As a remote manager, you may notice your employees engagement is starting to slip.
It could be that they’re submitting work later or aren’t performing to their usual high standards. Or perhaps they’re not being as social within their team? Whatever it is, it can be pretty worrying for a manager, especially if you’re new to the remote world.
Luckily, we know 6 fantastic tools to help you overcome engagement issues. They’re ideal for remote working and will get you back on track in no time.
But first, let’s break down what engagement is and the impact disengaged employees can have on your business.
What is employee engagement?
Employee engagement is about the emotional commitment your employees have for you and your business. For employees who are engaged, it’s more than just a paycheck. It shows that they feel committed, loyal and passionate about their work. This includes their efforts to collaborate with their team and put in the right amount of effort to achieve business objectives.
The impact of having disengaged employees
A disengaged workforce can have a serious financial impact on a business. A study estimated that disengaged employees cost the UK economy £340 billion yearly because of lost training, recruitment costs, sick days and low productivity. That’s huge! Just think about how many businesses could save that extra money by using the right tools.
Now we’ve established what it is and its impact, let’s roll on to our 7 recommended tools to engage your remote employees:
6 Fantastic Tools To Engage Remote Employees
1. Microsoft Teams
One of the bigger problems remote organisations face is that employees can feel disconnected from their colleagues if they’re not spending enough social time together. A recent survey found that nearly a quarter of employees felt less engaged working remotely, with many experiencing isolation and loneliness. So by reducing this through remote working, you could see a massive improvement in your worker’s engagement.
Let’s be honest, It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to achieve the same social culture for your remote team compared to the office. But with the right platform, you can make it easier.
Microsoft Teams is perfect for helping your team keep the conversations flowing. Within Teams, you can:
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- Create or find channels to hold group meetings, have conversations and share files
- Schedule meetings you’ve got lined up for the week and sync the dates with your Outlook calendar
- Catch up on unread messages @mentions and replies
- Create video calls, audio conferencing, and screen sharing on one-to-one messaging
2. Analytics 365
Being overworked or suffering burnout can be a major cause of poor employee engagement. To the extent that a study from Kronos listed it as the reason employees quit their job 20 – 50% of the time.
But spotting burnout is a lot tougher with a remote team. You don’t see your team as regularly, so you don’t have the same visual cues that you normally would.
And that’s where having a tool like Analytics 365 comes in.
It allows you to pull custom dashboards based on their usage of Microsoft teams. So you can get a steer on their wellbeing by having hard data on:
- The number of meetings they are in and time spent in meetings.
- The total amount of time they are on calls.
- The number of meeting conflicts and overruns.
- The amount of time they are spending collaborating versus focus time.
- The time spent using Microsoft Teams outside of working hours.
All of these allow you you to get better awareness for the pressure that they are under so you can take preventative action.
If you’re interested to find out how engaged your employees are, try Analytics 365 today by trying it today.
3. Quizbreaker
Social interactions are important for employee engagement. But socialising over Microsoft Teams is not always fun. But that’s not an excuse for not trying, and as a manager, it’s important to find ways for your team to interact that aren’t just based on work.
A really good tool for this is Quizbreaker. This tool is built for connecting and engaging your team with fun icebreaker quizzes. The quiz is delivered to their inboxes, and they answer the questions online.
The combination of icebreakers, comments and emojis will help to break down some barriers amongst the team but will also encourage the odd bit of – dare we say it – banter.
4. Culture Amp
The best way to understand why remote employees aren’t engaged, is by gathering employee feedback.
Culture Amp is a great platform for gathering feedback. Here you can create custom feedback programmes and compare your results against others in the industry. These programmes can be created using templated questionnaires, or you can create your own tailored to specific teams.
Once you’ve got the results, their in-house psychologists and data scientists can help you understand the insights, so you can take the correct actions for improving engagement.
5. WeGift
If recognition is badly handled at your organisation, the employees that are not recognised enough could feel undervalued and will be less engaged at work.
But according to a study, using rewards to lead engagement is one of the most effective strategies, so it’s clear rewards are important to keep your employees going.
Now sometimes it can be difficult to find rewards that all your workers would want, so it needs to be relatable but still offer enough value.
WeGift is a fantastic platform to use for rewarding your team, as you’re able to send digital gift cards from their favourite brands straight into their email. And it’s easy, you can purchase one gift card link offering all the brands to recipients and let them choose what they really want. They can even spread the value across multiple cards.
You also have the option to bulk-buy gift cards, so you can reward your entire team at scale instead of buying them individually.
6. 360Learning
Learning and development are some of the key drivers for engagement. In fact, a study found that 80% of workers would feel more engaged by learning new skills.
360Learning is a great solution for businesses looking for a learning and development tool for their remote team. It is an training solution, that you can:
- Create well-structured courses using pre-built templates.
- Record video content to guide your employees step-by-step.
- Test your employees with 10+ question types, including true/false, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank and more.
- Provide useful feedback for incorrect answers to improve understanding.
With 360 Learning, you can be confident that your remote workers are on the right learning and development path to keep them engaged.
Summary
So those are our top 6 employee engagement tools for remote teams. We know how important employee engagement is and that without investing in the right tools, you will start to see your teams disengage, and that will have a significant impact on your bottom line – a £340 billion impact on the economy is nothing to sniff at.
Our list has a little bit of everything in there. We’ve got practical tools like platforms that will help you set up learning and development programmes to fun tools that will help with socialising.
If you’re looking for additional tips for employee engagement, we’ve got great posts on employee engagement activities for remote teams, tips for keeping remote workers connected and how to use Microsoft teams for internal comms.
