A Quick Guide For HR's To Build Successful Employee Engagement Model

Top HR's know that employee engagement is a must to improve employee productivity and collaboration as it plays a crucial role in setting up a good work culture.

A well-engaged team of employees can increase productivity and make a company profitable. But employee engagement seems like a big challenge these days, as the workplace situations and scenarios have changed suddenly since the pandemic.

And we all have landed in the crisis almost overnight.

Now the story of most remote employees looks like this,

• Staying mute in online meetings unless asked for something.
• Lacking motivation and the drive to work.
• Zero communication.

As an HR manager or C-suite executive, How do you bridge the gap and fix this disengagement in remote employees?

The only solution is to build an employee engagement framework that can help employees to work better.

Here's a quick step by step guide to developing a successful employee engagement model for your remote team. 

1. Setup the platform for seamless communication

communication is crucial for employee engagement during lockdown to tighten the bonds as employees stay disconnected from each other. Hard times often reveal what lack of communication does to your company. Remote employees are already dealing with the side effects of working from home, and not setting up proper communication between them will only make it worse.

Key Practices:

• Keep checking with your employees regularly.
• Build strong connections between the employees, so they don't hesitate to ask for help.
• Turn your WhatsApp groups into a social communication channel with a bit of fun but not just the platform where you only post work-related updates.
• Let them know that you understand what they are going through, and you care for their wellbeing by scheduling at least one casual meeting per week away from work.

2. Appreciate and Empathize 

Genuine appreciation always motivates employees to work better by setting up new benchmarks. Let employees know about their impact on the organization's profitability and reward their achievements.

Key Practices: 

• Celebrate every small success with your team.
• Make your employees feel special and cared for. (Example: Celebrate virtual birthday parties and work anniversaries)
• Arrange weekly online meetings to help the remote team bond with employee engagement activities (Activities like sharing each other's personal stories or playing a fun game together often create high engagement between employees).

3. Find motivation drivers for your employees

Motivation is what drives us to bring out our best. But it might not always be a one fit for all your employees. 

Let us show you an example,

Dan and Jack are two employees driven by different motivations.

Dan is highly ambitious and accountable: He seeks pleasure by being accountable every time, helping the organization to get a step closer to their goals and targets. Whenever presented with a challenge, Dan immediately gets excited and finds ways to overcome it. Challenges always motivate Dan to perform better.

Jack fears trying new things: So the above communication mode doesn't necessarily work with Jack. Being a manager, you might feel that he doesn't have a purpose or lacks motivation. To motivate Jack, you need to make him understand about the losses the company can incur if failed to deal with the challenge, and showcase how he can play a significant role in helping the organization overcome it.

Key Practices: 

• Know what motivates every employee differently based on their personality.
• Designate roles that are suitable for different employees and always keep in check about their motivation drivers.

4. Create a safe place for open discussions

Create an environment where employees feel safe and do not hesitate to share their opinions. As a leader or manager, accept that whenever you are wrong as this sets up an example where employees will follow the same. Creating a safe place with open discussions makes employees feel happier and cared for.

Key Practices:

• Be transparent and share all the positives and negatives to keep employees in the loop. The more your employees know, the more they feel a part of what you are doing.
• Create a good culture in your virtual workspace, where employees feel confident to come up with ideas and not ridiculed by their colleagues.
• Give them the courage to try new things and fail. But make sure every failure becomes learning to them.
• Give your feedback for every task and tell them where they need to improve to be the best.
• Provide honest feedback about their work and give details about their areas of development.

5. Invest in their long term benefits

Organizations should invest in equipment, technology, and operations for their clients and also their employees. Pandemic has created a panic situation in employees due to layoffs and uncertainty of the future. Invest and help employees upgrade their skills as it can act as a variable to the organization's profitability, if not immediately but certainly in the future.

Key Practices:

• Help them in upskilling by providing free/paid resources and courses.
• Put efforts to make them an expert in their domain and feel confident about themselves.

We hope the detailed guide helped you to resolve the employee engagement challenges in your organization. Now it's time for you to put them in practice, and You will be amazed to see the results.

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Here's an extra bonus:

Download our FREE ebook "5 Virtual Team Building Activities For Remote Employees", covering exciting activities that your employees can't resist. Many HR's from different organizations have already downloaded and are loving it.

Click here to download it for Free.

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