Eight Ways to Keep Your Team Engaged While Working Remotely

Managing a remote team and keeping morale high without having the opportunity for face to face interaction might seem like a challenge at first, but it’s something that most businesses have needed to quickly adapt to over the last few weeks. As lives are changed and isolation is continuing on longer than expected, helping your employees remain in good spirits is more important than ever, for both their health and for your business. 

If your team is missing some of those human elements, some of these suggestions might help you to enjoy each other’s company once again. 

1. Meet regularly: set aside time each week to come together as a team and discuss progress and future projects or plans. Even better if you can use a video conferencing tool to see each other and connect visually, as well as audibly. Add some fun to these meetings by adding a theme once a month - funniest hat, Halloween costumes, etc. - consider matching these themes to the season.

2. Consider starting each meeting by having the team share a personal win and a professional win for the past week.

3. Look for virtual professional development opportunities - offer them to the team or to do them as a team.

4. Schedule a virtual happy hour or coffee for the team - choose your favorite beverage and just catch up on life.

5. Express gratitude and appreciation - doing this on your weekly calls is important, but hand-written notes and other small gifts of gratitude are easy to mail. Consider a gift card to a local coffee shop or restaurant or a branded item for their home office.

6. Create a Bingo game for your team. Send out Bingo cards that they can fill out during your weekly conference calls and of course, have a fun branded prize for the winner :) You can make your own conference call bingo card here.

7. Set up a Tiny Campfire for your team. Though we've never tried this, it sounds really fun! You could use this service or possibly create your own branded campfire experience unique to your team.

8. Host a team game night or lunch hour. Apps like Houseparty have games built in and there are many other online multiplayer game platforms that can be used too, depending on what type of game you’re looking for. 

How else are you keeping your team connected through this unusual time in history? We’d love to add new ideas to this list, so please share below!