The Coronavirus pandemic and the resulting lockdowns have changed the world of work.
Remote work is the new normal, with several employees preferring to work remotely even after the pandemic.
However, creating a positive remote worker employee experience can seem challenging.
But don’t worry.
In this article, we’ll cover what remote employee experience is and explore eight strategies that you can use to improve it. We’ll also highlight the benefits of a better employee experience in a remote environment.
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Let’s get started.
What is remote worker employee experience?
Employee experience or employee journey is an employee’s perception of the various aspects of their work life and relationship with the organization. It plays a massive part in how employees perceive your company’s brand, culture, and business goals.
Additionally, these perceptions significantly influence employee engagement, performance, and retention.
With the onset of remote working as the ‘new normal,’ the basics of employee experience remain the same. But employers need to update their understanding of how they can improve remote worker experience to keep them engaged.
Why?
A typical remote worker can spend weeks or months without entering an office. Most don’t even report to a physical office belonging to the company they work for.
This is fertile ground for isolation, miscommunication, and lack of connection with the organization’s vision.
Managers need to address these concerns to avoid disconnected employees who cannot work at their total capacity.
Moreover, without a great remote employee experience, your company will find it challenging to attract new employees and retain existing ones.
So, we’ll look at a few strategies that you can use to ensure a positive employee experience for the entire lifecycle of your employees.
8 strategies to improve remote worker employee experience
Here are eight techniques you can introduce to boost your remote employee experience:
1. Support a healthy work life balance
Remote work can help enhance employees’ overall wellbeing by giving them a better shot at work-life balance.
For instance, a lack of long commutes can dramatically reduce stress and lower the risk of burnout.
However, it can also threaten employee productivity. Some remote employees can find it challenging to keep their work life separate from their personal life.
As a result, employers need to create a remote work plan to help their workers remain productive. This is crucial since maintaining a healthy work life balance helps reduce stress and employee burnout.
Here’s how you can show support to your remote employees:
- Flexible schedules: Update your employees’ work schedules to accommodate the other commitments such as childcare or chores.
- Encourage your remote employees to take breaks: This can help reduce stress and fatigue.
- Check your employees’ workload: Distribute tasks evenly and consistently check the progress and the time your remote employees take to finish a particular task. This way, you’ll know which tasks take employees longer to complete and provide support accordingly.
- Create a clear attendance system: Ensure that your full time and part-time remote employees have specific clocking in and out times. This way, your remote workforce has a clear sense of when the workday begins and when it ends.
2. Focus on mental health
Remote employees often work long hours with thin lines between their professional and work lives. This can trigger several issues such as anxiety, depression, loneliness.
Employees struggling with mental health issues are more likely to be absent and less productive.
Here are a few ways you can focus on your employee’s mental wellbeing:
- Train team leaders on mental health: Train team leaders and managers to identify signs of mental health issues such as irritability, insomnia, forgetfulness, etc. This way, leaders can identify employees who may be struggling and intervene at an early stage by offering practical support.
- Initiate workplace mental health programs: Keep your employees mentally healthy by introducing various health and wellness programs, such as on-site fitness centers and optional nap times to reduce stress.
- Check vacation days: Encourage your employees to take their paid time off (PTO). Ask your HR team to check in with employees who haven’t scheduled any vacation time.
3. Maintain transparent communication
Remote teams are usually distributed across the globe. As a result, it can be challenging to ensure the team feels connected to one another and the company in general.
Consequently, you need to create an effective internal communication strategy to boost teamwork, transparency, trust, and employee engagement.
Here’s how you can improve communication in your remote company:
- Regular team meetings: Weekly or monthly team meetings allow your team to address any concerns and discuss any changes in the company.
- Keep your employees in the loop: As a business leader, let your employees know of any major initiative or goal changes in the company. This way, employees are aware and have a sense of belonging to the team.
- Encourage two-way feedback: Two-way feedback or communication gives both employees and managers the opportunity to discuss progress, work-related concerns and find ways to improve at their roles.
- Introduce collaboration technology: Empower your remote employees with a video conferencing and collaboration tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams to streamline communication and workflow in the workplace.
4. Invest in professional development
Professional development can involve various programs that better equip their employees for their current and future roles.
Employers who invest in professional development help their employees improve their skills, knowledge, and expertise.
Additionally, investing in the professional development of your remote and hybrid workforce can help you boost employee engagement and employee performance.
Here are a few ways you can invest in the professional development of your remote workforce:
- Tuition reimbursement: Consider offering full or partial reimbursement for tuition and other educational programs to expand employee skills and set a foundation for future growth.
- Offer training: Train your employees to use new technologies to perform their remote and hybrid work effectively.
- Provide mentorship: Workplace mentoring introduces your new employees to senior team members who can guide them and provide answers throughout the learning phase. Additionally, mentors should provide advice and feedback to help the new hires work more efficiently and confidently.
