How To Engage Remote Employees For Better Teamwork

Engaging remote workers can be a challenge, here is a guide on how to increase engagement for better teamwork.

How To Engage Remote Employees For Better Teamwork

Remote work has transformed the way businesses operate, offering flexibility and access to a global talent pool. However, it’s also made it difficult to implement company culture consistently and keep remote workers fully engaged with one another for great teamwork.

Let’s say you have workers across the globe on three different continents. In each country, there is a different work ethic and culture. Then there’s your company and what you’re trying to communicate as a brand message.

It can be difficult to marry the two. But it’s important that you do because remote workers are your brand ambassadors, and if they feel part of a unit, they do a better job at flying the flag high. 

Below are actionable steps you can take immediately to connect remote workers with your culture and encourage productive teamwork. 

Nurture your company culture

Keeping remote employees engaged in your company culture is one of the trickiest aspects of having a remote team. Without a clear understanding of what your mission statement is, the values you want to embody, and how you’ll reward a belief in those values, remote workers tend to fill in the blanks for themselves. 

Remote employee engagement with your culture is the glue that holds the whole thing together. They need to know they’re part of something greater than themselves, and they need to feel they belong to a group they care about. 

Here are some suggestions for apps you can use to keep remote employees connected and communicate culture. 

How technology can be a game changer in culture building

By using digitalization (which is already intrinsically a part of remote work) as your secret weapon for keeping employees connected, you can integrate employee engagement software. This will help you communicate culture without making a big deal out of it, and organically introduce your remote workforce to what matters. 

Culture elements

What you would like to encourage

App

Values and employee recognition 👏

An understanding of what the company values are and why they’re important. Encourage team members to recognize when others are actively implementing company values with clients and other team members.


This also ensures that all employees get recognized for what matters, and behaviors that are not in line with the company values are not promoted.


Having a peer to peer recognition culture has many benefits:


  • It boosts employee morale by making people happier

  • It increases productivity and team collaboration

  • It helps retain talents

  • It brings your company values to life


Behavioral studies tell us that human beings respond well to positive reward systems that are peer-to-peer driven. It is a need - a deep and fundamental one - to be meaningfully connected to others and recognized as part of a group. Simply put, it satisfies the remote team member’s needs on a deeply personal level. When you capture the heart, you have the person.  


 


Clappy Kudos is a simple way to start promoting employee recognition for displaying company values. 


By setting up a list of company values in the app and then allowing team members to tag values when recognizing performance, you reinforce culture organically


The app saves recognition data, which can be used for performance reviews. Can we hear a ‘thanks’ from the HR professionals?


See Clappy features

Respect, empathy, loyalty ☕

Much like recognition, social connections are what boost remote employee engagement. It is important for team members to know one another on a personal level, even if it’s only small details. 


When you understand something about a person’s background, work experiences, passions, and future desires, it cultivates respect and empathy. 


You can’t relate to someone you don’t know, and you can’t get to know someone if there isn’t an opportunity to do so. In an office environment where team members are interacting for most of the day, this happens organically, but with a virtual team, you have to carve out time for connection.


This goes beyond the need to belong, to genuine acceptance. This can take time, but it is made easier for remote workers with the use of cleverly designed engagement software. 


Alfy Matching is a way to strengthen team bonding by regularly connecting coworkers for virtual coffee breaks.


With Alfy, you can onboard new recruits, streamline collaboration, break down silos, and encourage organic mentorship as team members find inspiration from more experienced colleagues. 


You can choose which groups to connect to, and Alfy will help you find slots with the Google Calendar integration. 


Watch Alfy demo

Open communication and feedback 👂

If you want to keep remote workers engaged, you should encourage an open-door policy as a way to receive employee feedback on important issues. 


This can only be achieved by encouraging behaviors that create a safe environment where all opinions are heard and evaluated based on their value to the entire team or company. 


Employee engagement surveys are a great way to take the first steps toward creating open communication. However, they should not become the sole method for gathering information from your employees.


Employees who feel heard are more positive, productive, and open to feedback. 


Deloitte research showed that employees value a listening based culture over compensation!


Pulsy survey provides a fun way to engage employees and get information that matters. With a >90% response rate on surveys, Pulsy gives you the opportunity to proactively gather information, and even run polls. Got a team building planned and need a vote on it? Run a quick response poll. 


