Organizations worldwide are adapting to new styles of working, and the remote work model remains to be a widely practiced and preferred mode. In fact, it has become the new normal, which has transformed the way employers and employees work in a company.
Remote working has numerous advantages, such as flexibility, a productive and happier workforce as well as finding and retaining top talent from across the world. However, the work from home (WFH) setup also comes with its own set of challenges ranging from lethargic employees, inadequate equipment, employee isolation, ineffective communication, different time zones, and so on.
This blog post will discuss the different remote employee engagement activities HR professionals can incorporate into their companies for an engaged and motivated workforce worldwide.
10 Work From Home Motivation and Engagement Activities to Try
Managing a remote team isn’t easy. Hence, organizations must develop inclusive strategies to eliminate these challenges for keeping remote workers engaged and motivated during work. Here are 10 work from home engagement activities that will improve employee engagement in the organization.
Communication is one of the major challenges with teams that work from home. When you don’t get to see your employees in the office every day, it becomes necessary to find ways to stay connected to them and ensure an ongoing thread of communication. Lack of clarity in communication can lead to a regular communication gap among employers and employees, resulting in less engaged remote workers.
This is where leveraging effective communication tools can be a factor for remote employee engagement activities.
Integrate instant messaging platforms like Slack and Hangout for quick and informal conversations. You can also use tools like Zoom, Asana, and Trello to streamline communication and project management between your team to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Don’t forget to take advantage of the cloud for file sharing and video conferencing tools for face-to-face communication, making your remote employees feel as if they are present in the office environment.
Another crucial remote employee engagement activities include setting meaningful goals. Goals help align employees with the organization’s vision and mission. Furthermore, they enable employees to see how their efforts bring value to the company, motivate employee performance, and improve performance evaluation. Without goals, employee engagement strategies and performance are likely to suffer.
Here’s how you can set goals to motivate and engage employees in your company:
- Make goal-setting a collaborative effort by including employees in the process. This motivates them to improve their performance and become accountable for the results.
- Set clear deliverables and specific metrics to check in on their progress and measure results effectively. Conduct virtual meetings periodically to ensure things are on track.
- Make sure your goal(s) is SMART — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Specific. Examples of employee engagement in companies for SMART goals, the goal can be to increase 15% product sales by 25% in the next three months by reaching out to the target customers on social media channels.
Remote workers tend to spend more hours working than in-office employees, yet they don’t feel a part of the team. One of the ways to make them feel valued is by making employee recognition and rewards a priority.
Physical workplaces enable on-the-spot recognition for employees. However, this shouldn’t change when you have your employees working remotely. Recognition and appreciation for the work your remote workforce does is the most effective and direct way to show that you care for them. Thanking or rewarding employees for their achievements not only gives them a sense of accomplishment but also makes them feel engaged and motivated to perform their best.
Here’s how you can appreciate your employees and improve work from home productivity:
- Praise/acknowledge them in daily virtual meetings
- Highlight their achievements in the company’s newsletter
- Leverage a recognition platform that enables employees to view, comment on, and give recognition in real-time.
- Encourage peer-to-peer shoutouts in your organization’s Slack channel or groups chats.
Loneliness is one of the major drawbacks of a work from home setup, which can directly impact the employees’ well-being, engagement, and performance in a company. Hence, HR professionals must take out some time in a week or month to organize virtual team-building activities. Virtual games keep employees engaged and give them a feeling of belongingness. Plus, these boost morale and boost collaboration among remote workers.
Here are a few virtual engagement activities you can try to skyrocket your employee engagement:
- Schedule virtual coffee breaks, lunch breaks, or dinner experiences
- Introduce your pets, houseplants, or even children
- Rapid-fire random questions to your co-workers, such as are you a cat or dog person, where would you travel if money was not a problem, do you like pineapple on pizzas, and more.
- Conduct virtual dance-offs, online acapella, or lip sync battles to help your team let loose.
- Host a digital book club where employees can discuss the book they’re reading every week.
Training your employees and allowing them to acquire new skills is a worthwhile investment. In fact, employees are more likely to stay in organizations that focus on providing growth, learning, and development opportunities to their workforce.
