The remote working trend took the world by a surprise when the pandemic made it impossible to operate out of the office.
Even working professionals that were craving the freedom of working from their homes, have found themselves surprised.
Working from home is not as easy as everyone expected. Besides requiring a high level of time management and stress management skills, working from home can also feel isolating.
This is especially true for the more socially active professionals that found friends in their colleagues and superiors.
All of this, combined with the uncertainty in the air, because of the ongoing corporate layoffs can easily make any professional feel disengaged with their employer.
At this time, it is important for businesses to intentionally engage their employees that are working from home.
Here are a few ways you can start doing the same:
Considering Investing In Employee Training
Employee training and professional development programs are a great way of letting your employees know that you care about them.
Not to forget, such opportunities can also be tied with definitive employment contracts that allow you to improve retention numbers.
The best part is, employee training, when provided virtually, is incredibly affordable. The pricing structure of learning management systems and other elearning tools are developed with the budgets of small businesses in mind.
A great example is the Mindflash LMS pricing structure that allows businesses to get started with employee training for just a few hundred dollars.
Use Video Conferencing For Team Meetings
Online collaborations have made team meetings more important than ever. While we are all having to attend more meetings in a virtual environment than ever before, few of us realise their importance in keeping the employees engaged.
With video conferencing, your employees will have a chance to look at familiar faces and have informal conversations, just like they did before the beginning of meetings that were held in the office.
Similarly, you can also dedicate the first few minutes of virtual meetings to candid and informal conversations, allowing your employees to alleviate some of the feeling of loneliness that they may be feeling while working alone from their home.
Encourage And Enable Communication
Effective communication is the lifeblood of successful online collaboration. By encouraging open communication between your remote employees, you will be able to not only improve the outcomes of their collaborations, but you will also be able to create a sense of community within them.
While online communications still cannot replace coffee break conversations, they can do wonders for the morale of professionals working from home and struggling with isolation and loneliness.
Moreover, simply encouraging communication is not enough, you have to actively ensure that your employees have access to all the necessary and relevant communication tools.
This means, establishing separate communication channels for group discussions, personal discussions, informal conversations and shop talk.
Doing this will not just allow your teams to communicate with more efficiency and clarity, it will also make it easier for your employees to communicate with their colleagues, superiors, and peers.
Conclusion
Besides helping your employees stay connected with the workplace and the people within, it is also a good idea to encourage them to mindfully maintain a positive work-life balance. After all, you dont want one of your precious resources to go through a mental burnout.
How are you keeping your employees engaged during these difficult times? Share your tips with us and everyone else in the comment section below.