How willing are your team members to show up for work every day? Are they collaborating well with their colleagues to drive the company’s mission and vision? How likely are they to recommend your workplace to others? Are they flourishing in your culture? Are they likely to stay beyond a year? The answers to these questions all determine the level of your employee engagement.
Employee engagement and motivation are essential to the success of your business. If your team members aren’t engaged with your work, you’ll likely see a decrease in both morale and output – that's something that you're looking to avoid.
But what has the impact of remote work been on engagement?
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that businesses of all sizes across the globe made the move to remote work to keep their employees safe - and many companies have implemented the hybrid model for good. This has meant that teams have had to adapt. With less time spent in the office, it’s arguably more difficult to build a distinctive company culture which leads to high staff engagement. But it can certainly be done.
Tips on boosting engagement from business leaders
In the context of decreasing employee engagement due to remote and hybrid work challanges, we wanted to share some tips with you on how to make your communication absolutely stellar in a remote set-up, and in doing so reduce your turnover, boost morale and help your team’s productivity sky-rocket!
1. Select the best communication tools for your needs
Effective engagement begins with excellent communication and you cannot achieve this without the right tools. Above all else, you need your comms to be motivating and to rise above the mass messaging clutter.
Engagy Designs is an end-to-end service created to personalize and brand your SharePoint intranet which means - all the content you create and have created in the past!. The tool can be implemented and managed by any manager, without the need for developers!
“In the modern, remote workplace it can be difficult to get your team’s attention and it’s easy for internal emails and messages to get lost in the flurry of communication. That’s why creating visuals that bring your comms to life can make such a crucial difference to the levels of engagement!”
Agnieszka Kropacz, coach and consultant at Kingmakers
2. Build a sense of belonging
In the post-pandemic world, creating a strong company culture can be tricky. But culture plays such an important role in employee engagement and retention. In fact, according to PwC’s global culture survey of 3,200 leaders and employees worldwide, 69% of organizations that adapted amid the pandemic say that culture offers a competitive advantage.
Culture is all about building a sense of belonging and this can be done through delivering a consistent experience through your internal communication channels. It effectively means that all the channels you communicate through, including your intranet, your chat tool, your company emails and your presentations, should work in tandem to offer your remote workers what they need.
Engagy Designs offers exactly this. It enables you to integrate new Cloud Services such as Sharepoint Online and Yammer and brand them with your company’s branding requirements arising from the visual identity guidelines.
3. Empower your employees
If you run a remote business of a certain size, you’ll know that each department has different needs, meaning that for certain elements of work, there shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all approach. That’s why it’s a good idea to engage your employees in communication creation. A recent report from Salesforce has revealed that, “employees who feel their voice is heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work.”
Empowering your employees means making sure that they’re involved in the decision-making about not only their own personal targets, but also those of the team. It also means giving them access to all the information and tools they need to do their job properly, and encouraging them to voice their views on work-related topics without fear of negative consequences.
Engagy Designs enables you to use department or team-driven designs to satisfy the individual needs of each company function or region.
“I’ve found that the key to effective employee engagement is making sure that every team member’s voice is heard. And you need the right tools to make this happen as this is not something that can be just spontaneous! Too often there are employees who are scared to speak out, and they shouldn’t be. ”
Yuliia Pysmenna, Chief Operating Officer at Tutlo
4. Work on that human touch!
Working away from the office means that we lack those great moments of human interaction over lunch or while waiting at the coffee machine. That’s all the more reason to make sure that we don’t forget about what makes us human. Nobody wants to be seen as just another cog in a corporate machine. Employees want to be valued in and of themselves - for who they are as a person. That’s why the key to effective management in dispersed teams is remembering what's important to each team member, and celebrating their achievements and successes.
Engagy Designs allows you to effectively deliver the right visual messaging around moments that matter.
“It goes without saying that the more you invest into each individual, the more they will give back to your company. The human touch should never be underestimated, particularly in a remote work environment.”
Klaudia Cegieła, HR Manager at ICAN Institute
It’s all about a holistic approach to internal communication
A successful and effective remote work culture should be formed around each of the above elements. The idea is that although your team is dispersed over different countries and time zones, they work together in a commonly agreed way and that there is a sense of belonging. This can be achieved through brilliant, visual communications that truly inspire your colleagues, regardless of the country in which they live and work, and their job function. Do this effectively and you’ll reap the rewards in the shape of engaged, happy and productive employees. If you’re looking for a new way to manage your Digital Workplace and to make your communication stand out with amazing visuals, take a look at Engagy Designs!