7 Effective Ways to Empower Remote Employees in 2022

Productivity was always considered to be one of the most important pillars of the business world. Even if you have the best business models, and the best tools in the industry all these assets will amount to nothing if your employees are not able to ignite the spark and make the engine run. Keeping this vital workforce motivated, engaged, and empowered should be one of the primary goals of any company striving for success.

That brings us to the question of the growing presence of remote working. At the end of 2021, as much as 18% of companies in the world are considered fully remote while 62% of employees ages 22 to 65 have at least once relegated to work from home.

How this new environment affects employee engagement and what we can do to keep the remote staff empowered and productive? Let us try to find out.

Introduce flexible timetables

The ideas of telecommuting and remote working are only as useful as they are able to leverage the perks of working from home. When moved out of the office, your employees will want the freedom to schedule the tasks at hand according to their daily chores. So, don’t make the mistake of assigning this portion of staff with the tasks with narrow timetables. Instead, the remote workers should tackle the assignments that allow them to work within the constraints of the home environment and leverage peak performance hours. The ability to work in this manner has a tremendous impact on the morale of anyone involved.

Reinforce the company culture

The change of work environment doesn’t mean the change of company values your employees were exposed to when working in the office. You only need to find suitable ways to enforce that company culture in the new, admittedly looser surrounding. Try then to set up new rituals like video chat, appoint regular weekly face-to-face meetings, organize training that will tie workers closer to the mission of your company, and layout the road map to higher pay grades through dedicated work. The remote projects should feature employees across the company hierarchy tree and, if possible, be based on teamwork.

Improve communication

Good communication is one of the key ingredients to strong workplace productivity. Once we move the framework, remote work model, this important prerequisite becomes an absolute priority. Although the remote position can positively influence their independence and confidence, more often than not, the employees feel isolated and left to their own devices. Be sure then to animate frequent communication through various obligatory reports, on-the-go conferences, and virtual brainstorming sessions. This way, you will develop a strong sense of community and break the invisible walls separating the remote staff.

Set up foundations for effortless collaboration

This factor will greatly depend on the tools your employees are going to use while home. Keeping that in mind, we would like to remind you that even the most popular tools available feature small deficiencies that can destroy the productivity of your staff if left unchecked. For instance, Gmail famously doesn’t offer the option for mass sharing the contacts between the profiles so you will most likely have to use a dedicated Gmail CRM plugin. The platform also doesn’t allow the users to search the mail by size which can be incredibly useful. Keep these quirks in mind when setting up the IT infrastructure.

Encourage the use of time tracking tools

Your goal here is to help your employees achieve a better work-life balance and excel in both these areas. Even though the ability to schedule daily tasks can be very empowering, telecommuting is inherently vulnerable to procrastination which can have a devastating influence on the morale of your staff. One of the easiest ways to put an end to this problem is to encourage your remote employees to use time-tracking tools and offer small incentives for the proactive execution of daily tasks. Eliminating delays will give your staff more time to spend the things they enjoy and make them far more satisfied.

Give employees one-on-one attention

Personal interactions and one-on-one attention employees get from their peers and senior staff is very important for the morale of each individual worker. Once they are moved to the remote position, most workers feel they have lost this important connection with the rest of the collective. Do your best then to give every single remote employee the necessary level of attention and keep a detailed record of everyone’s performance, development, and track record. This archive will help you to provide valuable and timely feedback and let all workers know their efforts are noted and contribute to the greater cause.

Automate all the processes that can be automated

To put it simply, automation is location-agnostic – the model serves as excellent glue that effortlessly put together workers sent to remote locations to the ones that have remained at the offices. Automated tools also do an excellent job in setting up the pace your remote employees need to follow to keep up with the tasks at hand as well as provide a unified platform for collaboration and communication. Of course, the greater implementation of automated management processes and tools provides numerous other benefits that go beyond the issue of remote working so take this option into strong consideration.

We hope these few examples gave you a general idea about the strategies you can use to empower your remote staff and help them achieve the same level of productivity they would attain in the traditional workplace environment. Motivated and engaged employees are critical for the success of one company. Make sure then to allow your staff to make to enjoy the new work environment and thrive in it. Keeping in mind the present state of the business environment, you probably won’t get the chance at the second attempt.