How to Build Remote Employee Engagement with Tech

The business world of today is an ultra-competitive one, so to succeed, you need to ensure that your enterprise is operating cohesively with everyone aligned and pulling in the same direction. Employee engagement is critical in this regard, as engaged employees improve productivity, turnover, and profitability. However, contemporary workplace dynamics are shifting, and this poses some challenges.

With a growing contingent of the workforce now opting to embrace WFH and hybrid arrangements, your business is likely to encounter challenges with remote employee engagement, as remote employees are at increased risk of becoming disconnected from their organizations. In the face of such obstacles, being proactive is paramount, so you should strive to innovate in your engagement-building endeavors. In the digital age, this means leveraging cutting-edge software technologies to create a more dynamic and cohesive workplace for your remote employees.

In this article, we’ll discuss three useful strategies for building remote engagement, shedding light on some key technologies that can help you along the way.

Foster Collaboration

Over a sustained period, it’s not uncommon for remote workers to feel that they are growing isolated from the rest of their organization. This can cause teams to become fragmented and less productive and can result in employees leaving for pastures new if left unchecked. As such, it’s essential to establish a framework that encourages discourse and cooperation between team members so that remote employees maintain a strong sense of connection with the company.

In this regard, collaboration and project management tools like Slack, Trello, Asana, and Microsoft Teams and Workspace are incredibly useful. By providing a hub for task management, progress tracking, and real-time communication, these platforms give remote teams a shared space that unifies them. This gives them a sense of place and purpose within your organization, greatly boosting engagement, morale, and productivity.

Additionally, facilitating remote access to internal resources can help to make remote teams feel more integral to their organization. This, of course, brings the question of cybersecurity to the fore, when one cannot be sure of the security status of employees’ networks. However, these concerns can be mitigated easily by implementing a policy stipulating the use of a VPN for remote workers. These tools are highly accessible, intuitive, and simple to set up, with some Free VPNs  even offering quick-install services at no cost.

Nurture Development

Another reason why remote workers may become disengaged is that they feel their employer has no meaningful stake in their development, or that they aren’t getting the support they need to be proficient with the tools they’re required to use. It’s easy to see how this problem can arise, as proper onboarding can be challenging when employees aren’t on-site, but deploying the right technology, specifically digital adoption platforms, can help immensely.

Digital adoption platforms are software tools that overlay on other applications, providing contextual guidance and feedback that helps users quickly reach proficiency with any technological tools they’re required to utilize in their roles. Leading DAPs, such as WalkMe or Whatfix, for instance, can also enable your company to incorporate user feedback and help mechanisms to support employees through the developmental process, enabling a smoother, more cohesive all-around experience for remote employees.

By providing personalized, individual guidance, feedback, and support, DAPs can not only help employees build key skills, but also show them that they are recognized as valued individuals within your organization. Naturally, this translates to greater engagement and productivity.

Reward Performance

Once you’ve got them connected and growing together, you must then strive to keep your workforce motivated. To this end, it’s essential to recognize, appreciate, and incentivize the continued efforts of remote employees. This is where employee engagement platforms such as Vantage Circle come into their own.

A cutting-edge engagement platform will provide you with a comprehensive solution for continuously amplifying engagement. Using a points-based system, your engagement platform will enable you to provide a range of different rewards that employees can choose for themselves, creating a positive feedback loop of incentives and rewards that helps to keep them motivated and engaged even when working from afar. Moreover, platforms like Vantage Circle also include pulse survey tools and gamified fitness features to promote the health of remote employees.

By helping to create a positive culture of reward and well-being, employee engagement platforms can help you to ensure that remote employees feel recognized, incentivized, and cared for, fostering a sense of community and shared identity that will help drive your organization forward.

Concluding

Employee engagement is always critical to business success, but it is of even greater importance when your organization relies on the output of remote teams due to the innate challenges involved. Driving engagement in a remote workforce is no mean feat, but embracing the right technological solutions makes it eminently possible. By leveraging the power of collaboration tools, VPNs, DAPs, and engagement platforms, you can ensure that your remote employees stay empowered, challenged, motivated, and valued at all times so that they can power your enterprise to ever-greater organizational success.