Remote working gradually gained prevalence worldwide, especially with today’s condition. Almost every company has moved to some form of remote work setup despite it being a chartered territory for many. Aside from reducing the risk of contracting diseases outside because of several reasons, remote working proved to be a more effective working set-up for most employees. It also provides various critical benefits not just for companies, but also for employees’ lives.
For employers, the ability to recruit and retain employees from any geographical location is crucial in stacking the company with talented workers without requiring them to work on-site. On the other hand, remote staffs also benefit from this setup. In America, roughly 10% of workforces are made up of remote workers. That’s why cost-cutting trends like remote working significantly offer positive benefits to them, which also spice up the competition in the corporate world.
Remote workers can now evade the stress-inducing and time-consuming daily commute, utilize the flexibility of their time wisely and save costs by working from home. Due to these benefits, remote workers are expected to thrive more in their respective jobs. As a team leader or an employer, you can seek the help of online service providers like Easy Agile especially if you’re looking for ways on how to properly boost remote worker’s morale and motivate them to thrive in this setup.
In this article, you’ll learn more about the remote working setup and ways to help remote teams progress.
Relevance of Remote Working in Today’s Time
Healthy employees aren’t only happy employees. They’re also more productive and engaged in their jobs. In this aspect, remote working is crucial to make them exactly like that. Keeping your employees happy and contented with their jobs, result in fewer sick days and a lower productivity rate for the business. However, remote working also has its downsides.
By losing the normal office environment, remote workers may experience feelings of isolation and struggle to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Such scenarios may significantly affect workers’ health and well-being. Opportunely, there’s a variety of options you can choose from to counter the negative effects of this situation. After all, the only things that create a huge difference in this setup are the ways and the strategies you utilize to properly support your team.
To help you more, below are five helpful ways you can do to make remote teams thrive in a remote working set-up.
1. Invest Time in Building Trust
One of the most prominent threats against a worker’s motivation involves micromanaging. To avoid this mistake, building rapport with your employees and trusting their abilities by learning about their work styles may be of great help for you to boost their morale. Similarly, building trust among your people and making sure that they’re following your lead out of respect and not fear is important to produce harmony in the workplace. You may also use a time scheduling tool to allocate enough time with your employees easily.
The need to constantly know if remote workers are doing their job properly is common in micromanaging employers. They usually tightly monitor their remote employee’s online time and send out messages which do nothing to promote and sustain a healthy work relationship.
To keep your remote employees motivated, you must show trust in their remote workforce by allowing them to take responsibility for their designated works and sharpen their time management skills. After all, the key to motivation is trust, and rapport helps your remote team to easily approach you with any work-related issues.
2. Promote Open Communication
Promoting healthy and open communication among your remote team is one of the essential keys to motivate them and boost their morale. For example, when you don’t get to see someone in the office every day, it becomes essential for you to find ways to have constant and stable communication with such employees. Even conducting video conferences may be a great help to you. To effectively pull this off, make your team feel that they can talk to you without hesitation by being approachable and accommodating of their concerns.
This is because more than half of human communication is non-verbal. Showing visual clues is more helpful than merely guessing what other people may be feeling through their voices. Video call, in particular, tells you more than an audio call or chat can ever reveal. In this aspect, remote meeting software, such as Skype, Zoom, and other similar sites proved to be more effective platforms to use, aside from requiring zero to lesser expenses.
Utilizing these tools and conducting virtual meetings continuously make employees feel motivated and connected, aside from their affordability and availability in the market.
To make your employees feel at ease with your presence, you must lower down your guards and try to build a culture of adding people on calls. Treat remote workers equally inside and outside the office premises, and engage the remote worker into the meeting when required and relevant. You may also incorporate a bit of humor in your communication, as this is workplace etiquette. After all, a little humor can go a long way in keeping lines of communication between your employees and it can open and establish goodwill on your team.
3. Cultivate Growth Mindset
Inculcating the philosophy of growth mindset among your remote team allows them to reach out for new training programs and always strive for development and change. This may also help them to open up their remote workplace to new opportunities in terms of professional and personal aspects. No matter what your position is in your job or where you are in your career, having a growth mindset will make you realize the importance of providing extra room for developments and changes.
Apart from this, cultivating a growth mindset is a highly motivating alternative for your remote workers, especially for a remote workforce, as it mainly focuses on their performance goals and personal development to strengthen the company’s stability.
4. Provide the Right Tools
Lack of adequate technical tools may end up interrupting the workflow of your employees. Consequently, an ill-equipped team won’t be able to finish and submit their works on time. For instance, miscommunication in the workplace has become prevalent, especially for remote employees and most of them don’t have access to the IT team.
To avoid miscommunication and low-quality works, remote employees need a good internet connection, a dependable email, reliable time-tracking tools, adequate remote communication tools, project management tools, a direct messaging platform, video conferencing tools, and efficient shareable files to do their jobs effectively.
After providing enough tools for your remote employees, it’ll further allow lively collaboration and open communication among them, which are essential keys to motivate them for subsequent success.
5. Give Feedbacks
Nothing can ever motivate a remote worker that receiving constructive feedback on their work, be it good or bad. Providing regular feedback on your employee’s works will keep them more motivated and goal-driven as they’re able to learn of their weak points and strong points. Also, this helps them align expectations and objectives with level-up performances. You should also make sure to provide positive feedback along with your comments on their works when warranted.
Final Thoughts
This pandemic forced every person, even a lot of companies to get used to the new normal set-up even in the workplace. Particularly, the prevalence of remote working setup as the new trend in the corporate world entails various advantages and disadvantages to both employers and employees.
To better help you manage your remote team well and make them thrive more, you can try several helpful ways, such as building trust among your workers, promoting open communication, cultivating a positive mindset, providing them with the right tools, and giving them constructive feedbacks may significantly help you motivate them better to thrive more.