Being remote-first is a strategy that is focused on employees working from home as their ‘default’ work mode. This strategy has boomed in popularity due to COVID-19 which forced companies to have employees learn to work this way. There are even a plethora of statistics coming from research in the hybrid strategy.
What is a Remote-First Company?
Remote-first companies are comprised of fully remote teams. These companies have a physical workplace for employees who wish to work in the traditional office space, yet the majority of employees work remotely.
Environments that are remote-first make working from home the norm rather than circumstantial.
Benefits of Remote-First Companies
When it comes to several factors, having a remote-first strategy can help your company grow and develop. These are just a few benefits of remote-first companies:
Saves costs: This is the most drastic change, by having less office space and less needed infrastructure, you can lower the general costs of your business.
Flexibility: You can grow your company at its own pace. Remote-first provides more control and allows for you and your employees to have flexible scheduling.
Employee Satisfaction: A study performed by CNBC found that remote employees scored on a happiness index at 75 in comparison to office workers who scored at 71.
Drawbacks of Remote-First Companies
There are always drawbacks to any strategy. The following are some reasons why you might want to avoid a remote-first strategy:
Feeling Isolated: Employees working in remote environments are more likely to feel unconnected to other employees.
Time Differences: If employees live in different time zones, it can be more challenging to manage and ensure deadlines are consistent.
Need for Oversight: In many cases, leadership has a magnifying glass on employees working remotely, this can cause a level of distrust between the management and employees.
What are Engagement Strategies?
Employee engagement strategies are ways a company can get their employees more involved and productive at work. This is very different from employee satisfaction because this reflects intangible metrics.
A great way to tell if your employees are engaged is if they are productive and if there is a low turnover rate at your company.
Levels of Employee Engagement
There are three different levels to which employees can be engaged. Each having an impact on employee productivity and overall company performance.
Not Engaged
These employees are feeling neutral toward the company and tend to perform averagely. They are more focused on their own role and bettering themselves, but are interested in company goals.
Actively Disengaged
These employees have negative attitudes toward the company or management. This means that they check out of activities and perform worse than the average employee. They do not care about company goals and are solely focused on self goals.
Engaged
Employees that are engaged are more productive than average employees and are more interested and focused on company goals and initiatives. They have a positive opinion of the business as a whole and are striving for company success.
Barriers of Engagement
To have your employees move from the levels of not engaged, or actively disengaged, to the engaged level can be a tough process. Here are some important factors that can slow the process down:
Lacking a Balance
When employees can not balance life with work and place more effort in one area than the other, it can cause them to lower engagement. If an employee puts all the time into work, they may be productive, but they will run into burnout eventually causing the productivity to spiral downward.
The Work Environment
If the work environment has negative people, it can lower everyone else’s mood toward the company. It is always said that the negatives have more impact than the positives, unfortunately, this is the case with working. If everyone is happily engaged and comes across a vocal person who is actively disengaged, it can start to create doubt in those engaged workers.
Management Control
If management has a microscope over every activity, it creates a lack of trust between employees and management. By constantly watching what your employees do they will not want to be engaged and can turn them to the actively disengaged level.
Lack of Rewards
When employees work hard, they like to be rewarded in some capacity. From words of appreciation to being given a raise, all activities matter. When employees that work hard are not given any reward, their incentive to work decreases and lowers their overall engagement.
How to Build an Engagement Strategy for Remote-First Environments
There are a few important steps to creating an engagement strategy. You need to consider what strategy to implement, how to implement it, and how to measure the success of the strategy.
Choosing A Strategy
Many strategies that perform well in-office perform well in remote situations. Here’s a few strategies that work for both environments:
Provide Opportunities For Growth
This shows the company cares and wants the employees to be better. It can be giving more training for work topics or ways to receive more certifications or professional development.
Being Clear About Company Goals
Being clear can remove the lack of trust for the company. Having everyone on the same page allows for employees and management to better understand each other.
Recognizing Employees
By showing appreciation for well-performing employees. It also provides a great reason for employees to try and be more productive to receive that appreciation. Appreciating employees can be in the form of a verbal statement, a written letter, or even a gift card.
Promoting Honest Feedback
Encouraging employees to be honest and opinionated can make them feel listened to and more willing to give feedback. The largest issue management can have is encouraging feedback, but not truly taking it into consideration. That can cause employees to feel disheartened and move toward being actively disengaged.
Employee & Management Accountability
When you keep both employees and management accountable for their actions, it creates an environment that is more honest and it can remove egos that can be barriers to productivity and engagement.
Promoting Personal Growth
As much as companies want the best employees, the employees have other wants and needs. By encouraging personal goals, it creates more of a balance for work and home life.
Those are just a few strategies that can help increase employee engagement, but there are more. Consider the needs of your company and what is a reasonable goal for the workplace, the next step crucial to the success of the strategy.
Strategies for Remote-First
With the difference in environments between in-office and remote-first, it can be difficult to find and implement strategies that purely work for remote companies.
With a lack of communication and interaction between employees in a remote-first environment, it takes a larger toll on management to search for useful strategies and plan on implementation. Here are a few ways that can increase employee engagement for employees working from home:
Having open communication with employees
Providing training
Regularly check-in
Allow for flexibility
Encourage having fun
Provide ways for personal growth
Implementing Your Strategy
It is best to give clear ideas behind the strategy and what the company wishes to accomplish with the implementation. You need to tell those expectations to leadership, stakeholders, and employees.
After you know your goal of the strategy and which strategy you believe will work best, ask for feedback on the decisions. Others may want to give their opinions and that itself can help increase engagement.
Measuring Success
It is harder to measure employee engagement, but there are still a few things that can show how your strategy is performing. Here are a few metrics you can use to see the success of your strategy:
Turnover Rate
If your company has a high turnover rate it could mean that the employees coming in quickly transition to the actively disengaged level. It could also be that the average employee does not reach the engaged level, meaning they leave for better opportunities and personal growth.
Production
Having a higher production after implementing a strategy could show that employees moved from the not engaged level to the engaged level. These employees are more focused on company goals and less on personal goals.
Profits
An increase in profits can show success due to engaged workers wanting to make the company more money, rather than make themselves more money.
Number of Absentees
This can be related to the success of your engagement strategy because employees that are engaged are more likely to work more frequently.
Vacation Days
Surprisingly, this can help judge the success of your strategy as well. If fewer vacation days are used, it could be that more of your employees like being at work and adding to the productivity and company profits.
In Conclusion
Remote-first companies may be a way of the future and more companies are moving toward the strategy of remote-first, but everything has upsides and downsides. Also, you can use the majority of the same strategies for a remote-first company as you would the in-office companies and there are plenty of ways to increase the employee engagement of purely virtual companies.
A strategy to increase employee engagement needs to be well thought out and can greatly increase areas of your business. There are certain metrics to be aware of through the process and you need to consider what works best for your business and how to implement your wanted strategy.
We encourage using a tried and true method and show appreciation to your employees through our events. You can attend a free demo, or if you are ready, you can book an event now.