Remote work has recently become a necessity for many teams across the world. In the USA alone, two-thirds of employees went at least partially remote during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of them are expected to keep working remotely.
With this prospect in mind, it’s not surprising that organizations are looking for ways to foster a work environment where remote workers can thrive.
What about you? Perhaps leading a distributed team has been your bread and butter for years. Or maybe you’ve been put into this role only recently, due to the global pandemic and office teams switching to remote work.
Either way, you likely want to make sure that your remote team members are happy and productive. We’ve got your back! In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at ways in which you can increase your employees’ sense of happiness. We’ll also present three apps that can help you achieve that goal. Let’s dive in!
How to build a happy remote team that’s also productive?
In order to understand how to bring happiness to distributed teams, it’s important to investigate what makes remote teams unhappy.
Remote work may cause several communication and collaboration challenges, especially for inexperienced remote employees. As a result, work effectiveness is likely to suffer. 31% of newly remote workers surveyed by Slack admit that remote work is worse when it comes to productivity.
It’s not surprising, given the fact that many companies aren’t prepared for remote collaboration. Without tools that help to organize work and increase projects’ transparency, employees may waste a lot of time trying to figure out what to do and how to do it.
As your company switches to remote work, your team members may also struggle with their sense of belonging and connectedness. Such feelings will understandably take their toll on people’s happiness. To prevent it, you should pay attention to strengthening relationships between your coworkers and encourage continuous feedback.
Remote work is not an excuse to forget about team building. In fact, you should make sure that your employees have plenty of chances to interact with each other for pure fun. While face-to-face gatherings might be off the table for many companies, virtual hangouts can also be effective and boost employee engagement.
Yet another factor that may contribute to your workers’ unhappiness is the feeling of being invisible to the managers. When you’re working remotely, you may easily get a sense that your work is not acknowledged or appreciated. It may be especially frustrating when you’re putting in a lot of extra work. When you’re staying late in an office, your team will probably notice it. Remote employees often don’t have a way to communicate their workload easily. As a manager, you should make every effort to keep your finger on your team’s current status in terms of workload, capacity, availability, etc.
What if your organization has made only a temporary switch to remote work? Even if that’s the case, not paying attention to your team’s well-being because “we just need to hang on, we’ll soon go back to normal” is not a great strategy. With people working remotely, it’s challenging to spot burnout signs or lower employee engagement, so you’re likely to miss important signals from your remote team. Make sure that the remote work period, even if it’s temporary, doesn’t negatively affect your team.
Of course, this is not easy to achieve, especially if your organization’s company culture is not remote-friendly. You need the right tools, both in terms of proven tactics or processes, and in terms of apps that help you maintain team happiness. We’ve handpicked three apps that can help you create a remote-friendly company culture and increase employee satisfaction. Each of these tools focuses on a different aspect of work relationships and collaboration.