Engaging with your remote staff is an integral part of keeping your team working in top shape. Essentially you want to treat them like your in-office staff, making them feel like they’re contributing to the team effort. Here are a few tips to achieving that.
COMMUNICATION
By communicating with your remote staff you make them feel like a real part of the team. Being isolated isn’t good for morale and might lead to attrition. The easiest way to do this is by updating them. Sharing company news and allowing them to voice their opinions on certain matters gives them a voice and makes them feel like they’re truly a part of the team even without physically being there. Another good way to open the lines of communication is to have a team chat where both remote and physical employees can mingle with each other. Having one chat for more social things and one strictly for business will help cut down goofing off while boosting communication lines.
Elaborating on the communication tools, having a company Slack, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Zoom, or any other chat platform allows for greater communication. It’s great at giving your remote staff a voice. It allows them to ask questions, voice opinions, and communicate with the entire team. It gives everyone greater visibility within the team leading to better cohesion and collaboration.
SETTING MILESTONES/GOALS
Make sure you set your staff up for success. By giving clear and measurable goals everyone will know exactly what is expected of them and if they’re succeeding. This also allows you to properly calibrate your remote staff as it will show you where their strengths and weaknesses are. By helping them overcome their weaknesses and polishing their strengths it shows that you care about their success within your company. Once everything is ironed out and they’re constantly hitting their goals, you would have fostered loyalty within all your staff.
EMPOWER YOUR STAFF
By giving your remote staff the ability to work semi-autonomously, it shows them that you trust them. Allow them to make decisions on small tasks without being micromanaged. Delegate certain tasks out to remote staff and let them handle it, when the task is complete all someone has to do is check it to see if it is up to standards. By letting them control how a task is done, it opens up opportunities for staff to prove themselves.
Put in the leg work with your remote staff, the end result is having a team member that is both successful and loyal. Everyone has a dream team in their heads that will lead them to success, many people think this is a goal to reach for and never to actually achieve, but by nurturing your staff and molding them into the exact members that you need, you’ll eventually achieve that goal. By putting in the time and effort your remote staff will become successful and sustainable assets to your company.