5 Ideas of Employee Engagement For Remote Work
Remote work becomes the new future
The importance of employee engagement for remote work has been widely recognised by diverse groups of Human Resource (HR) managers in Covid period. Employee engagement has shown clear positive links to both organisational productivity and performance. An engaged employee within an organisation significantly increases workplace creativity, efficiencies, satisfaction levels and further quality work.
Although, in today’s current COVID-19 business environment employee engagement has been completely redefined. Now managers are finding new and diversified ways to expand the traditional knowledge of engaging employees at remote work. Also, a McKinsey study says more than half of workers would like to work from home at least three days a week after the pandemic, and nearly a third say they would like to work remotely full time
Correspondingly, it is integral for HR managers to develop well-defined strategies to successfully engage these employees who are remote work. Below are five essential ways in which HR managers may successfully engage employees who are in remote work.
Maintain Regular Communication
Establishing an effective and regular internal communication system to maintain proper message interactions with employees who are in remote work is essential to employee engagement. To ensure engaged employees within the organisation managers may constantly need to delegate information to employees about various duties and responsibilities that employees are to have. By relaying this information, it ensures that employees are not feeling isolated with their specific work responsibilities.
When employees are in remote work, management should increasingly ensure they are utilising a two-way communication system. That is to send important information to employees within the organisation while allowing these employees to respond. The responses may be either positive or negative, which allows for management to take action and ensure all the negative responses may be effectively removed aiming for a fully positive and in turn, a perfect fully functioning employee base.
Moreover, throughout COVID-19 regular communication is largely important to send direct messages about important COVID-19 safety protocols or information that should be heard by all. A communication system that is strongly built to regularly engage employees with important information may ensure that employees understand the information being conveyed and ensure that not only they are fully engaged at home, but they also stay safe in a time of desperate need of carefulness.
Encourage Teamwork
Teamwork is a largely important tool to achieve employee engagement. This is defiant whereby teamwork ensures that an environment to promote motivation and trust to work towards completing tasks and activities at hand may be achieved. Moreover, when working in teams the collaboration and trading of personal knowledge effectively will allow tasks to become much easier, in turn, employees are likely to be more engaged as a task at hand becomes much more achievable to complete. Further, working in teams encourages employees to work towards reaching a state of work engagement due to employees viewing another employee who is fully engaged in the work they are completing.
Correspondingly, management should ensure to encourage teamwork to employees who are working remotely. This may be done through constant reminders of employees to work in a team through the online platform the company may opt to use. One popular platform that could be pushed to employees is to work through the utilisation of the online application known as Zoom.
Moreover, managers may like to further encourage teamwork through engaging activities such as team building games that could be done all online. One such game that could be played is online Pictionary. In Pictionary, teams communicate and work together to figure out what an individual is drawing. This game strongly encourages a lot of team communication and further ensures that employees are developing task engagement skills.
Use Pulse Surveys
Pulse surveys are extremely essential for achieving employee engagement from employees who are in remote work. A pulse survey is a recurrent engagement survey that is designed to be asked on a fast and regular basis. The pulse survey eliminates the usage of largely complex questions and more so uses simple straightforward questions which aim to measure whatever an organisation may think is important at any specific point in time.
With the large development of technology, a Human Resource Information System (HRIS) may be utilised to effectively engage employees through pulse surveys simply on the internet. This is essential in ensuring that employees complete engaging pulse surveys when working from home. Through HRIS pulse surveys are effectively taken in a matter of seconds and data is ready to be analysed and developed towards creating a more engaged employee base.
Pulse surveys effectively encourage the improvement of employee engagement. This is seen whereby an employee who is undertaking a pulse survey may be encouraged within the organisation to have a voice that is heard. They may respond with either positive or negative answers towards a survey question, which allows for management to ensure that they may take necessary action towards satisfying the employee and correspondingly encourage engagement. Further through completing engaging pulse surveys a corresponding influence on employees to work more productively may be seen. This is due to pulse surveys influencing employee’s motivation to complete tasks at hand with the knowledge that they pertain.
Highlight Internal Career Opportunities
Employees are constantly looking for ways to develop their careers and businesses are increasingly aware of this fact. When an employee joins a company, they are seeking personal career development and experience yet also the opportunity to go further, looking towards the next position they may achieve.
To engage these employees and satisfy their needs of wanting to reach that next position mangers may be honest with them. Give these employees the necessary information on how they can work towards reaching their career potential. An employee who is working from home is increasingly likely to become more engaged with work if they have a career goal in mind.
Thus, it becomes essential for managers to identify what the next internal career position is an employee may reach. Then the employee should work towards this next position with the help of management providing objectives and goals that the employee may need to accomplish or do to grow into that career position.
Conduct Fun Activities
Fun and outgoing workplace activities are essential in engaging an employee. Employees that work non-stop without breaks for activities are less likely to be productive than others that have a short break. Thus, it becomes essential that workplace breaks are to be encouraged even if that be through working from home, as it will encourage employees to be increasingly likely to be engaged with there work.
A short work break game such as Skribbl, online Uno and even the aforementioned Pictionary to name a few games may help encourage an increasingly engaged workforce. Moreover, these games encourage individuals to develop interpersonal skills and make employees feel increasingly more comfortable when working with others from home.
Another activity that is used dramatically in recent times is to encourage employees to take photos of themselves doing work from home. This is increasingly popular to show the message of staying COVID-19 safe. Simply employees take a picture showing they are completing work from home in the most creative way possible, employers may even feature the photos on social media, showing how both the company and employees are taking positive actions to deal with COVID-19. The corresponding impact on engaging the employee is that they are attracted to an activity that encourages work through breaks to which engagement is increased and employee motivation to complete tasks at hand productively is attained.
