5 Simple Tips for Keeping your Remote Team Engaged

Useful guest post by Vaishali Badgujar, a digital marketing specialist at Time Doctor. She is an inbound marketing expert & specializes in SEO.

Keeping your employees engaged is hardly a piece of cake. According to Gallup, only 13% of employees worldwide are actually engaged.

Keeping a remote team engaged can be even more difficult. Working from home, without your team to motivate you, can be tough for many people – even those who are star performers. A globally distributed team faces several other challenges that contribute to disengagement, low performance and attrition.

Here are five simple ways to keep your remote team engaged.

1. Simplify Their Payments

One of the biggest challenges in globally distributed teams is payment processing. Banks and most payment providers also charge extremely high fees as transaction charges and currency conversion charges, which can range anything between 5% to 20%.

No one is thrilled about having such a huge chunk of their salary deducted, just for transaction purposes. The solution is to use a payments service like Transferwise, which is up to 8x cheaper than a bank or a PayPal transaction.

2. Provide Clear Directions

In a remote team, where communication can be a challenge, task clarity is often the casualty.

When your team members aren’t clear about tasks, they will naturally make mistakes. That’s bad for productivity as well as your employees’ morale. It also damages relationships between managers and their teams. Bosses become unhappy with their team members, who in turn blame the bosses for not giving clear directions.

The solution is to use social project management tools like ClickUp, which is based on Project Management 2.0 principles. ClickUp makes it super-simple to assign tasks, give detailed task descriptions, clarify doubts through an in-built commenting system, maintain visibility over project and task statuses and much more.

3. Hold Regular Video Calls

One of the biggest drawbacks of remote teams can be a feeling of isolation from the team. So how do you make up for the lack of physical proximity?

Hold regular team video calls over Zoom or Skype.

If you have daily scrum meetings, why not do it over video? Non-verbal communication plays a huge role in communication and facilitating a feeling of camaraderie. Video calls can go a long way in making your team feel more closely knit.

4. Avoid Email

Communication is the biggest challenge face by remote employees. But you can significantly mitigate this problem by avoiding email.

Using email for internal communication leads to messages get unnoticed, and overflowing inboxes which waste valuable time. Instead, use tools like Slack which are specifically designed for internal team communication. Slack has multiple channels for different topics of group conversations as well as one-one messaging which eradicates all the confusion that email suffers from.

5. Use Collaboration Tools

When someone is not sitting right next to you, collaborating on tasks can be quite confusing – leading to frustration.

That’s why you should use cloud-based tools which allow your team to collaborate on different sorts of files. Use Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365 to easily collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. and store all your files in Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox.

The easier you make it for your people to do their work, the happier they will be with their jobs.

Conclusion

These simple tips can go a long way in keeping your employees motivated, productive and happy. Implement them and your team’s performance will soar.

Edited and prepared by Amy Murphy, Journalism student from DCU.

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking