4 Ways to Inspire and Inform Your Employees While Remote

How do you keep employees inspired and informed in a distributed work environment where they don’t see each other very much face to face?

Many companies are sorting out this question right now with remote working becoming more of the norm, not the exception. (And, of course, the impact of  COVID-19  has many more businesses creating contingency plans for remote working, with some enacting them on a limited basis already). As companies embrace more distributed forms of working, the savvy ones are adopting digital to keep employees engaged and informed. Here are some tips based on our work helping businesses use digital to create engaging employee communications and retention strategies:

Ramp up Your CEO Communications

Your CEO is the face of the company. Although your CEO cannot be in every office at every time physically, they can do so online. At Invests Digital, our CEO, Don Scales, holds regularly scheduled webcasts where our people can literally see and hear the voice of our leadership and engage in questions. In between webcasts, Don shares a monthly newsletter with personal insights and company news. Employees working remotely need the personal touch, and they need more frequent contact from company leadership.

Uplift Employees

Putthe weight of all your digital communications into uplifting employees via awards and more informal recognition such as a congratulatory tweet, Instagram post, or other highly visible shout-outs to employees for a job well done. Social media  is a great away to make employees feel special in a fun, creative way. An Instagram post won’t replace a high-five or award onstage at a company event, but social love can be even more visible and inventive.

Give Your Employees a Voice

This sounds like a no-brainer, but when’s the last time you examined how you involve your employees in your content marketing and thought leadership strategy? Many of our clients are well past the “How do I get started with employee blogging?” phase. But in an environment where employees are suddenly working remotely when they’ve not needed to do so before, now is a good time to revisit your approach. Consider recruiting more employees into your thought leadership program so that they feel more connected to the company when they’re not physically able to share ideas in person. Blogging is an excellent way to do that.

Connect Employees with Each Other

The explosion of tools such as Teams and Slack for micro-communications is well known. Now is a time to start getting creative and encourage employees to create communities of interest on platforms such as Teams, which is an excellent way for people in far-flung locations to communicate in both one-to-one and one-to-many formats quickly, including scheduling and managing meetings. On Slack, offices can set up special channels such as Music Lovers, Industry News, Kudos, and as many groups as there are personal tastes.

Embrace digital and use it as a bridge to connect different offices and your people. If you have scheduled town halls, meetings around product launches, or vendor calls, leverage your digital conferencing options to maintain a collaborative environment even if not everyone is present physically.

These are just some approaches for keeping employees engaged with digital when they cannot see each other face to face. What are your tips?