How to Engage Remote Employees: 4 Must-Try Strategies

The number of remote workers has steadily increased over the past two decades – but with the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, this trend accelerated rapidly. For example, in 2019, around 4.1% of U.S. workers worked from home. By 2021, this number had more than doubled, reaching 9.6% of all U.S. employees.

The future outlook suggests that remote work will become established. A recent study by Upwork predicts that by 2025, more than 36.2 million Americans – about 22% of U.S. workers – will be working remotely.

The acceptance of remote work as a viable reality means that HR managers need to strategically consider how to motivate remote employees in their daily work. They need to feel connected with their teams, departments, and the entire organization.

Read on to learn strategies for motivating your employees while working from home, increasing their satisfaction, and boosting their productivity.

Strategy 1: Improve internal communication

Communication is crucial for enhancing the motivation and engagement of all employees, whether they are working from home or not. Keep in mind that communicating with employees working from home requires a little extra effort. Therefore, it is important to be especially committed, create additional opportunities, and make communication with these employees a priority in the company.

Here are some ideas you can incorporate into your communication strategy.

Use instant messaging

Instant messaging tools like Slack, Teams, or Google Chat may seem like an additional distraction at first glance. However, they are a real boon, especially for remote employees. They are faster and simpler than emails while also allowing group discussions in the home office. With instant messaging, you can easily stay in touch with colleagues both in the office and beyond, creating equal opportunities by overcoming physical distance as an obstacle.

Optimize Your Online Meetings

Online meetings are important because they enable direct communication with employees working from home – a crucial factor in strengthening their connection to the company. Regular check-ins are a proven method to ensure coordination and provide an opportunity to discuss upcoming tasks after the meeting. It is important to focus on best practices to make your meetings as efficient and productive as possible. Answering some of the following questions can help you decide how your company wants to organize its online meetings.

• Camera culture. Should your employees keep their cameras on during meetings or only when they want to speak?
• Meeting frequency. How often should leaders schedule meetings for their remote teams? Are daily, weekly, or biweekly meetings sufficient? Keep in mind that teams with strong collaboration may require more frequent meetings. If your remote team members are far apart and in different time zones, you should create a rotation schedule to ensure they can reach someone (or a group of people) during their working hours.
• Efficiency. What time guidelines should leaders follow for their team meetings? The goal is to find a balance between having enough time for the tasks at hand and enough time for exchange and informal conversations among remote team members.

Strategy 2: Improve Engagement

It may be impossible to replicate the sense of community in an office for remote employees exactly, but that’s no reason not to try. In addition to effective and continuous communication, it is important to ensure that remote employees interact in more diverse ways and with more people than just their direct supervisors or team members.

Make the onboarding of remote employees unforgettable.  

When you hire remote employees, the first days at the company are particularly important. They probably come to your office or another central location for training with other new colleagues. This is a great opportunity to get to know the new colleagues in person. An interactive onboarding experience becomes impactful and memorable this way. It creates connections that go beyond the boundaries of teams and departments and last for a long time.

Take advantage of coworking spaces!  

Maybe you can't afford a satellite office or don't need one at all. But renting a few desks in a coworking space can be affordable.  

This allows remote employees to network, collaborate, develop a sense of belonging, and escape the daily routine at home. Many providers even allow you to customize your workspace with branding, refreshments, and equipment at no extra cost (as long as you cover the cost of the equipment yourself).

Organize extracurricular activities

The Internet makes business dealings over long distances easier and more efficient, while at the same time enabling billions of people worldwide to connect socially. As an employer, you manage a company community and have the opportunity to further develop it.

Whether it's a book club, fantasy football league, online multiplayer gaming tournament, or simply an internal social network for sharing experiences and connecting outside of work hours – you can promote your employees' social interactions and thereby increase their engagement during the workweek.

Strategy 3: Show Appreciation

The last strategy is the culmination of the other two. Recognizing and appreciating the work of your remote employees is the most direct way to show them your gratitude. Unfortunately, employers often neglect this area or make recognition too general and impersonal to have a real impact.

Individual recognition can have a tremendous impact on making your remote employees feel seen and valued. This can be as simple as a digital thank-you card with a message that includes their name and their importance to your company, or an inexpensive but thoughtfully chosen personal gift. Even small gestures can make a big difference.

Send a survey

Here’s a tip that has proven useful for our employees at IceHrm: We use a questionnaire for every new employee that helps us learn personal information and preferences such as T-shirt size, hometown, and favorite candy. It may seem trivial, but when it comes to celebrating an employee anniversary or a special occasion, we have all the necessary information to give the gesture a personal touch.

Consider introducing a home office allowance

Whether it’s a simple donation of high-quality office supplies or generously equipping each remote employee with a standing desk for their home office – every cent you invest in improving the working conditions of your remote employees pays off twice: it feels like a gift and also boosts the effectiveness of your remote team.

Treat your remote employees like VIPs in the office

For remote employees, going to the office can already be a special challenge. Every gesture of appreciation is therefore a win. It can be as simple as having lunch together with the department when a remote employee makes the trip to the office, or simply bringing donuts in the morning – and remembering their favorite kind.

Tailored Services for Remote Employees

Another tip that has proven beneficial for the IceHrm leadership team is holding special Q&A sessions exclusively for remote employees. These take place in addition to our regular company updates and give remote employees the opportunity to speak directly with the leadership team. This is just one way for a company to show remote teams that it understands the unique challenges faced by remote employees. Other ideas could include location-independent health insurance or subsidized broadband connections.

Strategy 4: Measuring the Engagement of Remote Employees

All of the above suggestions aim to strengthen the connection between employers and remote employees. Regardless of your decision, measuring their effectiveness is a challenge that you should take into account—especially for cost-intensive initiatives.

When measuring engagement, the goal is to understand the needs and concerns of remote employees. This provides you with a framework to address these issues. By keeping an eye on your remote employees' engagement throughout the year, you can track morale and determine whether your initiatives are having an impact. At IceHrm, two tools have proven to be very effective for this: eNPS and pulse surveys.

eNPS

The Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a survey with just two questions to measure employee satisfaction. Using a simple scoring system and keyword analysis, employers receive a quick performance evaluation as well as deeper insights into the reasons for their employees' satisfaction. This allows you to track satisfaction over time and identify what is going well and where you can further improve employee satisfaction.

Pulse surveys

Pulse surveys are even simpler: short multiple-choice or yes/no questionnaires that can be completed by employees in just a few minutes, but can be conducted quickly to capture reactions and help leaders make the right decision when a decision could impact the employee experience.

Sustained remote employee engagement is achieved through a deliberate strategy of communication, connection, and individualized appreciation. The successful implementation of these four strategies requires more than good intentions; it demands an integrated system to manage and measure the effort. IceHrm serves as the central hub for executing this engagement strategy. The Communication tools facilitate instant messaging and feedback (Strategy 1). IceHrm's Surveys and Polls function is ideal for conducting both eNPS and pulse surveys (Strategy 4), providing the crucial data needed to track morale and measure the impact of engagement initiatives. By leveraging IceHrm, HR can efficiently prioritize and execute actions that make remote employees feel seen, valued, and deeply connected to the organization.