40 Fresh and Practical Ways to Build Engagement With A Remote Workforce

April 20, 2020 Employee Performance and Coaching

A Manager’s Best Practices for Leading Remote Employees: Out of Sight, But Not Out of Mind

We used to joke, Andy and I, about how the only time he ever saw his team was when he traveled half way around the world to meet with a customer in Japan. “I have to fly to the other side of the globe just to see anybody” he’d say. As much as we laughed about it, Andy was unfortunately speaking the truth.

I sat at our New York headquarters alongside Andy’s peers and their boss. Andy was a remote employee who worked from his home in Chicago. One of our key customers was in Japan, and a few of us would travel to Tokyo together once or twice per year. Even though I spoke with him daily as part of a project we were working on together, only in Japan did I get to see Andy in person.

As part of every annual budget his manager would allocate funds to get Andy to HQ once per quarter during the upcoming year. However, by the end of January – only a month into the new financial year – the budget for Andy’s travel to HQ to spend a week working alongside his team in person was routinely deemed ‘non-essential’ and cut. Another year would go by without having budget for Andy to travel to New York.

A sociable creature, Andy loved the people he worked with and although he never outwardly complained, I always knew the recurring budget cut bothered him. It made him feel unimportant.

Andy was in a tough situation. Because he was remote, no one really knew what to do with him. His IT support was 50 miles away. Technically, it was only a tiny sales office with no IT person – it was just a hard network connection. Andy had a different HR person than the rest of his team. Because he came into our organization from a different part of the company, he even had a different holiday schedule.

On Friday afternoons Andy would often “make the rounds,” as he’d say, calling people around the business to find out what was going on in the organization. Andy was often left off emails – people simply forgot about him.

His disconnect from the organization was evident. At dinner one night in Tokyo, I asked if he had heard that a mutual acquaintance of ours, Simon, was about to retire. Andy was stunned. He had not spoken to Simon in a few months and had no idea of the upcoming retirement. I didn’t want to tell him about the big daily countdown calendar that was posted in the office for everyone to see.

In a more extreme case, Andy learned that some members of his team had been let go more than a month after the actual layoff. In fact, Andy only figured it out because an email he sent was bounced by the system.

How to Engage a Remote Team

Unfortunately, there are millions of people like Andy – employees who are often forgotten about or neglected by their organization. They’re merely victims of distance. For supervisors, managing virtual employees is an added challenge on top of an already tough job. Worse, if one’s entire staff is remote, the job gets infinitely harder.

Whether they work from home or they just sit at a different office than you, remote employees are often at risk of being lost in their organization – out of sight, out of mind. They show up on an org chart, but no one really knows what they do. For these employees, the distance, the separation and lack of interaction can quickly get old and engagement can suffer.

Here are some common phrases used by employees when morale and engagement are low:

“A little support would make my job infinitely easier.”
“My boss rarely has time to talk to me.”
“Opportunities to learn and grow are sparse.”
“I feel trapped in what I’m doing.”
“I feel like I’m at a disadvantage because of my situation.”

These days, we often discuss remote work as a trendy thing companies are doing thanks to the power of the internet, but we frequently overlook the added challenges that come with managing and engaging that remote workforce.

So, in honor of my good friend, Andy, we decided to create an ultimate list of tips, strategies and inventive ways to boost employee engagement for remote workers. Some of these may be painfully obvious, some are unconventional – either way, we’re willing to bet you they’ll encourage you to find new ways to boost morale with your Andy.

Remote employees may be out of sight, but here’s how you don’t let them become out of mind. I’d encourage you to go through this list and pick out the ones that would apply best to your Andy. With that, stop forgetting about them: here are 39 fresh and practical ways to truly engage remote workers.

1. Invest in the Right Collaboration Tools

Let’s start with what is hopefully the most basic and painfully obvious tip.

Imagine working remotely with nothing more than a phone and an email account. You are constantly sending files back and forth, clearing inbox space, and fighting to get the job done with some semblance of efficiency. That type of daily habit is nothing but demotivating.

If you want to build engagement with remote staff, you must invest in the right collaboration tools for your organization. The goal here is to make remote working as easy, convenient and efficient as possible for your staff so they don’t feel burdened, ignored or handicapped by the situation.

Need some ideas? Here are a few examples of tools that can drastically improve an employee’s ability to work remotely, as well as your ability to manage them from afar:

Web meeting platform
Instant messaging software
Screen clipping / snapshot tools
Webcams for all staff
Shared file storage
Electronic sketch pads to make virtual collaboration easier
Portable hot spot device
Scanners and printers for all remote employees to help them complete basic tasks
A company cell phone

Before you go off and say ‘Yeah, yeah…’ remember that time is money. Operational inefficiency within your organization is not only disheartening for your employees, but it can also get really expensive when remote employees waste time doing basic tasks because they lack the right tools.

Do your remote employees have the right tools? When is the last time you asked?

2. Schedule More Frequent Meetings with Virtual Employees

If there is one single thing that you can do to improve morale, this should be it. Remote workers need more scheduled contact time with you than your co-located staff. The reason for this is simple. You already get a lot of face time with your local staff above and beyond regular meetings – in the hallway, in the breakroom, and in the elevator. Even those indirect, spontaneous 5-minute conversations that occur with employees while waiting for the coffee to brew offer both you and the employee valuable time to talk with one another.

