How to Properly Engage Employees Working Remotely
From a leader standpoint, it may be difficult to properly engage employees while they are working remotely. However, it can be done and can be done efficiently. Find out here.
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Covid-19 caused a negative impact for individuals, families, and organizations worldwide. One of the problems Covid-19 caused for many organizations was that they had to completely change and shift their daily routine. Employees had to start working remotely. Working remotely has been controversial, some individuals enjoy working from the comfort of their home, which allows for a better work/life balance, and other individuals are motivated by waking up early and going into an office with other co-workers. With this said, working remotely can be challenging for anyone. It can create distractions and a loss of motivation when you are not seeing co-workers each day. Despite the concerns working remotely has already caused, many individuals still struggle with this remote working change due to the simple fact that change is hard.
From a leader standpoint, it may be difficult to properly engage employees while they are working remotely. However, it can be done and can be done efficiently. Start by motivating and engaging your employees while utilizing virtual meeting apps, such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, or Zoom to host meetings with your employees daily to keep everyone aligned. Most organizations know how to use them at this point but learning and creating an environment where motivating and engaging becomes paramount and burn-out is limited.
One of the most effective ways a leader can engage their remote employees is simply asking for and listening to feedback from their employees. As mentioned, virtually working is not for everyone and a leader should stay connected with their employees and stay open minded to the ideas and feedback for improvements as many roles have now begun hybrid or fully remote. Each employee works and excels differently, learning about each employee and how best they work will make the team effective and effective.
Lastly, provide your employees with the tools needed to succeed. A successful leader of a virtual or hybrid team should also be doing research on what the best resources are while working remotely and provide tutorials and various solutions for the employees. Doing this will make your employees feel like they are cared about and understood, which as a result will increase their productivity and engagement at work.
Remote working is a modernistic trend in the working community, but it will only continue to evolve. Times have changed (and continue to change) and managers and leaders need to learn to adapt to these trends and changes. To learn more about how to properly engage and supervise your employees remotely, check out this free short course on Leading Remote Teams.
For free performance and engagement resources head over to our Resource Vault!
Engaged Teams
A ‘network of engaged teams” performance model which promotes high employee engagement, strong, real-time communication, and rapid information flow is transforming organizations and providing for a very powerful organizational competitive advantage. These teams are purpose-focused, consistently exhibit the right team behaviors, are committed and supported at the very highest level of the organization.
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The age of the hierarchical organization is quickly coming to an end. Businesses are reinventing themselves to compete in this complex and unpredictable world of change and opportunity, and this change applies to any and all industries, both small and large organizations. Organizations are decentralizing decision making, moving toward product and customer-centric performance models, and forming an agile network of highly engaged teams that communicate and deliver results in powerful ways.
This “network of teams” performance model which promotes high employee engagement, strong, real-time communication, and rapid information flow is transforming organizations and providing for a very powerful organizational competitive advantage. These teams are purpose-focused, consistently exhibit the right team behaviors, are committed and supported at the very highest level of the organization.
Let’s focus on purpose first. The foundation for any engaged team is establishing a clear purpose that every team member is aligned to. Sounds easy, but it isn’t. Every team struggles with this, and often, most teams skip over this important step and go right to resources and activities.
This step is NOT just creating a purpose statement, this is a defining action in the formation of the team that provides:
An anchor point for the team.
The “what” for the team.
A definition of both success for the team and the desired impact of the team.
The answer to “why” this team and its work are important.
A team can have all the right behaviors with all team members committed and tremendous organizational support but without a clearly defined and aligned purpose, the team will have little to no direction and rarely achieve its full potential and desired outcomes.
Next up is behaviors. After clarifying the team purpose, we want to turn our attention to establishing the right team environment by identifying and exemplifying the right team behaviors.
