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Whether your employees work in an office or remotely, they contribute largely to making your vision a reality. With this, you ought to ensure they do so efficiently. This calls for effectively engaging your employees.
For a business owner to effectively engage their employees, it takes more than just pushing workers to work harder or faster. Outlining specific ways your employees should conduct tasks can birth resentment, and it can also lead to low-quality work.
Again, if you are a soft leader, your employees may develop bad habits such as procrastination and laziness. Research shows that there is no ‘best’ way to engage your employees, but there are practical strategies you can apply to ensure employees are on board and that they perform work diligently.
Especially now that most companies have deployed their workers to work from home due to Covid, here are practical ways to engage your employees in work activities.
Set Clear and Realistic Goals
If you want to engage all your employees working from home, you should set clear and realistic goals. Now, more than ever, you need to set clear and specific objectives to ensure your employees are on board and have a unified focus.
Your company’s goals must be realistic for your employees to achieve in this economic turmoil. Other considerations include setting smart goals, aiming high but not too high, giving a reasonable time frame, and ensuring you have a proper plan of action.
With clear and realistic goals, you will effectively engage your workers without any inconveniences.
Communicate
If you have noted a decrease in employees’ productivity and lack of interest in business tasks, it’s probably because you are not communicating clearly. There are multiple ways lack of proper communication can lead to low worker productivity.
For instance, if you continuously flood your employees’ emails and slack inboxes with messages, they might have difficulty reading them. If you are never clear about deadlines and meetings, this might also be the cause.
Effective communication is vital for every organization that wants workers to perform work effectively and efficiently. Therefore, you should always find better ways to communicate with your staff. One best way of communicating is by creating a virtual communication policy.
Secondly, ensure that you use the right communication tools. Thirdly, provide the right time, such as when to research registered agent services for business help. Also, you should provide the how, such as how to do the research.
Match Tasks with the Right Job
If you have worked with your employees for a while, you probably know some of them individually. This means you might know their strengths, weaknesses, level of knowledge, and skills they possess. With this, it would be best to ensure that you delegate jobs to the right people to ensure they are on board.
Unlike in an office where you can assign work to a particular employee and closely monitor them to ensure they deliver quality work, it would be unwise to do this if they work from home.
Doing so can lead to adverse outcomes as you will not supervise how they do the work. You should ensure that you assign various tasks to employees who can deliver quality output without your supervision.
Be Consistent with Feedback
It can be easy for remote working employees to lose focus if you do not recognize their work. If you want to engage employees working from home effectively, you should maintain consistent feedback.
You should also ensure that you give positive feedback. With the pandemic, most people are going through a lot that you may not know of. Unknowingly, continually giving negative feedback may have adverse outcomes on some of your employees.
It would be best to be consistent with positive feedback to build confidence and motivate employees to work from home.
Be a Good Example
Another great way to engage your employees as they work from home is by setting a good example. As a leader, your employees are most likely to follow in your footsteps. For instance, if you are always late to virtual meetings, your employees might emulate this and not join the forum on time.
If you don’t commit to work or behave professionally, your employees will also fall in these footsteps. Therefore, if you want to have your employees on board, you should set a good example.
You can set a good example by taking responsibility for your mistakes and being accountable for your actions. As an employer, you cannot lead from the sideline. It would be best if you also worked alongside your employees in the various tasks you assign.
With a second wave of the pandemic potentially looming, it seems like companies will continue having their employees working remotely. Fortunately, you will effectively engage your staff with the above tips and ensure they don’t lose interest in business activities.
You may also like: Working Remotely: Tips for Employees and Their Employers