Remote employees can often feel uninspired. So, encouraging them to adopt a growth mindset can create an environment where employees focus on upskilling themselves irrespective of where they are in their careers. Plus, it can help fill knowledge gaps and make your organization stay on top of industry trends. What’s more, training and development opportunities provide job satisfaction among employees as they feel that you’re committed to their career development.
HR managers can establish a learning culture and provide employees with both free and paid courses to learn new skills for their career growth while working from home. You can either create your own learning material to improve your team’s knowledge or recommend courses on digital platforms like Udemy, Digital Marketer, and Skillshare with courses from different industries.
Further, you can also encourage them to participate in industry-related webinars and workshops to get acquainted with the latest developments.
Giving away offers and discounts to employees is one of the most effective employee engagement activities in companies. This helps keep your remote workers motivated to contribute to their organization. In fact, most employees prefer perks and benefits more than a pay raise.
Some of the employee perks include corporate deals from top brands, gift cards, subscription plans, tie-ups with hospitals, insurance plans, and more. Further, user discounts in restaurants, gyms, and e-commerce stores make an incredible employee perk. HR managers can also leverage a cloud-based employee engagement benefits platform that can allow them to track each employee’s performance and keep the top-performers happy with great offers and discounts on brands the employees usually purchase from.
Ensuring the health and wellness of your employees is an excellent work from home productivity tip that organizations can leverage to boost engagement. Your employees’ motivation depends a lot on their physical and mental health. However, in the past few years, the meaning of wellness has changed dramatically. What was earlier associated with gym memberships and on-site workout spaces is now represented with exercise programs focusing on mental health, mindfulness, stress management, financial wellness, cultural and leadership behaviors, and so on.
To promote employees’ physical and mental well-being, it’s a great time for organizations to incorporate wellness programs for employees. These programs are increasingly becoming effective for employees worldwide. Some wellness programs are straightforward, including activities like biometric screenings or steps-based contests. In contrast, others aim to provide a flexible work culture and encourage healthier and more positive behavior among team members.
Leveraging a health and wellness software can streamline the entire process, allowing employees to participate in other health and wellness tasks in the comfort of their homes. Plus, it can also monitor an employee’s well-being and create personalized wellness programs based on their health issues.
With remote working becoming a permanent arrangement in most companies, employees want a work from home setup that works for them. This means setting up a space with high-quality furniture, a desk and a comfortable office chair, and the equipment they need to work on projects, such as a laptop and Wi-Fi. This is a huge cost for your employees, but organizations can help them create it by offering them a home-office budget in the form of a perk.
While it may seem cool in movies to work remotely from just about anywhere in the world, it isn’t the case in real life. Without an efficient work from home set up, employees are likely to feel less engaged and productive in the organization. Further, it can affect your health and work-life, resulting in headaches, blurred vision, neck and back strain, poor body posture, etc.
Hence, companies must set aside a budget to ensure a proper WFH set up for their remote employees and boost their productivity, engagement, and morale when working from home.
Many people think that employee satisfaction is associated with high salaries and perks. Though these are essential factors, building meaningful connections in the organization is crucial for employees to remain happy, satisfied, and successful in their jobs.
Feeling connected in the workplace is an important indicator of employees’ and the company’s success. So, organizations must encourage their employees to connect with their peers — both inside and outside of work — so they remain engaged and motivated at work. Here’s how:
- Encourage your remote employees to treat everyone with respect and dignity.
- Ensure that your employees feel comfortable at work and your office is free from bullying and harassment.
- Set up communities and encourage remote workers to join different communities to discuss their interests with colleagues.
- Conduct regular social events for employees where they can connect with people from different teams and departments.
When your workers are working from home, it doesn’t mean they don’t have anything to say about the running of the business. This is where gathering feedback from remote employees can help. Open communication not only ensures your employees’ voices are heard but also eliminates any issues before they become huge. More so, it helps maintain morale as employees feel that you care for them.
Surveys are the most crucial tool organizations can use to ask for employees’ feedback. These are usually short multiple-choice questionnaires that only take a few minutes for the employees to complete. A survey can also include open-ended questions for gathering employees’ experiences and feedback in the organization. These questions allow HR managers to quickly gauge and make the right decisions that impact the employee experience and engagement.
