7 Ways To Keep Your Remote Team Engaged

It is well known that one of the main challenges that managers and businesses face is keeping their employees engaged.

This can be even more challenging when their teams are working remotely.

Without making an effort to bring your team together to stay motivated, there is a risk that standards will drop, effort will decrease, collaboration among employees will be lost, and your team’s overall quality and production will diminish over time.

This post will share some of the ways managers can help keep their remote teams engaged.

The Problems Managers Face When Their Teams Work From Home

When teams are working remotely, there are a few potential issues that managers need to consider.

These can include:

A lack of collaboration
Teams communicating less often
Employees feeling isolated from the team
Employees lacking motivation

These challenges are common among remote teams and can impact the efficiency of the team, but that doesn’t mean they cannot be solved with a few tips and tricks.

What Does An Engaged Team Look Like

Committed: They want the best for the company and will align its goals with their own.

Positive Attitude: A can-do attitude with minimal complaints about tasks. They’re happy to work with various people and will always try something new.

Willing to go the extra mile: They are open and willing to do what is needed to complete projects and meet deadlines. They also do not need to be asked to do more, they simply do it because they want to.
Collaborative: They take pride in working together and are interested in everyone’s ideas while understanding that it can take more than one person to reach a goal.

How To Spot An Unengaged Team

You now know what an engaged team looks like, but how do you spot an unengaged one?

Some of the common signs are,

High employee turnover rate: You may notice that when employees are disengaged, they become unsatisfied and unmotivated with their job and begin to look elsewhere for a new role.

Unable to complete tasks and meet deadlines: When your team is unengaged with their work, it may take them longer to get tasks done, and this can reduce the quality of the work as well.

Poor performance: An overall decrease in team performance can be a sign of a team that is not engaged with their work and, therefore, unlikely to work to high standards that help to boost performance.

Withdrawn: Individuals who are disengaged with work may start to withdraw themselves from everyday conversations or activities such as team catch-ups or socials, and this can also look like poor communication, which can be detrimental to the whole team.

How To Use Analytics 365 To Spot Unengaged Teams

The Analytics 365 tools, such as usage, chat and meeting analytics, are a great way to see how engaged your team is. Here is how to do it:

Getting started with Analytics 365 is a breeze, and thanks to the pre-built default dashboards it’s super easy to dive into the data and gain insights that can help improve employee engagement.

For example, Analytics 365’s employee wellbeing dashboard helps monitor employee sentiment, workload, and collaboration on Microsoft Teams. Here are some core use cases for the dashboard:

1. Understand employee sentiment: Use chat sentiment reports to understand how employees feel about their work.

Example: Identify that employees in the sales department are feeling stressed due to a high volume of customer inquiries.

2. Spot burnout before it becomes an issue: Track teams that are spending too much time in unnecessary meetings and working outside of business hours.

Example: Identify that the marketing team is frequently working after hours and reduce their workload accordingly, hire new resource, or introduce new processes.

3. Ensure the right amount of time is spent on Teams: Use dashboards and metrics to track collaboration on Microsoft Teams and identify teams that are struggling to balance workload.

Example: Identify that the IT department is spending too much time in meetings and adjust their schedule accordingly.

The dashboard can also help identify individuals who may be at risk of disengagement or low motivation. For example, when behaviours start to change, such as whether video is generally switched on or off, can help identify individuals who may be struggling with workload or morale.

Overall, the employee well-being dashboard is a powerful tool to help organisations monitor and address employee well-being and workload issues.

7 Tips To Help Keep Your Remote Employees Engaged

1. Make time for regular check-ins with individual team members.

You don’t want your employees to feel isolated and like they’re working in their own little bubble. As soon as they feel like that, they’re on a one-way trip to feeling disengaged.

Regular 1-2-1s and check-ins are the antidotes to that.

They provide your team with face-to-face time and the space to raise any concerns or issues they are having.

And equally as important, they provide you with a chance to understand how members of your team are feeling and be proactive about solving any issues they have before it spirals into them feeling unengaged.

2. Encourage Your Team To Collaborate On Projects

Collaboration when working from home does not come as easily compared to working in an office, as when you can talk in person, collaboration happens more naturally.

As a manager, you can do this by making sure that as you are kicking off projects, you map the tasks and their key collaborators.

However, when working remotely, the benefits of collaboration can be put to the side due to the lack of natural interaction, and therefore there is a greater onus as a manager to know the strengths of individuals in the business and encourage employees to collaborate with those people even if it is just for a quick chat.

By doing that, you’re helping them to understand who they can go to for what and collaborate with.

Our call analytics and chat analytics dashboards help managers to understand how often their teams collaborate within Microsoft Teams.

Analytics 365’s call and chat analytics features can be used to gain instant insights into how effectively teams are collaborating as well as ensuring that they are communicating effectively. Insights can be used to discover how top-performing teams collaborate and to see the engagement levels of employees.

To monitor collaboration, businesses can use various features such as measuring meeting attendance, identifying individuals at risk of disengagement, identifying collaboration activities by volume and time, empowering employees to work better together, and gaining insight into management styles and behaviors. Businesses can use the dashboard to analyze the data and create custom reports to track collaboration activities and improve collaboration efficiency.

The feeling of isolation is a real problem among remote workers, with 30.9% of UK workers in 2022 expressing feelings of isolation when working remotely, and this lack of social interaction can have a major impact on how employees feel towards their work.