- Encourage employees to attend professional events: Encourage employees to participate in industry-related webinars, conferences, and functions to expand their skills and knowledge.
- Promote continuous learning: Offer in-house training sessions using a tool like Microsoft Teams to improve your employees’ skills or turn to the online industry for access to online lessons.
5. Build a positive company culture
Creating a positive company culture can help your employees feel included, valued, and part of the bigger picture.
Additionally, ensuring your employees feel valued will motivate and encourage them to work productively to achieve business objectives.
Here’s how you can build a positive company culture:
- Define and promote your company’s core values: Having a clear set of company values gives your employees a sense of guidance and security and can help them make the right decisions. For example, if your company values integrity, you should encourage leaders to own up to their mistakes.
- Nurture diversity and inclusivity: Your HR team needs to build a workplace culture that welcomes people of all backgrounds and celebrates diversity.
- Effective onboarding process: An effective onboarding process ensures new hires get a glimpse into your company’s culture and values and makes them feel more welcomed.
- Encourage bonding: Provide team building opportunities for your remote employees to bond outside of working hours. You can do this by hosting game nights or company parties via Microsoft Teams or Zoom.
6. Pair up new employees with mentors
You can also improve the remote worker employee experience by pairing new hires with mentors. This is beneficial since new hires may have many questions, and pairing them with mentors ensures that those questions are answered immediately.
Remote employees with accurate information about company processes and effective training are more likely to perform productively and confidently.
Here’s how you can create an effective mentorship program:
- Pair up new remote employees with a suitable mentor: The mentor you choose should have the relevant skills, training, and expertise that the new employee needs to develop.
- Set up feedback sessions: Ensure the mentor and remote employee set up weekly or monthly feedback sessions to discuss how the remote employee is performing and identify areas of improvement.
- Allocate a program supervisor: Select a senior employee or HR team member to monitor the mentorship program and ensure that the mentorship tasks are beneficial to both the remote employee and the organization.
7. Show appreciation to your remote employees
Showing your employees that you value and respect their work can help them feel more connected to the company and motivated to achieve business goals.
Here are a few ways you can do this:
- Chat with your employees: Make time to chat with your remote employees about their digital employee experience so you can work out solutions to challenges they may be facing.
- Acknowledge employee contributions: Recognize your employees for their contribution by thanking them more often, giving store gift cards, awarding certificates, and more.
- Listen to and act on employee feedback: Frontline employees are the first to notice critical business issues that need attention. As a result, working on their feedback can be crucial to business success.
8. Implement company-wide productivity software
Although a positive remote worker experience can help employees be more productive, remote employees still need guidance, support, and nudges to continue delivering to the best of their ability.
Fortunately, with reliable and powerful performance monitoring software like Time Doctor, you can keep your employees productive and engaged with ease.
What’s Time Doctor?
Time Doctor is a powerful employee time tracking and performance management tool used by major companies, like Verizon and Ericsson, as well as by SMBs, like Thrive Market, to boost in-house and remote employee productivity.
Here are some of the things you can do with Time Doctor:
Read more about Time Doctor’s powerful features and benefits.
Next, we’ll find out the importance of improving your remote workers’ experience.
3 key benefits of improving remote worker experience
Here’s how your organization can benefit from enhancing remote employee experience:
1. Boosts remote employee engagement
A positive remote employee experience directly impacts an employee’s ability to engage with other team members and their work.
Engaged employees are 38% more productive and are more likely to perform consistently, which leads to more revenue.
Moreover, employees with higher engagement are usually more invested in the company’s success, while disengaged employees are only committed to doing the bare minimum.
2. Improves customer experience
Great employee experience also influences customer satisfaction.
In fact, companies that invest in positive employee experience have reported improved customer experience.
This is because employees with great employee experience tend to be more proactive and innovative, boosting the quality of your company’s products and services.
Additionally, engaged employees feel more motivated to provide quick service and answers to customers, improving the customer experience.
3. Improves employee retention rates
A positive remote worker employee experience can help you reduce employee turnover and hiring costs. On the other hand, disengaged employees can cost companies approximately 450–600 billion dollars a year.
You can also improve your employee retention rates by offering practical benefits and wellness programs that boost your employees’ personal and professional development.
Companies with great employee experience can retain more senior and experienced employees. This way, your company won’t have to retrain employees or find a way to replace them with top talent.
Final thoughts
A positive remote employee experience directly impacts employee performance, productivity, and wellbeing. Providing remote employees with a positive work environment also boosts your company’s revenue and ability to successfully satisfy customer needs.
You can use the eight strategies we’ve covered here to help you improve your remote worker employee experience with ease.
Liam Martin is a co-founder of Time Doctor which is software to improve productivity and help keep track and know what your team is working on, even when working from home.