Navigating the virtual workspace, especially with work-from-home setups, can make your worker feel like it’s a solo voyage in an endless digital seascape. You may need more than standard video calls and email threads to transform your staff’s feeling of isolation into a more cohesive and dynamic relationship.
With more creative thinking and energy, you can turn mundane and uneventful moments into memorable experiences. But these five insights might just be the most effective tricks to spark connection and lasting camaraderie among your remote talents.
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Some Tips To Engage Your Remote Team
1) Remote Wellness Challenge
Keeping your remote team feeling connected and motivated can be a challenge that could take a toll on everyone, especially when it comes to maintaining well-being.
Since “wellness” is the buzzword these days, introducing remote well-being challenges to your team could be a great way to engage and create “hype” among your team members. These are activities that will not only promote healthier lifestyles but can be a way for you to create team bonds and an encouraging work environment, however remote, like:
– Step-Tracking Contests
Just organize a fun and friendly competition where your team members can track their daily steps using your recommended apps for more uniform tracking. You can proceed to make a “contest” out of their achievements, whether daily or weekly.
This challenge can spur or encourage your team to take some action or engage in physical activity (which has become a challenge for remote workers) and promotes a sense of friendly and healthy competition.
– Monitored Daily Meditation Practices
You can include guided meditation practices in all your work schedules where your team members may participate and compete. Track their attendance and progress, then award points for consistency and inspiring entries in their journals. You can include challenges like completing meditation styles and timed durations.
These activities will not only reduce all your stress, it will also help boost endurance, focus, and engagement across all your staff.
– The Healthy Recipe Exchange
You could go more food-focused by creating a virtual space where your team members can share their favorite health-conscious recipes. It will engage everyone, especially those who love to cook, to experiment and swap their recipes.
This trick could also encourage healthy eating lifestyles, with your company offering a platform for culinary festivities and competition, albeit online.
– Virtual Fitness Class
You can stage an online fitness contest by arranging online fitness classes, like pilates, yoga, or aerobics, where your team members can all participate. You can coordinate classes in a more structured way so your online staff can stay active and engaged regularly.
You can cook up a wellness check-in for all your staff and find more effective employee recognition examples, so you can express your appreciation for their participation effectively. This activity could also be a chance for you to organize periodic check-ins to maintain that feeling of work-family connection and support.
Your wellness overall challenge could mean a weekly event where everyone will be qualified to compete and share something about their health challenges, wellness success, and goals.
2) Virtual Escape Rooms Challenge
You may say it’s challenging to engage and connect to your remote workers, but today’s advancements have provided many employee engagement software that you could maximize. These could help enliven your onshore and offshore staff and make your direction felt across time zones. You could stage more unique teambuilding activities like a virtual escape room challenge.
These activities have to create in your workers teamwork and problem-solving skills, like:
– Selecting Themes
They need to select from various themes, such as space missions, haunted houses, or spy mysteries, to tickle their interests. These diverse themes can create a remarkable experience and keep them wholly engaged.
– Forming Teams
You have to divide your large group into smaller teams for a more inclusive and competitive experience. Often, smaller teams can lift each other with better communication and collaboration easily reached among them.
– Setting of Schedules
You need to set your schedule for your escape room sessions during downtimes or a Friday closing activity. It’s best to make sure that everyone is more relaxed and ready to have fun without the stress of deadlines looming ahead.
– Track Progress
You may use leaderboards to keep track of each team’s accomplishments, especially if you post them up for everyone to see, that will really tick the challenge mode on.
– Debrief and Reflect
After each activity, or after everyone has “escaped” the room, you need to hold a debriefing session to discuss their hurdles, strategies, and what could make the engagement more fruitful next time.
This reflection session could encourage each participant to share their hurdles, success strategies, and other insights to highlight room for improvement, not only with the challenge but with their individual performance as well.
3) Digital Coffee Breaks
When it’s challenging to engage your people across countries (and continents), how much more on a more personal level? That’s why it needs more ingenuity from you as a manager. So, how about maximizing those 15-minute coffee breaks?
