With COVID-19 taking a grip over the world, organizations across the globe were forced to make working remotely the new normal. But, many are finding it challenging to engage their employees and keep their morale high. In this blog, I will discuss how you can engage your employees better while they work from home or remotely.
Working remotely is the new normal
Working from home or remotely is the new normal as COVID-19 spreads across the world forcing employers and employees to adopt new strategies to keep their businesses going.
Since the first wave, many employers quickly decided to help employees work from home. They implemented systems and processes that ensured employees can work effectively without losing their usual productivity.
While new systems were introduced, there were also new challenges like keeping employees engaged. When working in an office, employees regularly interact with each other. Now that they are working from home, it is important to keep their morale high and ensure they are engaged in productive ways.
Let’s look at some ways to keep your employees engaged while they work from home.
1. Create plans or goals that are meaningful with well-defined outcomes
When working remotely or at home, there is a tendency to drift away. Employees find it hard to focus if the plans and goals are not well laid out. Therefore, leaders and managers must chalk out plans that are not just for a week, but a month in advance so that employees know well in advance what is expected of them. This is a crucial activity that lets employees plan their tasks with clear goals both short-term and long-term in mind. The outcomes for activities need to be defined as well.
2. Communication is the key
Communication is crucial to keep employee engagement high.
It is very important to keep communicating with the employees regularly during the day. When everyone is working remotely, no communication or little communication can quickly bring down their engagement and enthusiasm. It is important not only to communicate about the company’s short-term goals but also to communicate about any help or assistance that the employees may require during the tough times that the world is in.
3. Make collaboration more efficient
Collaboration between individuals and teams is a good way to drive engagement.
As teams work remotely, they must collaborate better. If they are in the same place as in an office setting, collaboration is easy. But, when they are all spread out and working from home, it can become challenging. Managers and team leads must ensure that teams use the appropriate tools to collaborate, make better, and timely decisions on both project and non-project tasks. It’s no longer about an individual employee. All employees need to collaborate to ensure business continuity and joint problem-solving.
Teams can use tools for videoconferencing and discussions that help them collaborate better. It’s the responsibility of the leaders to ensure that collaboration is effective. Employee engagement will be more when collaboration is better between the teams.
4. Being Proactive
Being proactive is an important way to drive employee engagement.
Leaders and managers should be more proactive and attentive to the needs of their employees. Employees are working remotely, so they need to anticipate and be proactive to ensure that problems and risks are minimized. Some ways of being proactive are helping employees learn a new skill or solve problems in a better or smarter way.
5. Encourage sharing of useful knowledge
Sharing is caring. A good way to keep employees engaged is by sharing good reads or knowledge that helps employees learn new things.
Employees must be provided with useful information and tips on various aspects of work while they work remotely.
Conclusion
To conclude, employees need to be engaged in better and smarter ways while working from home. As countries grapple with the pandemic, organizations need to adapt to the new ways of working and keep their employees engaged and their morale high.
Tesseract Learning is at the forefront of providing learning solutions for companies looking to engage their employees better. We have created courses that will help employees get useful information and tips on working from home. You can find the courses here.
To know more about how we can help you mitigate the new challenges posed by COVID-19, write to me at <suresh@tesseractlearning.com>.