How to keep your employees engaged even while working from home

Work from home ethics

After the widespread of COVID-19, several companies have decided to give work-from-home options to the employees to ensure their safety. While remote work is common in many industries, there are several organizations that weren’t used to it. You need to be equipped with certain tools to manage remote teams and keep them engaged in these uncertain times. Employee engagement is crucial in the current situation since they will be overwhelmed by anxiety and stress.

The webinar conducted by Blue Ocean Academy on the topic How to keep your employees engaged even while ‘working from home’ threw light on the strategies which you can use to motivate your employees and improve productivity while also preparing for future challenges.

Following are the important points discussed in the webinar:

Employee engagement is the extent to which employees feel passionate about their jobs, are committed to the organization, and put discretionary effort into their work.

There are mainly three types of employees:

  • Engaged: These are the employees who go the extra mile to achieve the strategic goals of an organization. They will be efficient, innovative and committed towards their organization.
  • Not engaged: The employees in this category will put minimal effort into their work. Their characteristics include lack of creativity, increased absence and little motivation.
  • Actively disengaged: They can affect the balance of an organization. They will have a bad attitude, waste time and even influence other employees to follow their path.

Organizations that have engaged employees can have more productivity, financial success, increased customer satisfaction and reduced employee turnover.

The most important step that organizations have to take to ensure engagement is to make the managers engaged. It is always said that employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers and it is true to a certain extent. In order to do this, they must understand the aspects where remote managers are facing challenges.

Following are the main areas where remote managers struggle:

  1. Individualization: Managers face several issues in remote working including the difficulty to provide a definite structure to their way of working. As they are working from home, they have to balance their familial as well as professional responsibilities. They would also need support to accommodate flexibility in working hours. 
  2. Communication: The effectiveness of communication is limited when it comes to remote working. They cannot express their ideas especially in phone conversations where they cannot use nonverbal communication. They must schedule weekly check-ins with the teams to ensure they are on the right track.
  3. Accountability: It’s quite difficult to measure the productivity of remote workers. However, don’t neglect accountability. Managers can create processes to assess timelines and deliverables.

Remote working is the future. So, organizations must take the necessary steps to keep their employees engaged. There are three important steps to ensure productivity- make sure that critical technology is in place, establish regular check-ins and coach the employees.

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