that remote teams are still people with lives. Keep up the lighter conversation as if you were at the office; talk about your weekends, your pets, and life in general, as if you were face-to-face.
8. Empower your team to make their own decisions and keep their own time: There are times when remote workers need to make decisions quickly, so make sure they have the authority when required. Remote working also comes with an inherent amount of flexibility, so make sure that policies are in place so your teams know where the boundaries are.
9. Minimize your email; use other communication tools instead: With remote working, email can sometimes be a slow and cumbersome tool. For greater collaboration, uses tools like Slack to communicate, exchange ideas, and discuss issues, almost as if you were in the same room.
10. Encourage feedback and growth: As you talk to your remote people, remember to get their feedback; ask them how they feel about what they’re doing. Could their remote experience be improved? Get their ideas on better planning and integration; it all helps your remote workforce become a higher performing team.

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