How To Keep Remote Teams Engaged

Employee engagement has been a pretty hot topic over the past year. The “great work from home” experiment forced millions of employees to find new ways to get work done. As working from home moved from a short-term experiment to a long-haul arrangement, it’s worth considering the long-term impact of working remotely on motivation, collaboration, and engagement.

However, it’s difficult to get a clear answer on whether or not employees working remotely are engaged. The results can vary greatly depending on the researchers conducting the studies and the timing of the studies over the past year.

Some surveys suggest employee engagement is at an all-time high.
Other researchers argue that employee engagement is perilously low.

It’s hard to know what’s true about the level of employee engagement. But it’s safe to say that employee engagement has never been harder for most organizations than in the past year. If most of your engagement strategies relied on a colocated office, then it’s safe to say they haven’t worked well.

So, in this article, we’ll outline new strategies to keep remote employees and remote teams engaged.

Make Expectations Clear

The first strategy for keeping remote teams engaged is to make expectations clear, or perhaps better said, it is to make expectations clear to everyone involved. Clarity of roles, responsibilities, deliverables and deadlines is key to keeping remote teams engaged and collaborating. 

It used to be that teams working together could set longer deadlines and be less structured around deliverables because they occupied the same space and could quickly ask each other when clarity was needed. But in a remote team, the number of overlapping hours teammates work is shrinking…and their availability for a quick chat is shrinking even more.

Establishing a regular, teamwide check-in is one way to make expectations clear to everyone involved. Once a week or every other, get the whole team to report back on what they’re working on, what they’ve just completed, and what obstacles they’re encountering. 

This way, everyone knows what everyone else is focused on and where they might be able to provide help. This could be a regular meeting, but your team might already be overloaded with meetings. It could also be a spreadsheet or weekly survey with results circulated around the team. If you’re using project management software to help the team, you probably already have the functionality in place to establish a team-wide check-in.

Make Feedback Plentiful

The second strategy for keeping remote teams engaged is to make feedback plentiful. You need to over-communicate feedback. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to over-communicate constructive feedback. But as you’ve probably discovered, working remotely makes it a lot harder to know how you’re doing—to know what progress you’ve really made. 

We know that progress is a powerful human motivator, and most of us are conditioned to judge our progress based on the feedback we receive. Making feedback plentiful is about helping people see their progress more clearly.

Constructive criticism during your one-on-one check-in meetings is okay, but you want to double down on the positive, progress-oriented feedback. Every time you’re checking in with individuals or the whole team, make it a point to mention the progress you feel they’ve made. 

In addition, create space during meetings or a system in your electronic communication that lets teammates give feedback to each other. Especially making it easy for teammates to praise each other for both big and small tasks. 

Peer-to-peer feedback is a recipe for engagement because it reinforces the sense that employees aren’t working alone while also providing the positive, progress-oriented feedback that works so well.

Make Growth Unavoidable

The third strategy for keeping remote teams engaged is to make growth unavoidable. The importance of progress was already mentioned above, but progress on the job or towards a task is only part of how progress motivates us. Another big form of motivating progress is career progress. 

People want more than an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work from home; they want to know they’re making progress along a career path as well. In fact, when you’re working remotely, it can feel even more like you’re just treading along on a meaningless series of repetitive days—which makes feeling progress through a career even more important.

You may not be able to have long-term growth conversations with your people right now, but you can focus on ways to show growth in the short term. The easiest way to show growth in the short term is to introduce a little novelty into what each person on the team is doing. 

Ask people to take on new tasks and learn from other teammates who usually do those tasks. In addition, encourage people to introduce some novelty into their learning as well. It’s impossible to know in advance the windy path one’s career will take, but learning new information and developing new abilities will prepare anyone to travel the path.

Make Friendships Easy

A key strategy for keeping remote teams engaged is to make friendships easy. One of the more surprising findings when studying employee engagement is just how much having friends at work is a factor. 

For several decades, “I have a best friend at work” has been one of the core statements in Gallup’s famed Q12 survey. But in the last decade, researchers have found just how powerful friends at work truly are. Having people on your team with whom you share a bond for reasons outside of just the team will make you significantly more productive and engaged. 

But building those bonds through emails and Zoom calls is a lot more difficult than doing it in the office.

There are a lot of tactics you can use to make friendships easier to build and maintain on your team, but they all stem from the same concept: finding time for those unstructured moments we used to have at the office several times a day. 

We used to have coffee breaks, lunch times, or even just time before a meeting where people could walk and talk on the way to the conference room. Those little moments matter, but we have far fewer of them now. So, find new ways to make those moments. 

That can be by jumping on Zoom calls earlier, encouraging people to take virtual coffee breaks together, or even creating a dedicated “nonwork” chat area online for people to connect. You can’t make the friendships happen—but you can make it easier for them to happen.

When you look at all four strategies, you might notice that they work with a colocated team as well. 

In each case, you had way more opportunities to employ these strategies with your team when you were working together. They happened organically. 

But now that you’re working alone together, you need to find specific and deliberate ways to make them happen. When you do, you’ll find your team more engaged than before, and they just might find themselves doing their best work ever.

Prioritize Mental Health and Well-Being

A remote team environment is very different from a team meeting and sitting together daily. So, it is quite easy to forget the importance of mental health. Moreover, the boundary between personal and professional life can get blurry in a remote work environment, leading to stress and burnout.

So, as a leader and manager, it is very important to check on your team’s mental health time and again.

Encourage your team to take regular breaks and work on flexible hours. You can also introduce virtual sessions like yoga and mindfulness to boost their morale and help them find peace.

Although these are small steps, they can profoundly affect your team’s mental health, ultimately benefiting you in terms of high performance and engagement.

As per the World Health Organisation (WHO), every dollar invested in mental health has a return of $4 in terms of improved productivity. A culture where mental health is prioritized isn’t just conducive but also a smart business strategy for increasing productivity.

You can also have a mental health day where you can organize group meditation sessions, which can make a difference in how the employees perform and feel about the work.

Leverage Technology for Collaboration

A very important aspect of keeping your remote team engaged is to ensure you have the right technology. Use tools like Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Asana to your advantage and help your team stay organized and updated.

You can also use virtual whiteboards and other apps like Miro and Mural to enhance the spontaneity of your meetings.

Celebrate Diversity and Inclusion

In a remote team, you will be working with people from different backgrounds, cultures, and time zones, so you can support inclusion and celebrate diversity easily. Diversity can become the greatest strength of a remote team. 

As the leader, you must ensure that everyone is heard regardless of ethnicity, location and timezone. To encourage the people to voice their opinions, you can host cultural exchange events or celebrate International holidays with the team.

Also, they should be encouraged to share their own experiences and traditions. In this way, your team will feel valued, and a more collaborative work environment will be created.

Offer Rewards and Recognition Programs

Everyone loves rewards and recognition. Just like with physical teams, it is very important to recognize the efforts and reward the performance of the remote teams. In fact, since remote employees do not meet daily, they often feel more disconnected and isolated from each other and the company’s main mission.

To make things more cohesive, you need to develop a system where employees are recognised, praised and rewarded on a regular basis. It can be through a shoutout, at a team meeting, by giving them virtual gift cards, or by sending out a positive word in the company-wide email. 

Be it a small effort or a big win, remember that recognition goes a long way just as long as it’s genuine.

Wrap Up

You can keep remote teams just as engaged as your physical team with a bit of effort. Adopt a human-centric approach and clear communication practices, and welcome and give regular feedback. By following the strategies we’ve discussed, you can keep an open channel where every member, no matter where on the globe, feels connected and part of the team.