How to Keep Your Remote Team Motivated

In recent years many leaders have crossed the bridge of moving team members to remote positions, although many are still resisting the change. Leaders embracing remote work have teched up their teams, defined the processes to follow and ensured employees are logged into conference accounts permanently.

These steps are just the beginning, the question is how do you keep these employees motivated? Many say productivity decreases with remote teams and others disagree and believe remote teams are more productive.

Academic research on the topic does have mixed results though, pointing to the implementation of the remote system and the management thereof. It is important to note that statistically employees with a choice of where to work are happier and more motivated versus those who have no choice over where they work.

Positive motivators at risk with a remote team are:

1. Play – this positive motivator decreases as it becomes harder for the employee to work at home.
2. Purpose – the employees’ sense of purpose could decline if not reminded of the impact of their work on their clients and colleagues.
3. Potential – if employees can’t gain access to team members who will develop them then their potential will decline.

What can you do as a Leader?

For many, work is their sense of play and purpose. The key is to resist making work mundane and bureaucratic. While structure is important it is equally if not more important to ensure your processes and rules don’t result in a spiral of demotivation and disengagement.

If you want your team to be engaged in their work, then it is essential to make their work engaging for them. Ways to do this are to give them work that will challenge them, help them learn something new. The leader can only obtain value if adding value to the job of the employee, employees who feel they are getting no value from their work or aren’t included, are ultimately disengaged, and plodding along hoping to float under the radar.

Important questions to ask your team and keep them included:

1. Where can we improve our service to our clients?
2. What can we fix right now?
3. How can we all improve output?
4. How can management improve to add to a better work environment?
5. What works for you and what can be changed?

Collaboration and inclusion are what gives an Employee a sense of and real involvement in the business as well as the all important, job satisfaction. Spending half your life on work should surely mean that where you work is a happy place.

How do you implement this with your team?

What you measure as a leader will indicate what is most important to you. Your team wants you to show them that you care. Running a survey and then discussing the results with your team will help get to the core of what they are feeling and their mood in the team.

Giving your team a fundamental basic structure and then the license to work freely within that structure is a good place to start with your remote team.

A basic structure could be based on the workdays of the week, for example:

Monday – Run team meetings. Reflect on the prior week and develop plans for the week. Identify potential areas of risk and implement a strategy to mitigate those during the week. Request at least one task to be implemented per team member to achieve for that week.

Tuesday – Team check-in, team assistance and progress analysis.

Wednesday - Team check-in, team assistance and progress analysis.

Thursday - Team check-in, team assistance and progress analysis.

Friday – The day to reflect on the week. Check in with your team and their motivation levels. Learn what worked and didn’t work and where attention is required based on the week that has passed. This will influence decisions and approaches in the week to come.

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