There are many benefits to having a remote workforce. However, one key challenge is the lack of human interaction. Although it can be difficult for employees to stay connected to each other and remain engaged when constantly working remotely, there are many strategies that employers can use to overcome these challenges.

Below, find some easy ways to keep your remote employees engaged and staying productive.

3 Ways to Keep Remote Employees Connected 

• Operate a Culture of Trust 

When you run a remote company, you cannot keep track of your employees all the time or account for each moment of their working day. This means that as employers, you will need to trust your managers to manage their remote teams in the way that they choose and trust that your employees will get the job done in the given time and to the required standard.

One of the worst things you can not do in a remote workplace is micromanage. You need to give your managers the freedom to act as they choose and take risks to behave in a certain way. For employees, trust means allowing them to organise themselves and offering them the flexibility to manage their own work schedules within the given hours. It also involves keeping employees in the loop with necessary information and providing feedback, both good and bad.

Samuel Davies of Kallyss comments: “Whether you are offering customers online payday loans in the US or selling consumer goods from another country, wherever your workforce and employees are, is essentially the muscle of the company. Always make sure your employees are looked after and they will in turn look after you and the company.”

Trust must be a part of the culture in order for a remote workforce to work and to keep your employees engaged. All of this will have the added benefit of increasing productivity, employee satisfaction and workplace morale.

• Communicate Regularly

Regular and effective communication is essential for running a successful remote business and for keeping employees engaged. This is not just at managerial level; every staff member should feel comfortable communicating with coworkers and managers and sharing their ideas.

There are various ways to create an effective communication strategy which caters to all employees. For example, you can hold weekly check-ins. Depending on the size of your team this could be team-wide or just by department. Whatever you choose, the idea is that every employee has an opportunity to speak. If your company is larger, you can do regular company-wide meetings on a less frequent basis to update all employees on company news and progress.

Another crucial element of communication is setting expectations and ensuring that each employee knows their role. This could be by establishing performance goals for the month, quarter and year and making sure that you are setting clear expectations for projects.

• Cultivate Friendships and Personal Connections

With so much of our life spent at work, it is important that our time spent there is pleasant. This means having colleagues and coworkers with whom we feel a connection or an affiliation. When working for a remote company, it can be easy to feel alienated from other staff members which is why it is so important to foster personal connections in a remote workforce.

Regularly reaching out to individual team members, whether it is for work-related things or simply just to chat, can be a great way to connect with your coworkers, especially in the absence of a physical workplace.

Communication tools, such as a social feed, can be a good way to get people talking and engaging in a way that is not always about work. Setting up various feeds that are purely for personal topics can make the workplace more lighthearted and can establish connections between different coworkers in the workplace. However irrelevant it seems, whether its TV show recommendations, interesting news or important life updates, giving colleagues a platform to share is key to keeping them engaged.

You could even go the extra mile and create virtual events to encourage socialising such as corporate team-building activities, company Christmas parties, coffee breaks or happy hours. Employee friendships make people more motivated to come to work each day and this socialisation can have a hugely positive impact on retention rates, productivity and overall employee satisfaction.