Leading a team of employees onsite is different from leading a team of employees working from home. The leadership style, the culture, the setup and structure, and the technique of running meetings would be modified to adapt to the flexibility of remote working. This will help in order to prevent challenges in achieving the target goals of the company.
According to Schaufeli, "Work engagement is a positive, affective-motivational state of fulfilment that is characterised by vigour, dedication, and absorption." In order to involve your employees working from home, there are 6 ways, which you can read from this article:
Schaufeli.
Work engagement is a positive, affective-motivational state of fulfilment that is characterised by vigor, dedication, and absorption.
- Use the right collaboration tool
- Provide social support and coaching
- Keep everyone in the loop
- Provide Feedback
- Host an online event or virtual team building activities
- Develop Trust
6 Ways To Engage the Team and the Clients While Working From Home?
- Use the right collaboration tool.
While working from home, designers, developers, and even the clients need to communicate regularly and stay connected. You can stay connected with your team and clients using a collaboration tool like Savah and it will be easier for you to stay on top of your tasks and also, get a faster turnaround time for asking approval for design revisions.
Savah is an all-in-one tool that allows you to do all of the prototyping, project management, and design communication. This platform helps you engage your team and even your clients in spite of not being able to interact with your colleagues face to face when working on a project.
Savah is very useful for app prototyping even when colleagues or team members are working remotely.
Helen, UX Designer
- Provide social support and coaching
Make use of a social media platform, like Facebook Workplace to increase employee and client engagement even while working from home. Some remote employees report feeling of loneliness and lack of support when working remotely. This can be addressed by staying connected (e.g. virtual coffee sessions) with your colleagues and clients using the collaboration tools.
Some organisations make use of the Facebook Workplace or Slack for announcements, updates about products and services, new release products. They also to acknowledge and give recognition to employees' exemplary performance, it is like a tap on the back for a "job well done". On the client's side, they often post videos of inspirational talks and share tips or coaching on how to improve productivity and performance. These kinds of social activities in your social media platform help engage both your remote employees and clients because the employees working from home will know what and how they could contribute to the team. They will feel that there is support or someone they could ask if something about a project needs clarification. Also, the clients will be pleased with the results in the increase of work engagement.
- Keep everyone in the loop
Engage everyone in the team and loop your clients with the status of your project. Even if your team is working from home, you can use a lot of project management tools online which are beneficial for increasing work engagement and productivity. If you are a tech startup and you need to engage your team of designers and developers, you can use tools like Trello, Slack, or Asana to delegate tasks, organise projects, and keep track of progress.
These tools will also allow your team members to track their progress towards each project completion. These project management tools will boost their productivity, sense of responsibility, efficiency, and engagement.
- Provide Feedback
Be generous in providing constructive feedback. The team of developers and designers are in need to create design templates that are pleasing to the client. Revisions are inevitable for they may add one feature and another once they find something is missing or needs to be improved. This is why a prototyping app is beneficial for developers to help them alter their design and use it for testing. They can even make changes in their prototype even if they are offline or working from home without the Internet.
Now, it is even possible to receive design feedback instantly using an app like Savah. Since it is an all-in-one app that allows designers to create their prototype and upload images fast, it can also be helpful by automatically notifying your client of the current changes with the prototype; hence, you will receive faster feedback as soon as the client has seen the uploaded design. This app is definitely a useful tool for engaging both the client and remote employees.
- Host an online event or virtual team building activities
Working from home has a number of benefits. But sometimes remote employees also report feelings of sadness, especially when they are used to face-to-face interactions with colleagues and peers in the office. You can eliminate this feeling by keeping your employees engaged (and your clients too) by hosting virtual team building or wellness activities online, which you can schedule once a week.
Some companies conduct a wellness hour every Friday through video chats or virtual team games for happy hour.
The virtual team building activities promote engagement or connectedness and fun time with colleagues too even when everyone working remotely. Also, it will benefit the wellness of the remote employees to prevent the feeling of burnout. Find a time to think of activities and what is best for your employees, because they are your talents and assets that should be valued and they should feel that you care.
- Develop Trust
When employees perceive that their employer or leaders at work are trustworthy, it also affects their creativity, performance, and work engagement. Trust is important in an employer-employee relationship whether working from home or on-site. Giving the trust and freedom for an employee to work from home is one of the best examples that an employer has trusted an employee with the accountabilities and the freedom to be flexible and work in his own space. As a result, the remote employee would also feel positive with the trust given to him/her by the employer. Hence, it will develop mutual trust between an employer and an employee.
