Top 15 Remote Engagement Tips from HR Experts

What has the transition from hybrid to place-based impacted employee engagement? It can be difficult to create opportunities for employee engagement for remote and in-person workers.

In partnership with HR.com, we hosted an event on how to reimagine employee engagement in remote environments.

The panel of experts, including Headspace Health and Guru as well as Bonusly, discussed how to create a sense of belonging in remote and hybrid teams.

The panelists discussed everything, from remote onboarding to meeting audits. We have gathered all the top tips from our panelists so that you can easily access them at any time.

Top 15 Remote Engagement Tips From HR Experts

Tips to combat burnout and meet fatigue

1. Audits of meetings

Encourage your managers to perform a meeting audit of team meetings. Your team should ensure that meetings are a place for collaboration and not frustration. These are some questions that you might want to ask:

• Are all meeting attendees required to attend? Or could they get a time back and an email update instead?
• Is the meeting necessary? Or could it be done on an asynchronous channel?
• This meeting could be videotaped?

2. No-meeting Days

Encourage employees to set aside a week without meetings and encourage them to use this time for personal and deep work. Employees can benefit from a day of self-care. This will improve their mental health and morale.

3. Camera on, camera off?

Establish clear expectations about which virtual meetings your employees will be participating in and which can be left open for them to do so.

4. Walking meetings

For meetings that don’t require your team to be in front of a screen, you can organize a walking meeting.
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5. Remote team advocates

In all mixed-location meetings, designate a remote advocate. To ensure that remote people have a chance to speak up, ask the advocate to check in on them. You can also pre-define other roles for meetings such as facilitator, notetaker, and timekeeper.

6. Meeting agendas

Make it a rule that meetings must have agendas. No ifs, buts, or buts.

7. Multiple modalities

Make sure that people have access to multiple modes of communication to participate in meetings. They can, for example, send their thoughts to the chat and unmute to chime into, or use Zoom’s “raise a hand” feature.
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8. Onboarding checklists

To help you set expectations for your new employees, whether they are remote or in-person, create an Onboarding Checklist. You can include items that you need to complete at different times, as well as for instructions for accessing the tools.

9. Collaboration agreements

To make it easier for new hires to understand the working norms of a team, we will briefly discuss working agreements. This template can be used if you don’t yet have working agreements.

10. Video updates

Create a system to update internal videos and store them all in the same place. A single source of truth for training videos gives new employees autonomy. It is also more efficient than having to conduct training sessions every time a new employee joins.

11. Mindfulness practices

To help break up the day, encourage employees to include mindfulness in their daily lives. We love Headspace for a moment of calm and mindfulness. If your organization uses Slack, there are many apps that can remind employees to move around or to drink water.
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12. Understanding biases

Recognizing common biases in feedback cycles is the first step in avoiding them. It is important to educate managers and teams about biases that could affect their ability assess employee performance. Are they falling prey to recency bias or weighing individual performance more than considering the whole employee?

13. Make use of tools

Track your performance over time with tools so that you have lots of examples to refer to when you are reviewing. This will avoid recency bias.

14. Training for performance

To ensure that they have the right tools and knowledge to conduct successful reviews, identify managers who have never facilitated performance reviews.
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15. Be clear about your expectations

To take out the surprise and fear from the review process, clarify your expectations. Start by making a list of what you can expect from the review process using a knowledge base such as Guru.