Through the rise of remote work, more and more people realize that there’s a lot to be gained from not being physically present. This separation poses vast challenges for collaboration, but when you don’t see your colleagues every day, it can also affect how connected you feel with them too.
We all know that distance can make things difficult. It might not be easy to stay in touch with others, important emotional context gets lost or misinterpreted in a conversation where there is no face-to-face connection between parties–relationships with colleagues weaken.
You know that socializing is an important part of building good relationships on teams. Whether you’re based at one location or across different time zones, the key thing here is that there should always be some form of connection between everyone involved!
So you want to make sure your remote working team is always connected and happy? Today, we are sharing some pro tips that can help you increase workplace socialization among remote workers-
7 Pro tips to strengthen remote work culture
1. Promote acts of kindness
You can encourage your team members to treat each other with kindness. This might seem too fluffy, but studies have shown that encouraging people to be kind makes them do kind things for others, even strangers.
You can set up a friendly competition between your teams to see who does the most acts of kindness, or you can organize a company-wide contest where the winners get a small reward. This will make people go out of their way to say “thank you,” complement each other, and generally spread happiness.
2. Create virtual breaks and cultural festivals
Make the most of time zone differences by creating a daily 1-hour break along with a virtual festival every few weeks. In addition, set up coffee breaks and lunch breaks to help people from different time zones work together better, encouraging bonding among those who work remotely.
This is the ideal solution when you want to strengthen bonds between people who work remotely. You can also extend post-work bonding that happens face-to-face, like holding virtual games nights or watching movies together.
3. Conduct remote competitions
Conducting remote competitions is a fantastic approach to socializing and encouraging interaction. Remote team-building activities are the perfect way to foster creativity and get your employees on board with new ideas.
The best part about such competitions is that they do not necessarily revolve around physical activities but can be focused on tasks. For example, one team can take up the challenge of finishing a particular job first, while the other group has to beat them at it! The main thing you need to ensure is that all teams can participate in this competition.
4. Plan a virtual tour of your coworkers’ home offices
Why not use our nosy tendencies and schedule virtual house tours of our coworkers’ homes? You all want to look into other people’s houses, so why not put your curious minds to good use by scheduling virtual trips inside your coworkers’ homes?
A virtual tour of a coworker’s home office lets us quietly look into the most personal aspects of our teammates’ lives. You can see their books, their kids, and their pets. Even though these tours will only be virtual snapshots from a remote worker’s webcam, it might feel like you made a real connection with your remote coworkers.
5. Get started with virtual wellbeing sessions
Want to encourage your remote team to socialize more?
Virtual wellbeing sessions create a virtual hangout space and include specific exercises that will help promote togetherness and strengthen existing relationships.
Fortunately, there are several methods to make it into a fun group activity. Consider organizing remote yoga classes or virtual meditation sessions once a week.
6. Plan 1:1 meetings with remote workers
In a traditional office, you’d bump into each other in the break room and chat about what’s going on. Team members miss being able to have those casual discussions throughout the day. Plan one-on-one meetings with remote workers so they can catch up with your organization and keep apprised of news and updates outside their department.
7. Improve work-life balance
Being able to work from anywhere can be the best of both worlds, but it’s important to remember that there’s life outside of work. Being social makes you happier and healthier, not just in your professional life but with friends and family too.
As long as you can get done what you need to do at work, that’s all that matters. And just because you’re working from home doesn’t mean your family will appreciate it if you are not giving them an equal amount of time.
Which tool can be used for remote team management?
There are several remote employee monitoring software tools available on the market. Which one to select? It will depend on which best meets your business needs. If you need a tool that can handle all your remote workforce from a single place, then you should try WorkStatus.
WorkStatus is a workforce management software that helps you to seamlessly maintain team communication and productivity by working at the best time in the best environment. It provides neat features like daily visit reminders for dispersed teams.
The trouble with our current workplace paradigm is this simple truth: collaboration requires human contact. With WorkStatus, you can embrace digital work without sacrificing your personal touch! Workstatus can take away remote problems with just an email or phone call — that includes headaches like dealing with remote workers, helping them set up their systems correctly, or updating office equipment when they relocate without interrupting workflow.
It also has a helpful dashboard that hosts all your tasks, projects, and communications together on one screen – never miss.
Some other useful remote employee monitoring tools that you can try are-
- Slack
- TeamViewer
- Zoho Projects
- LiquidPlanner
- Jell
- Trello, etc.
Final Thoughts
Remote work is becoming the new norm. It’s not unusual for companies to employ remote workers or even have a remote team. But does this mean that the culture of these teams will be lost? Not so fast! There are several ways of keeping employees happy and motivated when they’re not in an office every day with their coworkers.
The tips we’ve provided should help you start thinking about how you can cultivate strong cultures among your virtual workforce. If all of this sounds intimidating and you want help enacting these principles, let us know- our team of experts is waiting and ready to partner with you to create a stellar remote workforce management plan that can take your business to new heights without involving much effort from your side.
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