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3 Tips for Building Employee Engagement with Remote Employees

This article is more than 7 years old.

In 1995, just 9% of the workforce telecommuted full- or part-time, according to research conducted by Gallup. Today, that number has increased four-fold, with 37% of employees reporting having telecommuted in their current roles, per the agency’s Work and Education poll.

Telecommuting isn’t just a trend, however. More and more, it’s becoming a marketable HR benefit to be leveraged by forward-thinking companies that recognize the benefits of remote work for both organizations and their workers. Adam Schwartz, founder and CEO of Articulate, shares the advantages of his fully-remote team with Forbes contributor Laura Shin:

Being able to choose where and when we work empowers us to be more productive, more engaged, and more balanced in every aspect of our lives. After 14 years as a fully remote company, we’re convinced a distributed environment isn’t just good for our employees. It’s also one of the key reasons we’ve been so successful as a company.

Shin’s article profiles 125 different companies that have gone either entirely or nearly fully remote, including small operations and larger businesses like Citrix and Github. As more teams adopt this approach, however, there’s an obvious challenge. While it’s clear that remote workers are just as productive – if not more so – than their in-office counterparts, they do experience challenges when it comes to maintaining engagement.

Can teams of remote workers create and sustain the community-oriented drive that enables teams to succeed? Will employees form meaningful work relationships without a physical watercooler to gather around? The following companies prove that yes, it is possible to create thriving, engaged remote teams.

Here’s how to do it.

Communicate in Real Time

According to Sabrina Son of TINYpulse:

Technology has evolved to the point where it’s easier than ever for workers to communicate with their colleagues in real time — no matter where they happen to be. So invest in a real-time communications platform. Whether that’s Google for Work, Skype for Business, Slack, or any number of other tools will depend on how much money you’re willing to spend and what kind of functionality you’re looking for.

Wade Foster explains how his company, Zapier, puts this into practice:

Every Thursday morning at 9am PDT we get together for lightning talks, demos and/or interviews. Since we're over 20 people now, it's hard to see everyone on a weekly basis. These hangouts are a chance to say "hi!" to folks you may not normally see.

Nothing makes workers – whether in-office or remote – feel more out of the loop than being left out of communications. It’s doubly important to make sure that workers you don’t see every day feel the benefit of regular, real-time interactions.

Assemble, When Possible

If you can afford to do so, bring your entire remote working team together at least once or twice a year. Not only are these sessions important from the perspective of building working relationships, you’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish when you set aside time for focused, whole-team engagement.

Parse.ly’s Andrew Montalenti has found these kinds of retreats to be vital in terms of both productivity and engagement:

At Parse.ly, we have held several team retreats since our founding. We cook together, drink together, play poker, and hold competitions. We also have intense brainstorming sessions and even do a little free-form programming and hacking with one another. I call it a “workcation” because though everyone is working, everyone is also very relaxed and we try to pick backdrop environments that are vacation-like.

Even if it isn’t possible to bring the entire team together at an offsite event, make an effort to facilitate in-person meetings between key employees as you’re able to. Montalenti suggests that the brain processes interactions differently when they occur in-person, versus across technology, enabling these kinds of meetups to smooth the onboarding process, work through key production challenges or even resolve employee conflicts.

Prioritize Engagement

“Engagement” on its own is difficult to define. It’s more than tossing a ping-pong table in the breakroom, and yet it requires more than coming up with a stock mission statement for your employees to buy into.

What is certain, however, is that engagement doesn’t just happen on its own. It requires continual investment from company execs and workers at all levels – and it requires ongoing management and attention.

Wagepoint’s “Epic Guide to Employee Management” suggests that one factor in engaging employees is helping them develop their strengths, stating “Focus on developing each individual's strengths and encourage them to mentor others. By developing skilled employees, you create a strong team with aligned goals and the capacity to mentor.” This is something that should be prioritized whether your workers are down the hall or halfway around the world.

In addition to adopting strategies like these, companies managing remote teams may find it necessary to ask directly whether or not they’re meeting their engagement goals. Blaine Gorman of Presence Learning offers his team’s approach to monitoring engagement:

Our company sends out a bi-annual employee engagement survey to test the overall health of the company. We then have a town hall meeting to discuss the results. A team is put together to identify the top focus areas and get employees involved on mini-task forces to work on resolving the issues and then provide an update to the employees on action steps to resolve the issues.

Certainly, with a remote team, such meetings would have to occur online, using tools like Google Hangouts, Skype or ReadyTalk. They do, however, serve an important purpose. By letting your remote workers know that their engagement matters to you – to the extent that you’ll go out of your way to explicitly prioritize it – they’ll feel as valuable to your team as they would if they were working in the office, alongside you.

Got another tip for managing remote worker engagement? Leave us a note in the comments below with your suggestions:

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