You can also use an employee engagement tool, like Leena AI, to collect regular feedback from your remote workers across their lifecycle, get actionable insights, and make AI-driven employee engagement decisions. These decisions can not only prevent attrition and retain top talent in your company but also resolve challenges before they impact the overall company culture.
To know more about how an AI-driven HR tool like Leena AI can boost employee engagement in a remote working setup, schedule a demo with us today.
Key Takeaways
- Leverage efficient communication tools, like Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc., to stay connected with your remote employees. Using instant messaging apps and scheduling more video calls can further streamline communication.
- Set meaningful employee goals and align them with the organization’s goals.
- Recognizing and rewarding remote employees for their achievements is another example of employee engagement in companies.
- Organizing fun team-building activities over virtual meetings keeps them engaged and makes them feel like a valuable member of their team.
- Focus on providing upskilling and growth opportunities to your remote workers in the form of free/paid courses, webinars, and workshops.
- Give away employee perks and benefits to retain top talent in the company and motivate them to work harder. These perks include insurance plans, wellness programs, discounts from leading brands, etc.
- Promote employee health and well-being programs in the organization to boost their engagement, productivity, and motivation.
- Help employees set up dedicated WFH by providing them with a home-office fund for buying a desk, chair, laptop, Wi-Fi, and other essential tools.
- Encourage employees to foster social connections with their peers and people from different teams and departments. Hold up social events where they can meet each other or set up communities to enable them to talk about their common interests.
- Sharing surveys to gather feedback is another virtual engagement activity that helps managers know what employees feel about their company and whether or not they like how their business is being run.
Wrap Up – Automate and Measure!
Employee engagement and motivation play a crucial role as you embrace the WFH setup. However, it doesn’t happen overnight — especially when the HR professionals are required to perform multiple tasks to achieve it.
This is where investing in an AI-powered HR tool can help. These tools can automate different workflows related to employee engagement, such as communication, recognizing employees, recommending courses and training modules, asking for employee feedback, measuring engagement, calculating the ROI and so on. The best part? These automate the repetitive tasks usually done by HR managers, saving them time that they can devote to complex HR matters.
PLAN YOUR REMOTE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY WITH LEENA AI
SCHEDULE A DEMOFrequently Asked Questions on Remote Employee Engagement Activities
1. How do you engage employees working remotely?
Some employee engagement and motivation activities companies must try include:
- Ensuring seamless communication between employers and employees using effective communication tools
- Organizing virtual activities to boost collaboration among team members
- Providing growth opportunities to employees working from homes
- Conducting health and wellness sessions
- Recognizing and rewarding employees for their efforts.
2. How do you drive engagement in a virtual meeting?
Below are a few work from home activities for teams to ensure they are engaged and motivated during virtual meetings:
- Plan the agenda for conducting the meeting in advance
- Start the meeting with a fun question or poll
- Allocate about 10-15 minutes to open-mic sessions at the start of the meetings
- Play online games, such as online acapella, virtual dance-offs, building word clouds, etc.
3. How do you stay motivated and focused when working remotely?
Follow these strategies to boost your work from home motivation and productivity:
- Structure your workday to keep things on track and avoid distractions
- Set up a dedicated workspace at home
- Reward yourself for your achievements, such as having a cup of your favorite tea when you complete your report on time
- Take short breaks between working sessions — go for a walk, watch a funny video, grab a snack, etc.
4. How do you boost team morale virtually?
Following are a few work from home activities for teams to boost morale in a remote work environment:
- Stay connected with your staff and strive toward building and maintaining relationships
- Never miss an opportunity to appreciate your employees for their accomplishments
- Encourage team members to participate in virtual games, lunch breaks, etc.
- Allow employees to take regular breaks during the day.
5. What are the challenges of working from home?
Despite its incredible benefits, work from home model comes with tons of challenges, such as:
- Ineffective communication and collaboration
- Loneliness and social isolation
- Distractions at home
- Being in a different time zone than co-workers
- Blurred work-life balance
- Unclear performance metrics
6. How do you keep employees engaged and motivated?
Encourage your workforce to try the following virtual employee engagement activities during work from home:
- Ensure their personal and professional development
- Recognize your teammates for their hard work
- Provide employees with reliable remote working tools and resources
- Encourage workers to come up with innovative ideas
- Use HR tools to measure employee performance and take steps to boost WFH productivity and engagement.
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