6 Ways to Increase Employee Engagement in Remote Work

Working from home is convenient: no need to spend 2 hours a day on the road and wear a tie. But this type of work is chilling. Let's sleep for an hour, hang out on YouTube, want to wash the dishes. According to a study by writer and blogger Darius Forox, 88% of employees procrastinate (put off for later, do nothing) at least 1 hour a day . Laziness, even if it is the engine of progress, is not a trait that an employer wants to see in an employee. How can you increase employee engagement? We give 6 tips.

Employee motivation methods

Conduct team building

Remote team building is essential. You probably have colleagues that you have never met. Introduce team building activities into your workflow.

• Ask your co-workers to show you their remote work space once a week.

Let them tell you why they organized them that way. Arrange a relay race: this week Anton will go on the air, who will call Ilya. Ilya, in turn, will invite Vitya to speak ... Find out where your employees work from. Suddenly, someone went remotely to Morocco or Thailand?

Bonus tip: create your own video relay races. Here, for example, is a colleague simulator from Tjournal. Invite employees to do something similar, but with their own slang and jokes.

• Have meetings

Work does not stand still, and employees are interested to know what's new. Tell the news live! We recommend meeting once a week to greet newcomers, share fresh information and just chat with each other.

• Organize a Question Box

Colleagues anonymously throw questions and suggestions to the leadership, and you announce them at a general rally. Here's where you can do it for free .

Arrange morning calls

To motivate employees to perform current tasks, we recommend that the department meet in a video call in the morning. Pour coffee and call your team. Tell what you plan to do today and ask your colleagues to do the same. Thus, watching the series instead of work will be much more difficult: you have already promised to do certain things.

We offer 2 options:

• Call up in the morning, tell what you did yesterday and what you plan today

A faster option where you can discuss all issues at once

• Call up in the morning, talk about plans for today. In the evening write what you have done

Takes more time, but less risk of missing something.

Praise employees for good work

What influences employee engagement? Feedback. Of the 1,000 Britons surveyed, 31% said praise helps them perform better (click here for tips on how to praise in English). If someone did something well, tell the whole company about it.

Organize additional chats for non-work related topics

“He who works well, he rests well.” Create interest clubs. Discuss a new episode of your favorite TV series or just leave each other memes after hours. But don't overdo it 🙂

Run hackathons

Hackathon is a way to increase the engagement of employees, moving away from the usual schedule. This is a certain day when employees do not do work, but prepare their projects. It could be a day off. Alone or in teams, useful for the company or "for the soul" - you set the rules yourself. The purpose of the hackathon is to give employees a chance to be creative, to reveal themselves from a new perspective. The benefits as a team building are guaranteed, but what if you also invent something new? Here are 50 startups whose ideas were developed at the hackathon.

Implement a mentor system and development plan

Allow experienced colleagues to transfer knowledge to newcomers, encourage this financially. Organize a mentoring system, conduct trainings. Create a development plan in which each employee outlines their aspirations for the coming year by month. Ask the mentors to work on this development plan.

How to increase employee engagement with video conferencing?

Video calling is required to follow these tips. Conducting team building or meetings without seeing colleagues is difficult.

We recommend trying Mind, a free video conferencing program. Just register, send the conference link to your colleagues and start your first morning meeting! Conduct weekly large-scale video calls.

Implement video communication in the work of the HR department. Onboarding with a video where you take a tour, talk about the history of the company, meet a newcomer face to face is a good way to immerse an employee in the life of the company.

How to start employee engagement activities?

First, conduct a survey of employees to measure the level of engagement now. Then use our tips, their implementation will not take a lot of time. After 3 months, conduct the survey again and compare the level of engagement.

You can use the Gallup Q12 survey of 12 yes-no questions. To create it, the company interviewed 35 million employees around the world. Therefore, the wording is precisely verified and there are only 12 questions.

The survey is paid - $15 per participant. It is in English, but even Google can easily cope with the translation.

Or you can trust the article from CRM Hurma - they published a translation of the questions and told how to calculate the percentage of involvement. This is simply the percentage of “yes” responses from all responses.

You can create a free online survey in Google Forms . Make it anonymous - get honest answers and the engagement rate will be correct. Conduct surveys in each department separately. So notice if there are problems in some department - and the general indicator can always be added from the private ones.