Remote teams quite often struggle with employee engagement and keeping employee satisfaction high. It’s not surprising when you imagine staying home and having hours after hours of long zoom meetings; nothing super engaging there! However, working remotely doesn’t have to be boring or disengaging.
Here are some tips and tricks to improve employee engagement for your remote team.
Improve employee engagement with the right tools
First and foremost, there’s no reason for your team to keep the same tools you worked with while you were working in person for your now hybrid or remote team. Also, there’s no reason not to at least try and improve your toolset from time to time.
Now, it might take some adjusting while implementing new tools, but technology evolves so quickly, it’s important to stay ahead of the trends and take advantage of the new time-saving tools out there, from communication tools, project management or video conferencing tools. Here are a couple examples of tools your team could use to improve employee engagement:
- Networking and team building tool: Remo
- Communication tools: Slack, Chatter
- Project management tools: Asana, Monday
- Video conferencing tools: Teams, Zoom
By using tools like these you can improve the communication of your remote team, make sure they are engaged, but also give them fun new ways to interact with each other. Keeping work fun for everyone will also reduce job dissatisfaction. One of the best ways to do so is to host activities regularly on networking platforms, here are some examples of activities you can do.
5 Activities To Improve Employee Engagement & Employee Satisfaction
1. Virtual Onboardings
Particularly for a remote team, onboarding can mean endless meetings, feeling lost, and not feeling very engaged. Keep employee satisfaction high from the beginning by making sure new and existing employees can meet and get to know each other right away. How? Plan some virtual onboarding sessions including some networking, games, icebreakers or a 1:1 meeting.
If you hire regularly it might be a good idea to do monthly or even weekly events where all the company can attend and meet the new employees.
2. Online Town Hall meetings
Your whole team needs to know what’s going on in the company so that they all row in the same direction. So, a weekly town hall meeting can help improve employee engagement and communication.
- Team leads and department managers can come up on stage and present different projects they are working on, results, etc.
- Take some time to congratulate the team for all the hard work they put in these tasks. Congratulations can go a long way in improving employee satisfaction!
- Make sure to leave time at the end for questions and proposals. Employees will appreciate having a say in the company’s future.
3. Virtual Training and Coaching
It’s crucial for employees to always keep learning new things and keep themselves up to date in their fields, so why not create regular training and coaching sessions?
- Regular and relevant training and coaching will improve productivity and employee engagement.
- Make training fun with lunch and learn events and send good food to your employees.
- Don’t overdo learning opportunities. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing!
4. Prizes and Recognition Activities
Give recognition for the hard work your employees provide, make sure they know that what they do for the company is truly appreciated. That is, you can have yearly, quarterly or even monthly recognitions.
- Get inspired by the Oscars and make your very own gala with ball gowns, trophees, prizes.
- Be original and recognize your employees’ attitudes, the ones that help the company culture with good vibes, or jokes for example, but also some quirky ones like the best haircut, loudest typer, cutest pet, etc.
Introducing weekly recognition processes will create the habit in your employees and boost employee engagement. For example, Nailted helps you create a feedback culture between your employees and teams by allowing them to recognize each other’s achievements in weekly feedback processes and having a 1:1 meeting with their managers. Book a demo with one of our experts and discover how!
5. Happy Hours
What’s better than a fun happy hour at the end of a hard week?
Make sure these traditions stay even remotely, employees need to talk about what happened during the week, what they’ll do on the weekend, and just relax and bond together!
For instance, you can have themed happy hours every week, trivia game nights, painting or salsa dancing classes, a wine and dine party, possibilities are endless.
Get started right away with the right virtual networking tools. So, implement those different activities and you should see tremendous results in improving employee engagement and reducing job dissatisfaction in your remote team.