The team can have a clear team purpose, each team member can be committed, and the team can have all the organizational support it can garner, but if the team doesn’t define and consistently show the behaviors that will enable success, as well as identify and acknowledge behaviors that, if shown, will derail the teams efforts, the team stands a chance of not reaching the its full potential and not delivering on its stated purpose and team charter.
A critical team best practice is in the initial phase of team formation: Openly brainstorming and documenting team behaviors that will enable success and those that could potential derail the team.
Once the enabling and dis-enabling lists are agreed upon by all team members, it is a team best practice to review the lists periodically at the start of team meetings just to reinforce how important the focus on exhibiting the right team behaviors are to achieving team success.
The results an engaged team delivers are important, but how those results are achieved along the way are equally as important. Don’t assume good team behavior, cultivate it!
This brings us to commitment. Plainly put, your team needs you! A team can define its purpose, exhibit all the right team behaviors and have complete organizational support, but if any one or more of the team members are not fully committed to contributing to the team’s efforts it is this lack of commitment that is a major contributing factor for teams not achieving team the goals and success they have defined.
In working with leaders and their teams over the last 10+ years we have found a number of key areas where individual and team commitment enables and accelerates team success.
Each team member must be committed to:
Consistently attending scheduled meetings and events.
Preparing for each team meeting.
Commit to and deliver on all agreed upon next step actions.
Providing thoughts and ideas and challenging the status quo.
Learning and developing both as an individual and as a team.
Encouraging peers and those in their sphere of influence to actively engage.
Coach and mentor other newly formed teams.
Staying committed to a team's success is difficult. Each year we work with dozens of teams from their initiation to completion and with each one of them team and individual commitment is tested in some way. Day to day functional job pressures and the pace of change in business adds pressure and challenges that commitment. But, stay the course and, if necessary, reach out to the team supervisor or sponsor to assist in prioritizing both the importance to the organization and the time commitment required of you and your team to deliver on your team purpose.
Stay committed, your team and organization need you.
And lastly, a successful team needs support. An engaged team’s level of success and the ultimate impact of that success is often determined by the level of organizational support it receives throughout the team engagement.
Does the overall organization embrace and enable employee performance and engagement by sponsoring and supporting individual and team training? Are senior organizational leaders actively participating by allocating time for these activities, and by showing interest in and implementing many of the various team and individual recommendations? Lastly, do our front-line leaders encourage greater engagement by inspiring and enabling people and teams, not directing or controlling their activities?
A team can have a clearly defined and communicated purpose, exhibit all the positive team behaviors during the teaming process and all members be completely committed, but if they do not have organizational support to listen and act then it marginalizes, if not destroys, all future team activities.
Our experience enabling employee performance and engagement points to a simple, but effective success model for team and individual engagement and success. Purpose, behavior, commitment and support.
For free performance and engagement resources head over to our Resource Vault!
Team Performance: Form, Perform, Reform
If you want better employee engagement, what a better way than to engage your employees. And with the future of performance being a network of engagement and performance teams that form, perform and reform as needed to deliver results, it is key to have a model that provides a framework for team success from inception to disbanding.
Subscribe to the Lead Where You Are Podcast on all your favorite streaming outlets! Simply click one of the buttons below.
If you want better employee engagement, what a better way than to engage your employees. And with the future of performance being a network of engagement and performance teams that form, perform and reform as needed to deliver results, it is key to have a model that provides a framework for team success from inception to disbanding. The video below highlights the Engagement Team Life Cycle. It is a predicable team cycle that once understood can be accelerated and leveraged to provide focus and deliver next level team success.
For free performance and engagement resources head over to our Resource Vault!
Engage Your Employees Through a Team Environment
Random Related Fun Fact of the Week: The most effective teams don’t have formal leaders! Teams work best when members listen and talk in equal measure. If one member takes control and begins to dominate the discussions, it creates resentment. The team falters. Effective teams do need managers, though. Diverse teams are more creative and get more done but they require a team manager (not an individual contributor) whose full time job is to help team members communicate and work together, despite their diversity.
