A positive work environment starts with efficient team workers. Over the past years, remote work has become a significant way of life for many of us. Companies are globally adopting this new style of work. This is no longer considered new territory, as businesses are quite used to the idea.
Across the world, 71% of working people work remotely at least one day a week, although the struggle exists when it comes to managing a remote team. The days have gone when organizations had to follow an office-based work culture. Now technology has emerged and helps teams to stay connected.
Remote work offers employees the freedom to work from home. It comes to several advantages, such as:
- No commute and breakfast or lunch expenses.
- It increases remote workers’ retention and improves their productivity.
- Remote work offers work-life balance
- It allows for easy recruitment and flexible work
With short notice, organizations can send their employees to remote working and set up remote work protocols. It provides a chance for employees to use their time of commute or lunch to practice self-care.
For many people, remote work has become a way of life. While Covid-19 has taken lives to another pole in this pandemic situation, therefore, remote working has become necessary.
But there is a challenge interms of ensuring employee motivation and remaining energetic while working. Here are crucial ideas that can help you to support your remote workers.
1. Communication Is Key
With a remote workforce, in this incredibly digital generation, humans crave collaboration and interaction. Usually, remote workers feel that they are on an island. With the lack of in-person interaction, miscommunication can become a recurring issue, and, in this way, remote workers may feel languorous.
It is vital to make your workers feel that you are there with them. You need an effective communication channel for collaboration. Email is no more an efficient way for remote team communication. So, it is best to use Slack or Skype channels to help workers and employers stay connected. Begin team meetings by allowing people to share their innovative ideas.
When it comes to motivating your remote workforce, direct supervisor communication is essential but doesn’t underestimate communication value. Establish a process to bubble up new ideas and education on targets and KPIs to help focus efforts and provide your employees shared goals to meeting around.
2. Build Trust
It is necessary to trust your employees and remain concerned when they want to know how to stay energized at work; the very first thing that comes to their mind at the beginning of the day is ‘How to stay energetic all day?’. However, it is tough for both managers and remote workers to trust each other; mostly, you can’t see physically what people are doing. Managers worry that workers aren’t completing tasks, besides remote workers have different concerns, such as getting paid on time.
So, to deal with this, you can build trust by being transparent about a few aspects such as payment timelines, project expectations, pay rate, status updates on projects, working hours, and more. Moreover, it is significant to know each other, be responsive and reliable, get the right collaboration tools, and avoid micromanagement.
If your remote employees know that you trust them, they can stay motivated and energetic all day. Help your team to figure out what they are required to do. Set yourself and the team up for success by clearly explaining the tasks and understanding how you will measure success.
3. Allow Frequent Feedback
It is equally significant to keep frequent two-way collaboration and feedback channels open between employees and managers with remote working. Just like any workforce, you should allow open and honest communication and feedback that must be actionable and trackable feedback.
If you’re wondering how to keep employees motivated, regular feedback helps. This is because it is crucial to keeping your team engaged and motivated; it helps align objectives and expectations with performance and shows that you are concerned about their work. Make sure to provide positive feedback that can help them to be more productive.
4. Provide Right Tools
Due to a lack of technical tools, a team can’t submit their works on time and interrupt the workflow. Communication becomes a significant issue when the individual is a remote employee and unable to access the IT team.
While remote working, there can be many issues a worker can face, so make sure you provide them all the essentials needed. Ensure that your team has technology like laptops, mobile devices, fast internet connections, and software. Moreover, remote employees need project management tools, video conferencing tools, direct messaging platforms, time tracking tools, and ways to share and download files to do their job efficiently.
For this, you can use a management tool like Status Hero. It is a platform that reminds team members to give quick ‘Check-in’ details about their work so you can see everyone is up to at any given time.
You can use another tracking tool like Toggl to help you maintain and improve turnaround times and pinpoint issues. This platform allows you to assign tasks to a suitable person and let you know which member is time-efficient.
Thus, it is not acceptable to assume that all of your employees have all the things; as a manager, it is your duty to check on it.
5. Employee Recognition Program
Introducing an employee recognition program can make your remote employee feel like they are part of a team, and their contribution matters in a remote setup.
In this way, the remote employees don’t just remain a name in the email address book. When workers are valued they remain engaged, and this increases retention and they contribute more to their company.
6. Adapt Growth Mindset
A growth mindset can help to realize that there is room to stretch for more, no matter where you stand in the future. Instructing the philosophies of a growth mindset enables employees to reach out for new training programs.
It opens new opportunities personally and professionally for remote for the workforce. This way, the environment can be more motivating, making you more energetic.
7. Focus on Work Product or Hours Product
With a remote workforce, it is significant to focus on goals accomplished as compared to hours worked. It allows them the flexibility to care for their family and other important factors. It lets the remote employees perform at their most productive time instead of focusing on other things.
Essential tasks are hard to understand when working remotely; however, remote workers should have the ability to prioritize their tasks and work accordingly. Therefore, set remote team for success by clearly explaining the tasks and precisely understanding how you will measure success.
Understand your remote team and provide them with the freedom to get their work done on the schedule more than hours product; it helps them be productive.
Help Remote Workers to Stay Motivated and Energetic!
These are some of the motivating ideas as remote working is the future of the modern workplace; the sooner a company prepares for it, the better it is for employees. Employees’ motivation plays a significant role during such transitions and continues to be crucial for team productivity and enhance their remote work set up.
It is substantial to remember that motivating a remote team doesn’t happen overnight in a new type of environment, so help your remote worker in everything to stay motivated and energetic. It is a long-term investment that requires consistency and support.