One of the biggest challenges of managing a remote team is having faith that your “out of sight” employees are carrying out their tasks well.
There are several ways in which your company can address this issue. For example, you can monitor keystrokes on your team members’ workstations, use a time-tracking tool, or you can even monitor online status changes when workers leave their workstations for a specific time duration.
However, these Big Brother-inspired practices just propagate the fallacy that you’re only working if you’re sitting in front of your computer. Instead of measuring the results, such practices promote fixation with gauging our work in terms of the number of hours we devote to activities that look like “work”.
So, how do you ensure that your remote employees are working instead of hanging out or watching Netflix? How do you determine if they’re delivering the results they’re expected to without any physical guidance?
In this article, you’ll find out 5 key ways to cultivate a healthy mindset in your remote team so that they remain engaged and productive without you keeping an eye on them.
1. Personal-Professional Goal Alignment
Do you know that a whopping 70% of employers believe that their remote employees are busy managing their personal tasks during work hours? Around 25% of these employers estimate this time to be about two hours every day!
If you want your business to be more productive, you should align company goals with personal goals of your remote employees. The first step is to set clear company goals and to communicate them to all employees. Remember, without a unified vision and route, your team members will never move in the same direction. You need to explicitly define who you are as a company, your reason for existence, and ensure that your goals and visions are communicated regularly and openly.
Allow your employees the freedom to set their personal goals in the light of your corporate goals. Your higher management should frequently communicate improvement made toward attaining company-wide goals, and middle management should share how each team member’s involvement impacts the big picture.
2. Drawing Importance To Balance
To cultivate a healthy mindset, it’s important that every employee strikes a balance between his/her work and personal life. This becomes more critical in case of remote employees as their work is always with them and they can end up working 12 to 16 hours a day which is alarming.
A healthy organization requires its employees, whether remote or not, to have a balanced lifestyle. You must ensure that your employees prioritize their health by focusing on healthy eating, exercising and getting enough sleep. Similarly, it’s essential to ensure that your remote workers have an active social life and healthy relationships.
3. Recognise Hard Work
According to a report by Gallup, workers who don’t feel recognised at work are twice as likely to quit in the next year. This situation is more common in remote work settings.
Often, the contributions of remote workers go unacknowledged. This lack of appreciation and acknowledgement can contribute to attrition.
To avoid this, ensure your higher executives identify the names of the employees responsible for the good work, so they can personally congratulate and appreciate the workers with an email or over a phone call.
This humble gesture can be very important as around 28% of workers believe the most unforgettable appreciation comes from their supervisor, but about 24% of employees consider it more significant when coming from a high-level manager or chief executive.
4. Assign Level Buddies
There’s no denying the fact that people learn faster when they’re working with their counterparts rather than the higher management. This is because they’re in a more relaxed and non-judgemental environment.
A great way to encourage leadership training among your remote employees is to assign level buddies. For example, at Agency J, a renowned marketing agency, two or more individuals are assigned to function together as a single unit so that they can monitor and help one another which is also a great way to inculcate leadership skills in your workers.
5. Declare Time For Personal Health
When it comes to remote work, your employees may undergo some unique effects that are normally not seen in in-house workers. They may feel isolated, especially if they’re natural introverts and don’t socialize in their personal life as well. They also have a higher chance to suffer from burnout, as their work is always right there in their home.So, keep your remote employees fit by declaring time for personal health. This will not only empower them to perform better and prevent burnout, but also to show up and value the business as well.
You can ask your team members who are “out of balance” to prioritize other aspects of their lives. For example, once a remote team member at Agency J was asked to spend an hour exercising during work hours because their health was failing. After a month, their health improved considerably and they reported better sleep and fewer sick leaves.