15 Surefire Ways to Motivate Your Remote Team

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Working remotely has proven to make employees more productive, and many companies like Buffer have even seen huge success from having a distributed workforce. However, some remote teams do have a hard time keeping their employees productive and ensuring work runs smoothly. One way to tackle this is by setting up systems to motivate your remote team. 

By keeping your employees happy and energized, and setting up processes to do this, you can easily boost productivity, improve work output, and grow your business. Here are 15 ways you can motivate your remote team:

Top 15 Ways to Motivate Remote Working Team

1. Praise good performance

It is important to appreciate the good work done by your employees. When employees feel like they are valued and their work is appreciated, their job satisfaction and productivity levels rise. With regular performance praise, employees will maintain good work standards.

You can set up performance praise apps on your communication platform, like ManageBetter, to share praise and appreciate work done by your employees.

2. Be flexible with schedule

When working in an office, most teams have a specific reporting time. However, when working remotely and especially with family responsibilities, it’s hard to stick to the minute details of this schedule.  Give your employees some leeway to take breaks as they wish or choose when they would like to start work in the morning.

This flexibility in schedule can help them pick a work timing that is best suited for them. Then, they don’t have to worry about juggling between responsibilities at home and starting work on time.

However, ensure that any employee who is picking their own schedule has added this schedule to your attendance management dashboard. Apps like AttendanceBot allow you to set schedules for employees so that they are notified when their work hours start. The simplified time tracking and project tracking, will keep your team aligned at all times. 

3. Ensure everyone is invested

Oftentimes, teams aren’t aligned or invested in the company’s goals. Due to this, employees feel demotivated to complete their tasks, wondering why the task/project is even helpful to the company. Talk to your team about the company’s goals and ensure everyone is aware of why their role matters and how they help in growing your business.

This conversation can be set up within your monthly all-hands meeting and be reintroduced as necessary. Share how much of your goal has been achieved and what milestones you have reached so that your employees feel motivated to get more done.

4. Set up weekly casual chats

A good way to connect with your team is with a weekly casual hangout. Set up a quick video call for half an hour where the team talks about their life, plays a game, or any fun activity that isn’t about work. This weekly call is like a watercooler chat and can help your team reconnect.

5. Prioritize downtime

When working remotely, many employees lose a sense of structure in their day and they end up working even after their workday is technically over. Ask employees to set a structure to their day and emphasize the need for downtime. Once the employee logs off, they should not be receiving notifications and should not log on to work, unless it’s an emergency.

Mandating a log-off time means that your employees will have free time to spend with family and to relax, ensuring that they come back to work the next day happy, motivated, and productive.

6. Make them autonomous

Your employees shouldn’t have to constantly reach out to you for every decision they need to make. Make employees more autonomous by letting them make decisions for the work they are doing, reducing their dependency on you. Employees who are autonomous and aren’t micro-managed hold themselves more accountable for their work and are more committed to producing good work.

7. Provide the benefits that matter

When working remotely, perks like a foosball table or happy hours don’t work or add value. You need to provide your employees with benefits that make a difference to them. Set up healthcare, reading allowance, online course reimbursement, fitness perks, etc to provide your employees with benefits that make a positive impact in their lives. 

8. Encourage them to come to you with problems

Many employees avoid reaching out to their managers about problems or blockers out of fear that they would disapprove. Due to this, many teams see stalled work and slower turnaround time for projects. 

You must encourage employees to reach out to you when they are stuck with a problem so that you can help them solve the issue and get their work out as quickly as possible. Instead of berating them, show compassion and work with them to solve the problem.

9. Offer growth opportunities

Many teams see long-time employees leave the company for a step up the ladder. Since your team is distributed and works in a collaborative manner, offering your employees a higher position is often the last thing on your mind. But, it’s important to have this conversation with your employees in one-on-one meetings to understand what they are looking for in your company.

You can schedule employee growth conversations once a year, to understand what kind of role they want to take up and how you can help them get there. To add to this, you can also have a culture where employees can set up side projects that assist the company’s overall growth and provide them with online learning perks.

10. Get personal

Working from home is tough. It’s isolating, you don’t have a helping hand when you run into problems, and the lack of social contact can make it even harder. Managers need to reach out to their employees and have personal conversations from time to time. 

You can schedule such conversations regularly or within your one-on-one meetings. However, it’s more important for managers to be aware of how your employee is working, and reach out when you notice a drop in productivity.

11. Focus on achievements, not activity

Many managers focus on whether the employee is online, whether they are working at specific times, rather than focusing on work output. Since your employee is working from home, they will surely be dragged away from their laptop a few times in the day, it’s unavoidable. So, it’s hard to monitor whether they are working during their work hours and focusing on this aspect will make the employee feel like they are under surveillance.

Instead, look at the work done by your employee. You can have daily standups where each employee talks about what they worked on, what they are working on, and any blockers they had. Quick conversations and status updates can help you identify what they are and aren’t doing, and this will provide more information to you than if you scrutinized their time.

12. Communicate better

Communicating thoroughly and clearly is more important when working remotely. Often, bad communication causes delays in work, wrong work output, and misunderstandings. Ensure that you over-communicate your needs to your employees and give them clear directions. You can also encourage your employees to ask as many questions as they want. This way, you can avoid misunderstandings and ensure smoother work.

13. Allocate a remote workspace budget

Remote companies like Automattic provide their employees with a home office budget so that employees can set up desks, comfortable work chairs, equipment required for their work, and even get their preferred type of coffee. This budget allows the employee to set up a workspace that helps them stay productive. 

If you recently transitioned out of a physical office space, you can use this budget to provide a home workspace allowance to your employees. Talk to them and understand their needs and challenges when working from home. This can help you allocate the right amount to each employee.

14. Provide vacation leave and enforce its use

One challenge for many remote employees is that they often don’t take leave because of the convenience of remote work. However, off-times are crucial to help your employees recharge and relax so that they come back to work energized. Let your employees know about their vacation days and encourage them to take these leaves.

You can send a message every quarter to the company-wide communication channel, reminding employees to check their vacation days and encouraging them to use them. If you have a leave management app like AttendanceBot, employees can check their remaining leave with the bot on their communication app (like Slack or Microsoft Teams).

15. Set up a monthly all-hands meeting

A monthly all-hands meeting can be a great chance for the team to learn what everyone is working on, share achievements, and celebrate any wins that the company had. With an all-hands, each department can share the work they did in that month and the founder can give insight into the growth of the company, what’s working, and what needs to be improved. 

This is especially important since your team is working remotely. The meeting can be a chance for your employees to connect with the bigger picture and feel like an integral part of the company.

Motivate and connect with your remote team for higher work productivity and job satisfaction

Many companies don’t prioritize team building or employee well-being and this shows in employees’ job performance. Investing in a remote team’s job satisfaction is even more important than in a traditional setting to ensure a high level of quality work output. With different motivation systems set up within your team, you can successfully keep your remote team happy and make them want to perform well.

About the author

Kanav Abrol is the Founder of Harmonize, a chat-based HR system with a flagship product, AttendanceBot - a people management bot that simplifies time tracking, scheduling and more. You’ll always find him looking for hacks that can help remote working teams be more productive!