You might be part of an organization that has just completed or are in the middle of an employee engagement survey process with the results either complete or due back due very soon. What comes back is a lot of data highlighting strengths to leverage, opportunities for improvement and hundreds, if not thousands of written comments! (You will never believe some of the things people write when asked to comment in an anonymous survey!)
So now what? Organizations often hand the results to HR for follow-up. Other organizations delegate next steps to front line managers, or like many, unfortunately choose to do nothing.
Our recommendation?
If you want better employee engagement, you better engage the employees! This year try doing this, tap cross-functional, high potential employees with a charter to review the survey results, develop a core set of recommendations with an action plan. Present that plan to senior leadership, and then assist in turning those recommendations into enhanced employee engagement.
Our experienced has shown amazing results. From engagement teams creating a new hire “passport” program that addressed a gap in organizational onboarding for one client, to developing a series of cross functional “Performance Action Teams” (PAT’s) that form, perform and then re-form as performance issues are identified throughout this organization. These PAT’s intervene in the performance drift to quickly address both new and past performance gaps.
And this is just a small glimpse at some of the incredible results engagement teams like these have achieved. An additional benefit to engaging an employee-led team, when you add this question to next year’s engagement survey, “Has anything changed since the last engagement survey?”, it has been our experience that 90% or more of the employees will say yes!
So, don’t let this year’s survey results fall into the dreaded and powerful “blackhole of engagement surveys”. Put that data in the hands of those that can and will make a difference, the employees!
If you need help or examples on engagement team best practices, let us know, we exist to enable engagement success.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Teaming Up: Where is the Support?
Listen to the Destination: Success Podcast.
An engagement team’s level of success and the ultimate impact of that success is often determined by the level of organizational support it receives throughout the team engagement.
Does the overall organization embrace and enable employee engagement by sponsoring and supporting individual and team engagement training? Are senior organizational leaders actively participating by allocating time for engagement activities, and by showing interest in and implementing many of the various engagement team and individual recommendations? Lastly, do our front-line leaders encourage greater engagement by inspiring and enabling people and teams, not directing or controlling their activities?
A team can have a clearly defined and communicated purpose, exhibit all the positive team behaviors during the teaming process and all members be completely committed, but if they do not have organizational support to listen and act then it marginalizes, if not destroys, all future employee engagement activities.
Our experience enabling employee engagement points to a simple, but effective success model for team and individual engagement. Purpose, behavior, commitment and support. If you and or your organization would like to know more about enhancing employee engagement, please contact us here.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Teaming Up: Are You Committed?
Listen to the Destination: Success Podcast.
Your team needs you!
We are in our third week of exploring what the most successful engagement teams do consistently to achieve team success and deliver on their defined purpose.
A team can define its purpose, exhibit all the right team behaviors and have complete organizational support, but if any one or more of the team members are not fully committed to contributing to the team’s efforts it is this lack of commitment that is a major contributing factor for teams not achieving team the goals and success they have defined.
In working with engagement teams over the last 4-5 years we have found a number of key areas where individual and team commitment enables and accelerates team success.
Each team member must be committed to:
Consistently attending scheduled meetings and events.
Preparing for each team meeting.
Commit to and deliver on all agreed upon next step actions.
Providing thoughts and ideas and challenging the status quo.
Learning and developing both as an individual and as a team (engagement team training).
Encouraging peers and those in their sphere of influence to actively engage.
Coach and mentor other newly formed engagement teams.
Staying committed to engagement team success is difficult. Each year we work with dozens of engagement teams from their initiation to completion and with each one of them team and individual commitment is tested in some way. Day to day functional job pressures and the pace of change in business adds pressure and challenges that commitment. But, stay the course and, if necessary, reach out to the engagement team sponsor to assist in prioritizing both the importance to the organization and the time commitment required of you and your team to deliver on your team purpose.
Stay committed, your team and organization need you.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.