Are you looking for ideas to engage remote teams online? With the recent pandemic, most organizations initiated a work-from-home policy for their employees. In fact, remote hiring is on the rise for all good reasons. But, with ease comes responsibility. Now, there are growing concerns about engaging remote teams with on-site teams. At this point, virtual platforms become the central hub for all your employee online interaction and engagement. After all, you do not wish for your remote teams to feel left out. So how would you engage employees virtually?
Shift to a Virtual Platform
Recently, the pandemic has put a hold on face-to-face physical interactions. It has greatly affected the corporate sector to rethink its practices. Now, most organizations prefer to expand their reach and consider remote hiring of employees. This has given way to virtual workspace culture. With remote workers on board, the issue of team routine engagement and interaction has encouraged organizations to move to a virtual platform.
A virtual platform seamlessly accommodates a global employee base into the platform and encourages routine participation and involvement through virtual roundtable meetings, webinars, conference calls, or virtual training sessions. The platform becomes the virtual intranet software for the organizations to replicate the physical office experience for their audiences and gather an employee base over the cloud.
Ways to Engage Employees Virtually
Now, the question here arises how would you engage employees virtually? Let’s face it; we need something beyond zoom meetings to make the workspace exciting and fun. To begin with, join a virtual platform that offers tons of interactive features to facilitate your official meetings, conferences or discussions. You can allow employees, teammates, managers, HR, executives and other staff members to build professional relationships over at a virtual platform while also managing an on-site team. By all means, this user-friendly and easy-to-navigate virtual platform particularly becomes the online workspace for the team to network and communicate with each other. Be it live text, audio or video chat, the platform facilitates private and group meetings to engage employees virtually.
Follow the stated virtual employee engagement activities and create the best interactive work experience for your global employee base.
Immerse Remote Teams in a Virtual Workspace
When it comes to gathering remote teams online, companies establish a secure and private virtual space for their workforce. By all means, the virtual platform becomes the virtual office for the organizations with a true replication of their physical office space. Anyone from anyone can join in the private workstation. Here, the employees join the workplace within their office hours and in the meantime interact with each other virtually. Altogether, the place facilitates overall routine interactions, meetings and meaningful business discussions.
All-in-all, a virtual platform becomes your online workplace facilitating remote teams with:
- Virtual replica of your physical corporate office building
- Virtual roundtables installed within the office space
- Audio/video conferencing options to discuss business matters
- Live polls, surveys and quizzes to encourage participation from all
- Company representative avatars option to create a real-life experience
- Recreational engagement opportunity coupled with live gamification
- Live alerts and notifications keep staff members informed
- Live one-on-one or group chat options for employees
- Meeting scheduler option is available to book meetings with executives or the CEO
- Profile search option available to engage with each other directly
- Guided buttons to the office entrance, halls, lobbies, meeting or webinar rooms
24/7 Accessible Communications Network for Staff Members
A virtual platform significantly facilitates 24/7 live chat and networking among employees. In fact, it allows staff members to look for each other through the profile search option and connect at any time from anywhere. In addition, remote team members easily schedule meeting with the on-site staff and above all, network with them at a virtual conference, roundtable meeting, or training webinar session.
Once partnered with a virtual platform, your virtual workspace is accessible 24/7 just using the live credentials. Despite distances, the remote teams engage with each other on a regular basis and carry out their business meetings online. Precisely, the virtual workplace becomes your communications hub to gather industry professionals, customers or prospective leads to connect online.
Engage Employees in Virtual Roundtable Discussions
The virtual roundtables installed on the platform encourage routine interaction among the employees. The team members schedule private or group live discussions headed by moderators and easily discuss confidential matters or business agendas online. Also, the staff members can invite remote industry professionals to join the discussions and guide each other on the new projects.
The roundtable discussions are best for face-to-face digital interaction. Above all, it allows easy sharing of confidential data, documents, files, images, or video content to facilitate critical decision-making among employees.
Let Employees Interact in Private Chat Rooms
Just as an office has a common room, a virtual platform also presents private chat rooms to engage employees virtually in one-on-one discussions. Any confidential messages, matters or deals are privately discussed in these chat rooms. For instance, the executives get to connect with the concerned parties in live chats.
Create Live Webinars and Presentations
Undoubtedly, webinars work best to educate and engage employees virtually. In fact, by all means, virtual platforms allow companies to fully customize the webinar rooms and gather their staff members in a branded environment. Plus, it welcomes remote keynote speakers to altogether present webinar sessions online.
There’s a wide array of webinar options available for the workforce to engage in, such as;
- Allows speakers to host multiple webinar presentations
- Stream live or pre-record your presentations
- Allow remote employees to attend webinar sessions
- Create personalized webinars as per each employee
- Let employees intervene and comment throughout the sessions
- Easily train new employees through on-demand webinar sessions
Encourage Participation in Quizzes and Games
A virtual platform allows you to plan healthy activities for your employees. Do not just bore them with routine work; rather, spice up things by engaging employees in live quizzes, surveys and games. For instance, schedule live scavenger hunts, trivia, or other online fun games.
Appreciate Employees with Goodie Bags
While engaging employees virtually, you need to appreciate the most active staff members. One way to do it is by distributing virtual goodie bags. It is to encourage their participation and interaction with the other staff members. Most importantly, encourage remote employees in online team-building activities by offering goodie bags such as; gift cards, employee benefits, digital food or shopping vouchers, and health benefits.
Allow Virtual Tea or Coffee Breaks
A refreshing break from work does not harm. For that matter, companies schedule tea or coffee breaks for the employees to grab a mug and spend quality time with their fellow teammates. Especially, your teams working from home need a break from work and engage in brief chats.
Invest in Virtual Team Building Activities
Another way to easily engage the employees is through virtual team-building activities. These activities mainly range from group games, exercises, or activities that encourage group participation and live interaction with each other.
First, you can schedule ice-breaking activities encouraging employees to interact with their newest team members. Further, the team-building activities motivate staff members to build long-term work relationships with their colleagues. All in all, the exercises help build professional relations, network with remote teams on a routine basis, and boost employee confidence in themselves and the organization. At the end of the day, the fun activities ensure a sense of collaboration and promote teamwork among them.
Get Real-time Employee Feedback on Engagement
The real-time feedback from the remote teams helps determine the success of your online employee engagement. It guides you towards continuing the most working activities and discarding the ones that do not interest your employees. So, it is important that you extract honest feedback from the employees, such as;
- Employ new games and fun activities
- Invite popular keynote speakers
- Maintain a healthy company culture
- Schedule tea breaks twice a day
- Train the current management team
- Let employees enrol themselves on multiple courses
- Suggestions on improving the current project strategy
In Conclusion
For your remote teams to function seamlessly with your on-site teams, make sure you try out all the engagement activities discussed above. But, make sure you include the activities that work best for your employee base rather than imposing bland activities.
Virtual Days save your day by crafting a personalized plan to help you engage employees virtually. So, request a demo today and learn about all our advanced networking tools and features.
