9 Ideas to Increase Employee Engagement in Remote Set-Up

Are your employees engaged?

Not many companies can answer this question straight away. That’s because they haven’t actually thought about Employee Engagement much.

But this needs to change today as only 20.8% of employees consider themselves very engaged at the workplace. Yep, more than half of your employees aren’t engaged. On top of it, a remote work environment has drastically reduced employee engagement.

Now, the question is, how do you increase employee engagement remotely?

This post will walk you through the process of increasing employee engagement at your workplace in a systematic manner. Let’s get going.

Breaking the Employee Engagement Autonomy

Entrepreneurs, the term employee engagement isn’t white or black; there’s also some gray in the equation. We mean that all employees aren’t fully engaged or disengaged in the workplace; some are also partially engaged. Here’s a simple structure of employee engagement—

Fully Engaged employees are enthusiastic and committed to their workplace.
Not Engaged employees are not engaged at their workplace, but they put time and effort into the growth of the organization.
Fully Disengaged employees are not at all engaged in the workplace.

Signs of Disengaged Employees

Before learning employee engagement improvement strategies, first, you have to detect disengaged employees in your workplace. These are a few common signs that you can use to detect disengaged workers—

Lack of passion and energy towards the work.
Reduced quality of work.
Repeatedly deadlines missing.
Poor customer feedback.
Non-participation in the company culture.
Bitterness towards colleagues or management, etc.

If you observe any of these signs among your employees, you should immediately search for innovative ideas to increase employee engagement. For your ease, we have already laid down the best ideas to boost work engagement. So, read and start implementing them now!

How to Increase your Employee Engagement Rate Remotely

Get the Right Tools

The number one reason behind low remote employee engagement is the unavailability of the right tools. Today, employees are swamped between various emails, calls, chats, and virtual meetings that they are mentally and physically exhausted. Lack of proper remote work infrastructure is even driving employees to quit their jobs.

Remote employee efficiency tools are the best investment that you can make today to engage your employees. A good remote work software has a centralized dashboard, time tracking, monitoring, and performance analyzing features.

Knowing this fact, at TrackOlap, we had developed robust remote time tracking solutions before even the down of work from home culture. In our program, we consider both employers and employees' problems related to engagement and productivity.

For employers, we have embedded real-time performance monitoring and tracking features so they can quickly know which employees are being disengaged.

For employees, we have given a self-performance tracking solution that lets them access their own productivity metrics and take action to improve them. Also, employees get transparent and easy to communicate dashboard to stay in touch with the management.

Takeaway: The first employee engagement strategy is to provide the right tools to your remote teams.

Let Communication Move Freeway

Can you guess what your working from home teams are missing the most? Yep, they are missing all those lunchroom chats, corridor talks, and drop-by-get-togethers. According to Slack, 85% of employees wish to feel closer to their colleagues.

Therefore, today you need to simplify the communication process for your remote teams. Allow them to freely communicate with their remote colleagues and talk about anything non-work-related. You can drop a casual email and start some fun conversation with your team today.

Takeaway: Put work conversations on hold for some time and allow your remote teams to talk freely.

Highlight Poor Performance

The diminishing performance curve is the first sign of poor engagement. Employees submitting work late, poor quality work, or making excuses are all signs of weak performance. Many times employees have no idea that their performance graph is going down. In this, it is employers' responsibility to pinpoint poor performance to their employees.

However, to highlight the performance metrics, you have to focus on two things—

Constant monitoring
Setting the right base

To understand the change in an individual’s performance, you have to compare the past and present figures together. And that’s only possible when you constantly monitor your employees' growth and performance. Thus, we advise all companies to use time tracking software regularly to analyze the change in performance metrics.

Here remember one thing, performance comparison metrics in work from home and office are different. For instance, in the office, you can set a fixed schedule for employees to start work, stop work, or break.

But in the remote system, you can’t fix a rigid schedule. Your employees will work on their own schedule remotely. Therefore, you should measure performance based on project completion in the remote environment rather than on how many hours they work.

It might sound a bit complicated in words. But once you start using TrackOlap time tracking software, you will automatically receive daily, weekly, or monthly performance reports. The reports are in easy to read format that you can quickly share with employees and other concerned parties.

Takeaway: If you observe a decrease in an employee’s performance, don’t hesitate to pinpoint it.

Keep an Eye on Increased PTO

If your employees take several days offs in a row, this is a clear indication of low employee engagement. Therefore, you have to monitor the leave status of every employee to ensure their engagement level.

In TrackOlap time tracking software, you’ll find a special leave management portal. Employers can check which employee has taken how many leaves in the last few days on this dashboard. On top of it, they can reject and accept leaves requested by the remote team members.

Once you find an employee taking more than usual, you should not scold him or her. In fact, you should have a brief talk and try to find out what’s bothering the employee. Based on your employee’s feedback, you should take solid actions to resolve their concerns.

Takeaway: When your employee’s PTO increases, consider it as a warning sign.

Try Flexible Work Schedule

Around 40% of employees prefer working remotely because it gave them the flexibility to select their working hours. So, if you are trying to bind your remote employee in the rigid 9 to 5 schedule, it will frustrate them.

If your business nature allows, you should give flexibility to your employees to fix their own work schedules. You should simply define how many hours a person should work daily, but let them decide when they wanted to.

For example, if one of your remote employees prefers to work at night, you shouldn’t object to it. Simply tell your employee to use time tracking software to measure when they started and stopped working. This way, you will get to know how many hours individual works.

Takeaway: Allow your remote workers to decide their own schedule.

Define your Expectations

In remote settings, employees are left alone with their devices without any motivation, which quickly makes them disengaged. On top of it, if employees don’t know what exactly you want from them, it will further fuel their disengagement.

Here we aren’t referring to general company goals defining. No, you should define every project in full detail, including timeline, special requirements, etc.

Takeaway: Set your clear expectations with your team members.

Give Attention to your Individual Employee

Don’t leave your remote employees’ alone to fend themselves off. Once you assign them a project, you should regularly follow up with them. Often ask them how many projects they have completed, do they need any help, they will be able to complete the given task on time, and so on.

When you simply leave employees to complete the project without any monitoring, it makes them lazy and demotivated. However, it doesn’t mean you should start micromanaging the project. Just random follow-ups are sufficient.

Takeaway: Constantly monitor your employees' progress and keep them engaged while working.

Recognize and Reward Employees

There’s no secret that rewards and recognition can increase employee engagement in the workplace. For that, you need to first define clear expectations and accordingly monitor your team’s performance. Notably, use the same parameters to recognize and reward your remote employees.

With this method, you can motivate your employees and show them that you appreciate their efforts. This, in return, will encourage your employees to perform better and put extra effort into their job.

Takeaway: Rewarding and recognizing can even engage your actively disengaged employees.

Final Remarks

Whether you are working remotely or in the office, your employee engagement always has to be high. That’s because one disengaged employee can create a negative and lethargic environment in your workplace.

Plus, keeping employees engaged isn’t tough. If you consider your employees’ preferences and recognize their worth, you can easily build an engagement company culture.

Before you head over to define employee engagement strategies, just drop at the TrackOlap website and book the right tools to boost your employee engagement efforts.