Working remotely has many difficulties, both for a company and its workers. Employers save money by avoiding the expenses that come with a traditional office and can select the great people for their team irrespective of their location. Remote employees get to enjoy more flexibility, get rid of the annoying daily commute, and spend extra time at home with their families. Though several organizations saw these benefits and were trending toward remote workforces, the coronavirus pandemic forced others to suddenly shift to a work from home model. This came new challenges and the one challenge is a lack of perceived connection. However, there are many tools and plans you can implement to help your remote team feel more connected. Below are some tips to help remote workers feel like part of their time.
Hold weekly video meetings
The efficient way to make the remote work team feel more connected is with some face-to-face interaction. Many studies out there claim technology has killed face-to-face interactions. While that may be true, in the case of remote work, technology makes face-to-face interaction possible. Since your remote employees cannot come into the office, you can hold weekly video meetings with a video communications tool such as Zoom or Skype. Holding regular video meetings will let remote employees obtain the face time they are missing. Finally, this will help them form good bonds with their co-workers. To build even strong connections during your weekly video meetings, do not talk about work. Add a personal touch. For the weekly video meetings of the company, before talking about projects, you can permit the team members to share any good news they have. This can be work-related good news or something fun they had on the weekend.
Help them feel part of company culture
Company culture may be hard to pin down. And with the rise in hybrid working, frontline managers can struggle to virtually communicate the culture’s essence or find it challenging to ensure remote workers feel part of it. For great inclusion, encourage remote and deskless employees to feed into your company values, and think about how those values are evolving in the present landscape. You can want to put a strong than typical emphasis on company values across your communication platforms instead of relying on a subtle feeling that tends to work when everybody is in the same location. For instance, begin weekly meetings concentrating on one core value and ask people to describe how they have demonstrated it recently. And try to have ways of identifying or rewarding efforts, like small gifts and prizes.
Encourage your remote employees for communicating with each other
You should encourage your employees to communicate with each other, like virtual coffee breaks. Small groups can increase intimacy and trust, so for big teams, it is valuable to have many coffee-break groups and rotate people weekly. For new team members, it may be helpful to allocate them a buddy. One-to-ones with managers are more essential now, so do not let these slips out of your diary. Have an open-door policy and give remote workers an option of channels to communicate with you, so they can do what is comfortable for them.
Establish fun company traditions
It is easy to make fun of company traditions in an in-person work environment. For example, on the birthday of each of your workers, you may have a pizza and cake party in the office. On the last Friday of each month, you can have a board game day. If you want to make the remote team feel more connected, it is necessary to continue these kinds of fun company traditions online. So how do you do that?
For celebrating birthdays, you can post birthday messages. In this way, all workers can greet each other with their own birthday messages. Perhaps you can deliver a pizza to the location of your remote employee. You can make online scavenger hunts or get everybody together to play an online game. Including remote employees in fun company traditions will create strong bonds and help you keep the company culture intact.
Empower Team Members
Remote workers need freedom and responsibility to operate independently (that is work they can accomplish that does not need the approval of the manager). Frequent escalation to a supervisor slows down both work procedures and the pace of learning since team members (particularly more junior ones) miss out on necessary learning opportunities that come from having to solve issues for themselves. As a manager, plan your assignments for remote employees so that they involve different tasks. Several will need collaboration but ensure that at least some can be completed individually.