Managers should encourage their team to communicate regularly to help with the well-being of the whole team, create unity and develop relationships within the team that leads to a happier and more engaged team.

A few ways in which you can do this are:

Creating social channels on your company communication tool that are dedicated to social chat ad organising social events away from work.
Making a point to book time in everyone’s diary for socialising, whether remotely or in person.
Encouraging collaboration over social events to get the team excited and more engaged.

So finding spaces where teams can interact casually away from work can be just what remote workers need to feel part of a team and less alone.

4. Make Sure Your Teams Aren’t Burning Out

Burnout can have a huge impact on work quality and efficiency.

“88% of UK workers reported feeling burnt out in the last 2 years”, and 1 in 3 employees feel they don’t have a good work/life balance, according to an article by Stand out CV. So it is more than likely your team are or has suffered with it.

And then, if you don’t offer help, there is a high chance your team will become unengaged. So spotting burnout early is a crucial part of a manager’s role.

Analytics 365 can help you spot burnout with the following reports

Meeting hours to see how much time they’ve got for deep work.
Amount of time spent on teams during the day and after working hours.
And or how frequently they’re using chat during the day.

Our usage analytics dashboard makes it easy for managers to assess how often employees are online on Microsoft Teams and for how long.

Here’s 4 examples of how to use usage analytics to monitor collaboration:

Gain insights into Microsoft Teams usage: Analytics 365 provides in-depth analytics on calls, meetings, chat, and team activity, which makes it easy to identify who is using Teams frequently, and who isn’t. This helps you discover pain points, identify training opportunities, and unearth new efficiencies.
See if you’re getting the most out of Microsoft Teams: With analytics on usage, you can identify who is using Teams well, best practices, and which teams may need more support. This helps you ensure that your business is getting the most out of your investment in Microsoft Teams.
Ensure effective communication: You can use real data on collaboration and calls within your organisation to ensure that teams are communicating effectively. For example, you can use the call analytics report to see whether teams are effectively running meetings or use data on the usage of shared Teams channels to get an idea of how much teams are collaborating.
Drive adoption and best practices: Analytics 365 allows you to understand adoption rates at an individual, team, or organizational level, and analyse collaboration trends using standard periods, custom periods, or place cards side by side to compare. This helps you drive adoption and identify best practices that you can replicate across your organisation.

5. Make Meetings Meaningful

Does it need a meeting, or can this be summarised in an email?

Regular meetings may seem like a good idea, but they can quickly fill up calendars leaving team members no time to do anything else with their day, which can be stressful for employees with a busy workload already.

So it is important to regulate meetings by planning and organising them so that they are effective and useful in achieving a goal.

Analytics 365 meeting analytics can help you to spot which meetings are the most productive and have the most engagement. Allowing you to find out which meetings are the most meaningful and remove any unnecessary meetings that are wasting time.

The following steps can help organizations monitor engagement using meeting analytics:

Get real data on meeting quality with dashboards: understand call quality, talk times, and attendance patterns. This data can help organisations understand which teams are hosting effective meetings and how engaged team members are.
Discover which teams are running the best meetings: By using data on talk times, attendance, and recurrence, organizations can quickly identify best practices that can be shared across teams. For example, if a team consistently has high attendance and talk time, this may indicate that their meetings are well-run and engaging.
Cut down on unnecessary meetings: Using analytics, organisations can identify meetings that could be emails. Dashboards can help highlight attendance, talk time, and frequency to determine which meetings are important and which ones can be cancelled.

Overall, meeting analytics can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of meetings and the engagement of team members. By analyzing data on meeting quality and attendance, organizations can identify best practices, reduce unnecessary meetings, and ultimately improve engagement.

6. Use Tools To Help Inform Your Decisions

Make the most of technology when working from home.

Are you stuck on how to engage your teams or unsure of the best tools to manage your team effectively?

Make tools your friend, and don’t be afraid to use them to make decisions that will benefit you in the long run. There are millions of tools out there designed to make engaging your teams and making decisions easier and life far simpler.

We’ve put together a post which covers the tools you can use to engage your remote teams to help you make more informed decisions that benefit your team and improve their engagement, all from the comfort of your home.

7. Prioritise Building Relationships

Building relationships with your team should be a priority for any manager.

Not only does it build respect with employees but a better relationship leads to a more efficient team and one who is more engaged with their work, meaning they are more likely to work hard to achieve the goals of the whole company.

Building relationships with employees can be done in various ways, but for ease, we have created a post to help guide you through the best ways to build those relationships and create a more harmonious engaged team.

Summary

Keeping your remote teams engaged has its challenges.

But as a manager, it is important to spot the signs of an employee who may be disengaged and bring the team together for both the sake of performance and the wellbeing of the individual employee.

Some of the ways you can do this as a manager are,

Build relationships with employees.
Make sure meetings are engaging and meaningful.
Spot the signs of burnout with usage analytics.
Provide dedicated social spaces for employees to engage in social interactions.
Work doing more collaborative projects.
Use tools which offer guidance on how to keep your remote teams engaged.
Set time aside for regular 1-2-1s.

Analytics 365 has a wide variety of tools which can help any manager monitor remote employee engagement with regular updates and reports, all within a few clicks.

Learn more about what Analytics 365 can do for you and your remote teams here.