One of the challenges of a hybrid or remote office is keeping your team engaged. From connecting team members to encouraging collaboration, team engagement is crucial to your business's long-term health and overall turnover rate. An engaged team is more productive, has improved teamwork, and feels valued in their position. Engagement can benefit your team and increase overall workplace production and turnaround time, making it a crucial part of any workplace culture.

However, managers can feel stumped on engaging team members outside the physical office. Not only is it harder to feel involved in a remote position, but it can also be alienating as team members can feel like nothing more than faces in a chat window instead of living people. Here, we cover the top five ways to keep your remote team involved: using social prompts, praising team achievements, or working with your team to celebrate accomplishments. Let's dive into the best ways to keep your remote teams motivated and engaged without further ado.

Maintain Contact

One of the primary ways to engage remote team members is to keep up communication. Just because your team isn't in the office all the time doesn't mean you should let them fall out of the loop. Collaboration between teams can become more streamlined through hybridization thanks to online messaging systems like Slack.

Using Slack to keep workplace communication in one place can help keep your remote team members engaged. Not only can they easily reach out to team members with questions and comments and for a general chat, but it gives your in-person teams an easy way to communicate across departments.

In general, keeping your team engaged comes down to maintaining contact and keeping people up-to-date on office events. By prioritizing contact with team members, you can keep your remote employees engaged and build connections between departments.

Promote Socialization

With the complicated distance of remote and hybrid work, maintaining workplace socialization and encouraging team communication is crucial to keeping your team engaged. Similarly to maintaining contact, encouraging team members to socialize with each other can help promote team engagement.

While many managers worry about socializing on company time, connecting with team members through remote work is a major priority and should be encouraged. Unlike a physical workspace where conversations happen naturally, encouraging online communication can be challenging.

Keeping conversations moving on online workplace platforms like Slack can be difficult, so using a social prompt program like CultureBot’s watercooler function can help reduce the number of dead channels in your workplace. Not only does this cut back on the amount of social work managers need to take on, but it also encourages team members to interact with each other without pressure.

Acknowledge Team Achievements

Acknowledging team achievements can promote team engagement. While more opportunities exist to reward employees in person, building team recognition online can be as important as in-person acknowledgments.

With an online workspace, seeing tasks as a bland checklist can be easy. Through acknowledgments, you can ensure team members feel their efforts are valued. Showing team members that their work is worthwhile will make them feel important to the team. Team members who feel valued are likelier to stick with the company and feel invested in their work.

Using Slack and specific Slack apps to show appreciation for your team members can help greatly improve their engagement and creates a positive workplace culture for your online workspace. Thanks to Slack apps like CultureBot, you can easily acknowledge your team's achievements or allow them to call out a job well done by their fellow employees. Creating this online framework makes it much easier to celebrate team achievements and connect team members through positive feedback.

Encourage Wellness

Promoting employee wellness can help with overall engagement. Employee burnout can impact remote employees at the same rate as in-office team members. Online employees may burn out faster due to taking fewer breaks and working in their home environment. With wellness incentives, you can prioritize your team's overall health while showing investment in your employee's well-being.

Tracking online wellness incentives can be easy with the help of Slack apps that remind team members to take a break, reflect on personal accomplishments, and offer real-life incentives to motivate exercise. From meditation exercises to awards aimed at encouraging exercise, using a Slack integration can make rewarding your employees easy (and automatic). Automated push reminders to take a break can keep things running smoothly in your workplace while offering employees respite during the workday.

From meditation techniques to reminding your employees to prioritize their well-being, wellness integrations for your Slack app can help promote engagement, stave off burnout, and increase overall workplace satisfaction. Thanks to automation, you can encourage team wellness without straining your team leaders, making it a win-win for overall satisfaction, engagement, and well-being.

Celebrate Events

If you've ever missed a workplace birthday, you understand how hard tracking workplace anniversaries in a remote environment can be. With Slack integrations, tracking important events (and celebrating remotely) can be a breeze. From celebrating team birthdays to acknowledging workplace anniversaries, ensuring your remote team feels as valued as they would in a physical workplace, especially on their special day, can help boost overall engagement.

Celebrating workplace events not only helps boost team engagement but it can also help ensure your team bonds well together. With remote work, it can be hard to differentiate between team members, even with the help of Slack images. Celebrating important events and encouraging team bonding can make your online workplace feel more connected and increase engagement levels.

If you want to engage your team members and make remote and hybrid teams feel appreciated, a Slack app like CultureBot can transform your workplace. From encouraging socialization to connecting team members and more, using the right Slack integration can transform your team, leading to a better workplace culture and more engaged employees. To learn more about CultureBot and how it can transform your team, check out our other blog posts or contact a team member to learn more.

~ Oswald