With the continuous advancement in technology, remote work is not only becoming more common but is also enjoying a great deal of popularity. There are surveys which have determined that people working as remote workers are not just happier, but tend to be more productive as well. This will never be bad news for the employer.
There are two sides to everything though, and remote working is no exception. Not working in a traditional kind of an environment has a different bundle of hurdles, like time management and productivity issues, and even potential isolation. Lack of engagement is also an aspect to be looked into while dealing with remote work.
As an employer, if you are liberal enough to offer your workers a certain degree of flexibility, you can implement many strategies to ensure a higher level of engagement.
A large number of remote and telecommuting workers select their home as the perfect place to complete their essential business activities. While there is no disagreement about comfort and convenience, having a home office poses quite a few problems.
To start with, there are many distractions where the people without a perfect sense of discipline will not be able to handle on their own without hampering their work. To add more to it, a home office can also prove to be restrictive in the context of available technologies.
For a remote workforce, coworking space is a really great option.
Studies and reports have claimed that coworking increases the overall effectiveness and happiness in people at work. The work culture feels more like a community that is devoid of the extra bit of pressure which comes from spending long hours at an office. Coworking provides a much more informal approach and also gives a lot of opportunities to network with professionals from various walks of life.
Coworking also brings about a boost in enhancing the creativity levels of the workforce. Creativity is not just limited to graphic designers and writers, but can also help managers, accountants and even team leaders to come up with out of the box solutions related to the critical business problems they come across.
Companies actively engaging to help their remote workers find a great place to work generally get to ensure pretty high levels of engagement and increased productivity too. It is an important reason why getting a coworking membership will make much more sense under a specified employment arrangement.
One of the most significant issues which the remote workers deal with is the feeling of isolation. Isolation often leads to a lack of engagement which might become difficult to address.
This is why it is crucial that there is constant and healthy communication with remote workers. There are many forms for doing it. A weekly video chat, getting involved in the brainstorming sessions through live streaming, or even meeting them with regular schedules are some of the ways by which communication takes place.
As an employee, it is imperative that he or she feels like a member of the company he is working. Being familiar with the company’s culture and having an interaction with the other team members help out to cut the gap and instill a sense of belongingness missing in some of the remote workers.
There also need to be specific guidelines and values leading the stream of communication with the freelancers or remote workers. Having solid guidelines in place will give a very clear message to the people as to what the company is all about. If corporate and personal values come out to be similar, it will be easier for remote workers to have a high level of engagement.
A beautiful assortment of stimuli can be considered as the most amazing and practical possibilities to overcome the issue of a lack of engagement.
Employee recognition programs should be conducted in a way that they apply both to the in house employees and also the remote workers. On your part, it is essential to be sure and has clear guidelines about the kind of performance which will be recognized, along with the specified bonuses for every recognition.
It is not necessary that a reward needs to be huge with the motive of boosting the engagement levels of employees. Even a corporate company mail has enough potential to motivate the employees, by recognizing their accomplishments for a certain period, say for a month.
Investing on a considerable extent for training the employees is also a good idea. Professionally conducted qualification programs imbibe a feeling of loyalty and assist the workers in increasing their productivity with these enhanced practices.
The same opportunities can also be provided to the remote workers as well.
Effectiveness and engagement are two different concepts linked very closely with each other. The best thing is that there are many tools which can help you measure these concepts and determine whether telecommuting is providing with the desired degree of output.
Progress reports, activity logs, and automatic tracking can be beneficial if you want to learn about the behavior and work practices of telecommuting employees. Through this data, you can analyze the kind of changes needed and the enhancements to give out better results ahead.
Asking the employees to report their tasks is one of the most incorrect approaches. No employee will report a shortcoming in the achievement of tasks that easily. Some of them can even go the extent of exaggerating their jobs. In other words, such reports will have a lot of errors.
Having an excellent remote workforce engagement is directly proportionate to developing the right kind of culture. There is no denying that you will have to make some efforts on your part, but rest assured that this effort will bear good fruit in the coming times. OR, you can choose to only bear the good fruits and leave rest of the hard work to us 🙂
