Employee Engagement and Development in the Hybrid/ Remote Work Mode
Keeping your employees engaged and creating a robust culture while everyone is working remote is a herculean task yet crackable.
What do our employees need the most while working from their homes?
If this part is figured out, then you can master how to engage your employees remotely. Employees feel isolated, missing those face-to-face interactions, water cooler conversations, clarifying doubts immediately instead of waiting for one to respond to emails, and break hours. On the other hand, they love avoiding the commute hours, spending extra time with their family, and investing time to upskill themselves.
However, sometimes, it becomes difficult for them to keep the parts they love as, in some companies, managers do not trust the employees and burden them with a lot of work in the name of productivity. This is a huge turn-off for employees, and they become disengaged and leave the company or give low productivity.
A manager should categorize what affects the employees and what is loved by them and plan employee engagement ideas accordingly. Many organizations are planning to go completely remote. All they need to do to stay powerful as always and also move forward is to build a strong culture that will help them to sustain themselves in any predicament.
Some companies are implementing a hybrid work model to allow teams to collaborate and have periodic human interactions to stay engaged. Other days, it is employee engagement and development plans that keep them motivated.
Here are a few ways to keep your employees engaged and happy.
Individual Development Plan for Employees
Employees are enrolling themselves in courses and watching educational videos to improve themselves. How about an organization helping them in their journey? Creating employee development goals and providing training programs that motivate them to work harder toward achieving them. Learning can help both the employees and the company. Giving a 10% of their time to work on themselves builds mutual trust and loyalty.
Synergita implemented an employee development plan in the company by recommending training programs and employee development methods to each employee depending upon their performance and existing skill sets.
Related Articles: 7 Reasons Why you Should Focus on Employee Engagement
Virtual Coffee Breaks
Yes!!! Many employees have taken to social media saying that they really miss meeting new people and communicating with their colleagues during breaks. In an employee engagement survey among Synergita employees, this is the important point that everyone has insisted on. To address that concern, Synergita has implemented various employee engagement plans such as Fun Fridays, frequent video team meetings, etc.
The managers or employees do not talk officially in those meetings but have open conversations about their personal experiences, fun moments, and concerns. This approach can help your company too in creating a connected remote workplace and a highly collaborating workforce.
Employee Engagement Software
A digital employee engagement platform is nothing but digitizing your performance management processes and other business operations. A tech-savvy workforce will be greatly involved when the processes happen with the help of digital tools that offer hyper-personalization and engaging features.
Goals can be set by themselves and send for approval if the process wants that. They can track their progress toward their objectives, and keep a record of their conversations with their managers. If the feedback is good, it becomes a souvenir that motivates them.
Innovative Projects
Encourage your workforce to come up with new ideas and work on them to develop a prototype or business plan that would convince the key stakeholders. The companies can support, and many projects have become a great hit like Google Gmail. Innovation should be encouraged and most geniuses are among the employees without an opportunity to grow.
Create that opportunity for your employees and see how engaged they would work toward their new ideas and also existing projects. Allow them to spend a particular amount of time on their goals. This would help the employees and also the company to grow, and employees would stay for a longer period at an organization that takes an interest in their professional growth.
Goal-Setting Process – Make it More Interesting
The goal-setting, in old times, is done by the managers and followed by the employees. Nowadays, companies are following new ways to increase the percentage of attainment of goals by the workforce. They set goals after conducting one or two team meetings and taking the inputs of employees. Also, they give autonomy to the employees in deciding their individual goals.
However, not all organizations or small businesses do this way. But, this approach of allowing the employees to take part in the goal-setting process encourages accountability and keeps the workforce more involved in the workflow. Frameworks like OKR and SMART goals engage the employees more and also help them develop leadership skills.
A Changing Leader Position
360 degree feedback, where every stakeholder can provide feedback on an employee’s behavior and work, helps the management in identifying a future leader and gain insights on an employee’s behavior in the workplace.
This is an engaging feedback mechanism but how about directly knowing whether a person possesses leadership qualities or not?
The managers should try to give the team leader or project leader position to each employee every week or month under his/her supervision. The chosen person should be responsible for a project from assigning a task to a group member to delivering the final product. This will help the management to learn more about an employee and give responsibilities accordingly. During tough times, this knowledge helps a company to overcome any challenge.
These methods can be used to engage the workforce and develop employees’ skills. What kinds of practices do you follow at your workplace? Comment your answers.
