What Are The Best Ways To Boost Morale In A Remote Or Hybrid Team?

Evidence suggests that remote operations can increase team morale, but that doesn’t mean all your employees are going to be happy in their remote work environment by default. Instead, you have to make a concentrated effort as an employer to reach out to your remote workers, ensure they remain connected, and boost their morale. How do you do it?

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Keep Your In-House And Remote Teams On Even Footing

It’s common for offices to use digital signage software to display messaging to employees working in person. On a rotating basis, or across different digital screens, you can provide company updates, display motivational messages, highlight recent employee wins, and more. It’s a great way to keep your team feeling motivated, connected, and aligned with your company’s goals.

The problem is, employees working from home may not see these messages by default. They may feel isolated as a result – and they may miss out on some important updates.

An easy solution to this is to incorporate your digital signage messages into an HTML5 playlist, which can then go on your intranet or website. Once you do this, your remote and in-person employees will be able to see the same messages – and to an extent, feel like they’re working in the same environment.

Provide Teambuilding Opportunities

People working in remote environments often feel disconnected from their office-bound counterparts – as well as the other people working remotely. That’s why you need to go out of your way to provide more teambuilding and interaction opportunities; you need to make it a point to have your individual team members connect with each other and get to know each other on a personal level.

Thankfully, there are many ways you can accomplish this. You can host your teambuilding events in person or virtually, and you can use any number of activities to introduce your team members to each other and keep them connected.

You can play games, you can take a group course, you can go on an adventure, or you can openly discuss some of your biggest goals and challenges. It all depends on the nature of your organization, the disposition of your team, and how much you’re willing to invest.

Prioritize Organizational Cultural Values

Your organizational culture shouldn’t stop mattering just because some of your employees are working remotely. Unfortunately, organizational values do tend to naturally deteriorate if you’re not actively working on instating and enforcing them.

Whatever your organizational values happen to be, you need to go out of your way to drill those into your remote employees. Simple steps, like making your organizational values more visible throughout your communication channels and platforms, or reminding people of your core values during important meetings, do make a big difference.

It’s also important to recognize when individual team members are deviating from those core values, so you can have this conversation with them and guide them back to your ideals.

Keep in mind that your organizational values don’t need to remain very strict or stagnant; they are free to evolve with the rest of your organization. That said, as they evolve, it’s important to keep them updated and keep all your team members informed.

Offer More Flexibility

Most remote employees who love remote work cite one of their favorite benefits as flexibility. But not all remote work positions offer this flexibility; some work environments force people to start work and end work at specific times, with minimal flexibility for breaks.

The nature of your work may or may not permit certain types of scheduling flexibility, but you can always make a concentrated effort to allow whatever flexibility you can. Flexible hours, more breaks, and more empowered employees through autonomy can all strengthen your organization and make your remote employees happier.

Create Opportunities For Growth And Improvement

One of the most common desires of employees is having opportunities for ongoing learning, growth, and development. People want to feel like they’re constantly improving, or else they feel bored and stuck in a rut.

That’s why it’s important to reach out to your remote employees and provide them with more opportunities for growth and improvement. Help them sign up for classes, provide them with mentors, and teach them new skills that they can put to good use.

Get Feedback

Finally, get feedback from your remote employees. If you’re not sure what their level of morale is, or whether your morale improvement strategies are working, you can go directly to the source and find out the truth.

Operating remotely, or in a hybrid work environment, can confer many benefits to both the organization and the individual employees working for that organization.

However, these benefits aren’t guaranteed. If you want to make the most of your new work environment, you need to find ways to specifically boost morale of your remote team members – and the strategies listed above are some of the best ones to utilize. Keep tinkering with your formula until you find a combination of strategies that work.