You may think of it quite complicated, but digital coffee breaks actually offer a simple yet effective solution. They’re casual, unstructured times where you allow team members to chat over a cup of coffee or tea the online way.
– Have Them Regularly
You can plan weekly or twice-a-week coffee breaks during “breaks” that will allow everyone to join. It needs to be consistent, though, so there’ll be that feeling of anticipation for these coffee sessions to be unconsciously included in everyone’s workflow.
– A Relaxed Atmosphere
Each employee needs to first create a relaxed atmosphere in each of their stations, then bring their favorite drink before they can join the call. This comfortable and relaxed setting will make it easier for people to engage and open up in light-hearted conversations.
– Free and Natural Convos
It’s best to avoid talking about work and all that’s in it. Instead, you can shift the talks to shared interests, fun stories, and experiences. It needs to be as stress-relieving coffee-talks as much as possible.
– Rotate Hosts
You can assign a different host each session, reminding them that it’s their assignment to bring in unique themes, ideas (fresh and engaging), and icebreakers to keep the ball rolling. Just make sure, as manager, that all your staff gets the chance to lead and be the host.
These digital coffee breaks could effectively connect your staff across the globe. It’s not just coffee time, but a chance to chat about anything under the sun in different settings without the fuss– but pure good time. This could be a chance for everyone to say bye-bye to isolation and feel they sure have a family within the company, wherever the exact location may be.
4) Online Skill-Sharing Workshops
Tapping into your team’s diverse skills may be the best way to stage an online skill-sharing workshop, especially if maintaining teamwork and continuous group learning is fast becoming a hurdle in your organization. These online skill-sharing workshops might just be a great strategy to explore in these ways:
– Identifying Skills and Interests
You need to stage a survey for your team to find out what unique skills or talents they can share with the group. Whether it has made them genius at work, at home (cooking recipes), or they’re quite adept with marketing styles, oblige everyone to contribute.
– Schedule Workshops
Whether monthly or quarterly, you need to plan a definite schedule to establish consistency in your team’s learning mode. It’s to make sure that knowledge and skill-building become integrated into their routine, which they can look forward to every time.
– Volunteer Presenters
You could encourage team members to volunteer as presenters, or you could attach a freebie or a cash reward to make it more appealing. It could also allow everybody to have their time to shine, whose skills and prowess will be highlighted.
And, when it’s time for them to present, apart from breaking down barriers in ranks, it promotes a culture of engagement and knowledge-sharing.
– Interactive Sessions
Make it a point to design each skill-sharing into an interactive style, like Q&A-type sessions, live demonstrations, and group workshops, to ensure that the learning experience is hands-on and really shared.
– Record and Share
Always make sure to record each of your sessions, you can even create a digital library of these workshops where everyone can have access and benefit from it, not only those who were present during the presentation but for those duly absent as well.
These workshops will not only promote engagement among your employees but will create an enriching and dynamic work environment. Your recordings will also become concrete evidence of company camaraderie and engagement, serving as references from present to future employees across time zones.
5) Virtual Artistry or Music Jams
The more creative your activities, the more engaging and remarkable they become, building a culture where families share and connect every time, even in the arts.
– Choose Your Theme
You can start each session with a specific theme or topic for your art or music jam, whether it’s painting landscapes, composing a short song, or drawing abstract figures. Your theme can provide the walkway to make your activity more interesting and engaging.
– Bring Supplies
Depending on your theme, encourage each participant to prepare their own art supplies or musical instruments before they join.
– Live Sessions
Make sure to make these sessions interactive; you could encourage your participants to share their progress and techniques, like talking in real-time or “live.” You can use breakout rooms to assign smaller groups to make their art more concentrated, and they can discuss freely within the group.
– Showcase Outputs
At the end of each session, host a fun virtual gallery or mini-concert where participants can showcase their art and they can relax and interact as a whole.
– Record Achievements
These events are best recorded not only as timelines and milestones but also promoting every contributor as an achiever in their own right.
It’s a way for the whole organization to recognize and express pride that you have a host of talented individuals that you need to celebrate across generations of workers bound by one organization.
