Onboarding new employees has never been an easy task for most business owners. Moreover, it could take weeks to a few months to fully integrate the newcomers into your firm. This can be more challenging, mainly when dealing with remote employees.
However, the best way to help them adapt to your company’s system is by making them feel valued and appreciated.
This post has outlined a few strategies that will help you make your remote employees feel appreciated.
How is Employee Recognition Related to Employee Retention
1. Follow a Well-Structured Orientation Process
New employees need time to process the company’s culture, core values, mission, and vision. When hiring remote workers, please don’t give them too much work and expectations. Instead, provide them time to observe and learn your company’s culture.
Remote workers don’t directly interact with colleagues, making it hard for them to develop a solid bond with the company faster.
Structuring and following a comprehensive orientation process can make your new remote staff feel at ease. They will benefit from learning about your organization, their new colleagues and resources during their onboarding process. Moreover, you can ease their transition by making it more convenient.
2. Give Professional Development Opportunities
Whether employees work from home or in the office, they care greatly about their professional development. Unfortunately, over 30% of employees confirmed that the pandemic hurt their professional development opportunities.
It could have been because there weren’t enough seminars, and conferences, among other situations for the industry. So, to help your employees improve their skills when working from home, you might want to look into online courses and events. Besides, it’ll show them how much you appreciate their efforts.
You may, for instance, sign up your remote workers for webinars or provide them with individualized training to help them develop better work practices. Alternatively, you might progressively give your employees new and challenging responsibilities to help them improve if paying for professional training is out of your budget.
3. Give Regular Feedback
It’s essential to keep in touch with your remote employees regularly if you want them to stay motivated and feel appreciated. If you only communicate via email occasionally, your staff may feel insecure, worried, and less motivated.
Since people like to feel appreciated, giving timely feedback is an excellent way to show appreciation for your remote employees. Whether the feedback is good or bad, giving detailed feedback will make them feel better and more confident.
Furthermore, I’ll assist employees working from home in understanding their role in your business and how valuable they are. Also, they will be more interested in performing their duties and will try to fix any mistakes that show up in them.
4. Show Gratitude
You may have few opportunities to express appreciation to your colleagues if they are working from home. However, showing gratitude to your well-performing employees is essential; you cannot afford to neglect it.
When leading a team meeting, you can talk about the best-performing employee who met or surpassed the company’s individual goals. You can also grant a shout-out to employees who led on different categories like the overall employee of the month, the most improved, best team player, etc., on your website and social media accounts. Instead of praising an employee one-on-one, you can send them an email or call them and tell them how great they are.
Even so, always endeavor to give memorable things to remind them of their hard work and your appreciation. For example, you could send custom plaques to your remote employees.
5. Encourage two-way communication
Encouraging good communication is also a great way to show appreciation and respect for remote workers. Rather than delegating roles to your remote employees, get them involved in the project by encouraging them to give ideas.
If a previous job didn’t go as planned, ask your staff for their thoughts on how you might work together and better your future projects.
When you tell your employees what is expected of them, both when things are going well and when things are hard, they will feel like you care about them and appreciate their efforts.
Bottom Line
Recognizing and thanking your employees is the key to building a long-term employer-employee relationship, whether they work from your premises or at home. But when people work in a remote location, they need extra care to ensure they feel appreciated. Fortunately, with this approach, you’ll be able to make your remote employees feel appreciated.