You’ll be able to ask for clarification on anonymous responses, analyze survey results, and measure improvement in engagement.  


With Pulsy on your side, you can:


  • Build trust and loyalty

  • Monitor employee well-being.

  • Prevent employee churn


Pulsy Use Case

Ownership and accountability

Autonomous decision making is a necessary component for taking ownership of tasks. Employees who understand their scope of responsibility are far more engaged in their tasks and willing to take responsibility for mistakes. 


Employees are more motivated to take ownership of their own tasks when they can see their entire team is doing the same.


This kind of transparency puts the “I’m doing more than my fair share” employee sentiment to rest in teams where members may be feeling overutilized. 





Stany Standup allows you to automate daily standups, check-ins, or status updates. 


You can free up hours by the need for virtual meetings so everyone can get on the same page. 


Remote teams remain flexible and autonomous by having a clear, automated process, and transparency creates trust between team members. 


Stany encourages ownership and accountability by:


  • Providing a stronger team alignment

  • Removing roadblocks that stand in the way of task completion

  • Strengthening collaboration and communication

  • Increasing the focus on priorities and goals


See Stany features

Using technology to communicate your company values creates cohesion amongst remote team members and provides business leaders with a way to keep their finger on the pulse of how their employees feel. 

Employee engagement activities such as virtual coffee breaks, peer recognition, and even birthday wishes seem deceptively simple and almost provoke skepticism about whether they’ll work - especially when you’re dealing with corporate employees.

The only response that can be given to this kind of skepticism (which is perfectly natural) is that people respond instinctively to certain drivers, no matter who they are or where they are. 

Also, more often than not, it's the simplest solution that works the best, precisely because it’s not hard to implement or keep going. 

Once you have your culture initiatives ticking along nicely, it's time to implement the next step for engaging remote employees. 

Create opportunities for personal feedback and development

Another way to engage remote workers is to arrange one-on-one meetings (virtual meetings) for performance reviews. Employees who know they will be having a discussion about their performance are more likely to take a personal interest in key performance indicators.

Direct reports appreciate the interest and input of their managers, even if it’s quarterly, because it provides an opportunity to discuss their personal well-being and development needs. 

Performance and development discussions can be highly beneficial for building trust, loyalty, and motivating employees, yet they need to be structured and productive. Here are four key factors that make a great P&D discussion:

  • Set clear expectations beforehand for the meeting: Clearly outline goals, performance metrics, and development opportunities. Give the employee time to consider the information that will be reviewed and question the accuracy of that information if need be. Transparency is non-negotiable if you want to build trust. 
  • Provide constructive feedback: Offer balanced feedback on strengths and development areas with specific examples and actionable insights. Keep the tone positive (unless there are serious performance issues), and steer clear of subjective statements that do not have evidence to back them up.
  • Encourage employee input: Allow employees to share their thoughts, opinions, and experiences. Demonstrate the culture values of open communication and careful listening. 
  • Follow up with actionable steps: Develop an actionable plan with the employee with milestones and support mechanisms. Explain what resources you can provide to help the employee meet their career goals and how you can support their development efforts. 

Better remote employee engagement is just a few steps away

Honestly speaking, and from experience, you don’t need a whole bunch of fancy initiatives to get your remote team engaged and working as an effective team. We human beings are pretty simple creatures. Even if we believe we’ve ‘evolved,’ we find ourselves gravitating pretty much towards the same things that have worked for eons. 

Technology (a remote workers domain) can help you create a culture where people thrive together, and feel passionate about their participation in something they love. No one spends hours in front of their digital devices without some pretty significant internal drivers at work in them. Fact. 

Pressing on those internal drivers is a way to build great teams because they speak to the heart of what most individuals want. But at the same time, it shouldn’t be difficult for you or your employees to participate. The simpler the better, and if it’s something you can do at a reasonable cost, all the more reason for it!

Begin with the path of least resistance (install apps like Pulsy, Clappy, and Alfy - and don’t forget Billy) and if they don’t help you encourage the values you want to see (we doubt it), you can try another approach. 

We hope this discussion has been engaging (see what we did there?). If you’re looking for more, we’ll see you at the virtual water cooler!