Keeping team engagement is important for all companies. After all, the action of engaging employees relates to productivity, which has an impact on the organization’s results.
Suddenly, remote engagement has become a priority and leaders struggle to manage their home office teams.
Due to the covid-19 crisis, which forced companies to migrate their operations to remote work as a matter of urgency. That is, without adequate preparation.
The search for engagement for remote teams is essential in times of social distance. For this, productivity tools and solutions for certain tasks promote complete work environments, connecting people, managing demands, and keeping the service up to date.
In this article, you will learn how to create a good environment for engagement through remote team members.
Engagement Challenges for Remote Team Leaders
The challenges to promoting employee engagement in the home office involve adapting to new forms of communication. Also, it uses tools to integrate tasks and projects, and also aligning organizational culture.
However, the leadership skills expected for remote leaders are not far from those that must be developed by managers who are close to their employees.
Companies will see an increase in teleworking going forward. This is what the vast majority of studies carried out by consultants and specialists point out.
Those who know how to best leverage recent teleworking experiences to intentionally plan their hybrid/remote work proposal will be able to create a journey with less friction and therefore more chances to succeed.
The empathy to understand your member’s issues
When adapting to teleworking, leaders must understand that employees need to adapt to a new work routine.
Especially in times of pandemic, many people could not prepare for a new way of doing their activities, which could affect their performance.
7 tips for remote teams engagement
Develop a contingency plan
Putting together an emergency contingency plan should be the first thing to be done in times of crisis that require remote work.
This plan must resolve all doubts that may arise during the crisis period, serving as an employee survival manual.
Thus, it must contain all the measures that will be taken in the various possible scenarios, in the short, medium, and long term, in a clear way and without any scope for interpretation.
This material aims to bring transparency, security, and agility in this delicate moment.
This constant update reduces the anxiety caused by this new scenario and provides a greater sense of security, promoting a sense of belonging and employee engagement.
Activity alignment meetings
In addition, it is important to hold online activities alignment meetings between the teams, where each one indicates their priorities and actions for the period.
The frequency of meetings will depend on each area, and maybe daily, weekly, fortnightly, or even happen more than once a day.
At this point, employees must be clear about the priorities of each delivery. This is important because it is the way they will have the overview and see the importance of engagement.
In parallel to these meetings, the team can also use online communication channels to solve faster, more urgent questions or even share specific information. With distance, it is essential to reduce bureaucracy in the flow of information exchange.
Make one-on-one meetings
A one-on-one meeting is a format for a meeting between manager and team member to discuss projects (present and future), feedback, and other matters that they may find relevant. It’s a time to talk in private.
Core Online communication
There are several ways to communicate online, but when it comes to the work environment, the ideal is to keep communication only on official channels.
Human Resources’s role is to delimit inform their best practices so that everyone can communicate without noise.
When communication carries out individually, investing in a tool that allows exclusive chat between managers and employees avoids the loss of requests made by email, for example.
Promote remote events among members
A fundamental part of the routine is happy hours and other meetings outside the corporate environment. This is important to promote integration and help to engage employees.
Social contact is a natural human need and being deprived of it can damage mental health. For example, Human Resources can promote virtual happy hours, mini-lectures, and online chat circles.
And during that time, don’t hesitate to ask them what they need most, whether in conversations or online forms. This simple survey can show you what makes the most sense for your company to follow.
Motivate team culture
To encourage the integration of remote teams, the company can schedule off-work virtual meetings. For example, a breakfast, happy hour, or interactive games section. These moments strengthen the bonds of friendship, as well as relax and renew the employees’ energies.
Give personal networking and connections
A good feedback policy breaks for relaxed conversations and a corporate social network are an excellent tools for connecting remote professionals. The idea is for employees to have friends within the company. This type of bond strengthens human relationships and engagement at work.
The importance of engagement for remote team members
Remote teams still represent some special conditions that gave rise to this situation, even though home office work is a growing part of the organizational culture.
In these cases, it is important to value the dedication and engagement of employees. Therefore, it is not always simple to the point of placing it only as an obligation for them.
Some crucial factors help to better understand how this engagement makes such a difference not only for companies but also for employees and their work levels.
Keep team decision-making
Social withdrawal need not impact work relationships. As much as this possibility exists, it is important to have good resources and practices to keep everyone close.
One point that influences most of a team is decision-making, which is increasingly common.
Companies that opt for this management model have trust among their employees as one of their main assets to achieve goals. As much as it is part of the most operational issues, the contact between the members of a team must maintain the usual dynamics.
Avoid the accumulation of demands
Too many demands can be a problem for the company’s objectives. Thus, this is the consequence of a possible lack of engagement in the remote team. However, it is possible to be able to work well, focusing on the planning that the company already has.
With best practices and the support of specialized tools, it becomes easier to maintain an efficient level of productivity. This occurs because that maintains the workflow of each employee and also of the teams.
Align important bullet points for work
When remote team engagement efforts work, there is naturally a scenario where it becomes easier to align ideas between members of those teams, even if they are far apart.
Without this feature, it can be difficult to define important work issues. Especially when reviewing some points and analyzing metrics, which is common in marketing teams, for example. For this to happen, the entire team must be acclimated and adapted to the calls.
In this process, choosing a suitable video conferencing tool makes all the difference.
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