Naturally, your virtual workers do not get these brief hallway chats. As a result, you need to deliberately plan more conversations with remote staff to ensure they get enough time with you.

By scheduling dedicated times in advance, you ensure the day, or the week doesn’t slip way.

3. Set a Midday Reminder

While building engagement with remote staff does require more regular discussions, those formal discussions may still land several days apart. Boost engagement with virtual employees by setting a goal to have some sort of contact each day.

Schedule a daily noon reminder for yourself “Have I Connected with Remote Workers Today?” If you already have, great. If not, identify ways in which you can. Do you owe him/her a reply? Is their expense report awaiting your approval? Even a team-wide email counts. The point is just to try and have contact with remote employees once a day in some way.

4. Turn on Your Webcam

Body language and non-verbal cues are an important component of effective communication. And, people like to interact face to face.

So, let your employees see you! No need to dress up, no need to be especially formal. Just let them see you and have your normal conversation. It may feel a little strange at first but do it once and it will be far easier the next time.

Turning on your webcam also holds you accountable. When you’re just talking on the phone, it’s easy to lose focus, start reading those emails and looking at spreadsheets – multitasking! A webcam meeting in which the employee can see you will keep you tuned in to the employee and nothing else.

5. Be … Engaging!

It may sound a little silly and obvious but it’s actually an important point. Think about all those times you participated in a meeting led my someone else (either in-person or remote) and thought ‘Wow, this is drier than dust.’ We’ve all been there.

But, did you ever stop and wonder if your employees are saying that about your meeting?

In some cases, that’s all the communication your remote employees will ever get. So, if you want to talk about building engagement with work-from-home employees, you need to be engaging!

Tell a quick story, be funny, or talk about the sports highlights from the night before. You should also ask questions, solicit feedback and request updates that get the employee talking. Even if they already emailed the answer to you, drive a verbal dialog. In order to build engagement, you need to bring the energy, the conversation and the stories that keep people interested and motivated.

6. Start Staff Meetings with Your Virtual Employees

If your team consists of a mix of both co-located staff and remote workers, always start your roundtable sessions with your virtual staff. It’s natural for us to focus energy on what’s right in front of us, in this case, the employees sitting around the conference room table.

However, by starting with your virtual employees, you ensure they get a chance to participate and contribute. The last thing you want is for them to be short-changed on the 60 minutes they get of your time that day because time was running out.

You can always connect with your in-person staff separately if time expires. Prioritize participation for remote workers.

R ELATED: How to Run a Staff Meeting

7. When Giving Feedback….

Managers often struggle to give feedback to remote workers because the distance makes it hard to truly observe and reasonably evaluate employee behaviors. Are they efficient? Does the employee manage their time well? How well do they demonstrate leadership skills? Are they capable problem solvers?

Consequently, from the employee’s perspective the lack of effective feedback from a remote manager often feels unhelpful, limited, or too general. “Clearly, my boss has no idea what I do” they might say.

Therefore, when giving feedback to remote employees, either informally or as part of your formal employee performance management process, always use very specific examples of their behaviors. Avoid generalizations.

With respect to employee performance, using positive and constructive details about an employee’s performance provides clear expectations of what you want to see from them in the future.

There are always performance clues: the length of time it takes to complete a task, the way they communicate through email, and the level of participation they bring to meetings.

Here are some examples of performance clues by remote employees that you can specifically cite when giving feedback:

A task that should have taken 1 week took 3 weeks (Problem Solving and Efficiency)
A poorly written email to a customer that was misinterpreted (Communication Skills)
Excessive talking during meetings (Time management)

From an employee engagement standpoint, the use of specific examples reassures the employee that the feedback they are receiving is genuine, fact-based and that you’ve been monitoring their progress, even if remote.

8. Hold a Virtual Coffee Break

You have them in the office, why not over the internet with your remote staff? No need to schedule them (unless you want to).

Simply send a quick message to the employee requesting they jump on a virtual meeting to say hello, or even make a quick phone call as you’re walking to the coffee shop down the street.

These short, often impromptu chats can be a tremendous delighter for employees who sit at their home office all day long. A quick 10-minute conversation can be a warm welcome when all they normally interact with is a computer screen.

9. Assign Work of Consequence

Are you challenging your remote employees enough?

As managers, we always want to assign challenging and important work to our employees. But, because we don’t interact with remote employees as regularly as we would in-house workers, it’s quite common for supervisors to give remote staff more administrative tasks by default. It’s not intentional; sometimes it just comes down to feeling pressure to keep remote employees busy without realizing the type of work we’re assigning.

Don’t fall into the trap of routinely assigning “busy work” to remote staff. Instead, be sure to give them important roles and responsibilities that are not only intellectually challenging, but also makes them feel like they’re part of the team.

Let them coordinate a new proposal, lead a highly visible project or champion a new initiative. By empowering them and giving them a chance to prove themselves, it helps make them feel valued even though they work physically apart from their team.

engagement, meetings, performance reviews