How can employers reach a remote workforce with employee engagement initiatives?

With rail fares rising by 3.4% for 2018 and two-hour daily commutes becoming the norm, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Exodus survey 2018, published by Investors in People in January 2018, concluded that nearly a third of workers (31%) would prefer more flexibility in their work, including the freedom to work remotely, to a 3% pay rise.

Of course, remote working is not just about working from home. It can mean any individual or team that is dispersed, whether in different offices or locations, out on the road, for example commercial drivers or sales people, or working on site with clients or customers. It can mean employees who do not readily have access to workplace communication, whether it be a retail employee on the shop-floor, a hospitality worker in a kitchen, and so on.

For such employees, the challenge in terms of engagement is always how can the employer ensure that what it is communicating is reaching, and resonating with, these dispersed, disparate workers? How, too, can it tell or measure how engaged, or not, they are, and whether what it is doing is working?

Line manager engagement
The effectiveness of line managers at regular day-to-day communication with their remote workforce or dispersed teams is one of the keys to unlocking engagement, says Steve Herbert, head of benefits strategy at Jelf Employee Benefits. “I have long been banging the drum to say it is simply about making sure line managers engage regularly with their workers,” he says. “By definition, this will not be face to face, but are they interacting beyond simply the task at hand?”

At a basic level, making sure communication channels work and can be reliably accessed remotely is also a good start. “I still regularly meet employers with dated or difficult technology that effectively prevents remote employees from actually accessing their benefits information,” says Herbert.

In a distributed or remote workforce, employers need to be connecting with their employees every day, says Phil Dunk, chief executive of employee engagement and incentive firm River Agency. “Often, remote workers do not feel connected to the main organisation; they’re not having those ‘water cooler’ chats. But if they are being communicated with regularly, being recognised and appreciated both personally and through apps and technology, that can be really powerful.

“Formal or informal peer networks can be another powerful engagement tool, and can sometimes help remote workers to feel they are part of the wider organisation, not just their immediate team,” he adds.

Engagement surveys
Traditional employee engagement surveys, whether digital or, increasingly rare, paper-based, can still have their place but, in a remote environment, more nuanced solutions may be more effective, says Pippa Arthur-Van Praagh, global employee communications evangelist at Reward Gateway. “What can work well is when autonomy is pushed down. So regular ‘pulse’ surveys carried out by regional managers who have autonomy to make those decisions,” she says. “A really good local management bulletin or briefing, perhaps which goes out weekly, can be powerful.”

Employers can make it part of their culture to take feedback and do things quickly as a result. “[They] may not be able to make big decisions quickly, but if [they] can show [they’re] tackling the small stuff, that people can see they’re in a feedback loop, that can be important,” she adds.

For home workers, personalisation of the message is the key. Sarah Robson, senior communications consultant at Aon Employee Benefits, says: “It is about having the message tailored to them. Newsletters and emails work well, league tables, of where they are and how they are doing in comparison to others, can create healthy competition.”

For employees out on the road or just working in different environments, multi-channel delivery, simple messaging and ‘over-communicating’ can all work, “Tell them where to find out more and keep telling them, so they feel connected,” says Robson. “They are usually time-deprived, so short, clear messages work best. Try SMS, post,  [or] video for this group. Drive them online to read more and then you can measure this ‘digital handshake’.”

Counter-intuitively, given that digitisation has been one of the key drivers of remote working, taking things back to ‘old tech’ can sometimes be an answer. “Get back to paper. Put little postboxes up at various locations. Have workplace champions. Collate things every month, read them, but then act on their suggestions,” says Arthur-Van Praagh.

In addition, employers can simply ask people. Too often, organisations jump to conclusions about how people would like to be communicated with. “Ask them what is the best time of day, what is the best way to communicate? It is about not presuming,” says Arthur-Van Praagh.