Speaker 1: Have you noticed morale and engagement slowly dip among your remote team members? In this video, we'll talk about what can cause morale problems and our four top tips to keep remote employees engaged. Hi, I'm Julia. I'm a people and culture coordinator here at Gusto, and on this channel, we help people leaders like you build amazing workplace cultures through recognition and engagement. On paper, remote work is great for your employees. They get to enjoy more flexibility, they get to save money on things like commutes and lunches, and they get to spend more time with friends and family. Most of your employees probably love it, but for some people, the shift to remote work can be a completely new experience, and it may be a little bit jarring. The workflows that they're used to get disrupted. They find it difficult to get into a productive routine, and they might start to feel disconnected from their colleagues. Over time, their morale starts to dip and they feel disconnected. Now, when a lot of people leaders think about boosting morale and engagement, they think about social activities or perks and benefits. So things like remote team building events or at home office stipends, or even, you know, sending all of your employees a care package. Now, all of these things are very nice to have, but they are cosmetic. If you really want to create sustainable engagement from your remote team, you should focus on the strategies and practices that help make your employees day to day experience better. That's what we're going to dive into on this video. When Gusto became a remote first company, most people loved the freedom, but some of our team members found it difficult to work efficiently or they missed the sense of belonging that came from interactions at the office. We found that the best way to tackle this problem was to be proactive about it. And so we came up with clear engagement strategies to keep our team on track. Hey, everyone, before we dive in, I'd love to know what are your biggest challenges when it comes to engaging your remote teams? Answer in the comments. Here are the four that we feel are most important. Number one, embrace the flexibility. Since moving remote, a lot of companies made the mistakes of trying to recreate their in-person practices only doing it from home. And so this meant trying to force people to stick to an office hours schedule. For a lot of employees, though, this means sticking to a schedule that isn't optimal for them, and it negates the biggest upside of remote work. If you want happy, engaged and productive team members, embrace that flexibility and let folks have as much freedom as possible to work when it suits them. Which brings me to my next point. Encourage ownership. Working remotely can only be successful if you truly allow people to take full ownership of their work. If employees feel like you're constantly checking up on them, micromanaging them and not letting them have the space to do their jobs, morale and engagement will go south fast. Set clear expectations and show employees that you trust them to plan their work and be accountable for their results. Trust me, they'll repay that faith. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. If you are, please hit the like button and subscribe so you don't miss out on our next one. Thirdly, set clear guidelines for communication. Ownership doesn't mean that everyone just does their own thing all willy nilly without talking to each other about it. After moving to remote work, it's actually more important to establish clear lines of communication to help people stay connected. In some ways, you might need to make room for more communication and not less. This might mean scheduling more check-ins or touchpoints with your team, and it also means putting time in the calendar for virtual activities or social events, just to make people feel connected in the way they would by offhand communications in the office. Having said that, you do want to avoid that dreaded Zoom fatigue that we all know, and you definitely don't want people stuck in a dozen meetings that could have just been emails. Plan your virtual meetings schedule carefully so that you strike the right balance, and set clear communication guidelines so that employees know what should be addressed on a Zoom call and what can be saved for Slack or emails. Having a clear communication flow that employees feel connected without having their phones ringing and pinging 24-7 will actually help them feel more comfortable with remote work. Number four, don't forget to recognize your people. Lastly, okay, I might be a little bit biased here, but the one thing I've found to be the most effective for improving morale and engagement in remote teams is, you guessed it, recognition. Being recognized regularly can help reinforce positive behaviors, it can encourage collaboration, and it can make your team members just feel more connected to each other. Best of all, you can do it all fully remotely and asynchronously. So even if your team is working all over the world on different schedules, different time zones with very little communication touchpoints, they can still show their appreciation for one another. One more thing. You might be watching this and saying, Julia, my team loves remote work, you got nothing to worry about, our morale is at an all-time high. Now even if you feel like your employees have been mostly positive about working from home, it's still super important to be mindful of the potential problems that associate it. Take a look at some of these stats. 78% of remote employees say that they felt more included while working in a physical office. 55% of employees say that they work longer hours remotely. 22% of remote employees say that they struggle to unplug after work. And 75% of employees say that they feel more socially isolated than they used to. So it is possible that these problems exist at your company, even if your people haven't been vocal about them. So to recap, our top four strategies to improve remote employee morale and engagement are embrace the flexibility, encourage ownership, set clear communication guidelines, and don't forget to recognize your people.