In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, more of America’s workforce is working from home than ever before. However, although many living rooms are now functioning as offices, burnout remains a serious threat to the average worker.
As a business leader, you want to support your team and keep your employees engaged, productive, and happy. But when your employees are working remotely, it can seem difficult — or even impossible — to truly support them. Fortunately, even from a distance, there are many effective ways to help remote employees thrive and avoid burning out.
- Don’t Micromanage
If you want your remote employees to stick around and do good work, you should not micromanage them. Avoid the temptation to monitor every minute of their workdays and instead focus on results. Allow your employees to enjoy some autonomy, and you will see the positive effect of this reflected in their work.
- Provide Positive Feedback
Remote employees don’t have the benefit of sharing a workspace with a supervisor who can show them they are appreciated. So, if you aren’t intentional about reaching out to your work-from-home employees and providing positive feedback, they can quickly feel as if their hard work is going unnoticed. To keep everyone feeling valued, try to reach out to a different team member every day, and provide them with some positive feedback.
- Stay Connected
Working from home is a dream for some but a nightmare for others. For many extroverted individuals (and even some introverted ones), working remotely creates feelings of loneliness and isolation. To combat this, try to keep your teams as connected as possible. Host video meetings, create virtual team-building activities and do what you can to keep communication lines open for everyone.
- Talk About Burnout
Lastly, it’s vital for leaders to be discussing burnout with their teams. Let your employees know that you value their well-being. Encourage them to talk to you if their stress levels get too high so that you can work through it together. The less taboo the topic becomes, the better it is for your organization as a whole.
As you can see, there are still many ways that business leaders can show up and support their teams throughout this era of remote work. If you follow these steps, you will be more likely to lead a team of fully engaged remote workers.