ENGAGING REMOTE EMPLOYEES
5 WAYS TO ENGAGE THOSE WORKING FROM HOME
Tribe recently fielded a Return to Office benchmarking survey with more than 50 large companies to see how they plan to bring people back after the Covid-19 quarantine, and what they expect the workplace’s new normal to look like. (If you’d like to see the results, email [email protected].)
It looks like many companies will continue to have a large number of employees working remotely indefinitely. Even those companies who are beginning to bring people back to the office seem to be doing so in a staggered fashion, so that most corporate employees will continue to work from home at least part of the time.
Many respondents to our survey indicated that employee engagement will be one of their top communications priorities moving forward. Meeting by video is helpful for maintaining contact and putting faces to names, but it doesn’t give us a good way to build meaningful new connections.
So, how do we recreate the coffee machine camaraderie when everyone’s drinking coffee at home? What can we do to encourage the sort of deeper work relationships with colleagues that invest in each other’s careers?
Here are five ideas that could be thought starters:
MENTOR PROGRAMS
Whether one serves as a mentor or a mentee, the relationship can foster deep connections and an investment in success at your company. It creates a reason for employees to discuss meaningful work issues and consider the best paths to success in your culture. And if it helps the mentee advance his or her career, that bodes well for retention.
VOLUNTEER ACTIVITIES
Help your employees be part of something bigger and work together to support a cause they care about. Gathering employees around local efforts to help at a community food bank, playground cleanup or animal shelter helps connect employees from different teams and functions, which can improve collaboration down the road.
WELLNESS CHALLENGES
Engage employees in some friendly competition with wellness programs, which have always been a great way to build connections that aren’t based on the work itself. They also can help humanize leadership and level the playing field. For instance, even the interns can compete against the CEO in a step competition. Teams can be based on geography, work function or types of exercise.
A REALLY GOOD INTRANET
Can your intranet compete with Instagram, Twitter and
Facebook? Probably not, but consider how effective social media platforms can be at helping people build friendships, share ideas and stay updated on the latest news. An intranet with more social features for employees to bump into each other can help build remote engagement.
MEANINGFUL WORK
There’s not much that can engage an employee more powerfully than being really excited about the work he or she is doing. You employer brand can help stir this excitement, both in terms of the vision or purpose of the company, the culture around that and the individual career growth available to employees.
HOW CAN WE HELP?
If you’d like to see Tribe’s capabilities presentation, please reach out to:
Steve Baskin
President and Chief Strategy Officer
404-256-5858
tribeinc.com