Remote Employee Engagement: 4 Proven Strategies to Succeed

Just because frontline and remote workers are away from the office, doesn’t mean they have to be disconnected from company news. Learn how to keep your deskless employees informed and engaged with these four time-tested techniques for remote employee engagement.

Frontline & remote worker scenarios are today more prevalent than ever, with hybrid office, online tech, and a corporate emphasis on mental health and work life balance giving employees the freedom to do their jobs away from a corporate office. But just because they’re not sitting at a desk in HQ, doesn’t mean that they should be any less aware or engaged than their office counterparts.

With the right technology, tools, and strategy, they can receive updates, download critical documents, attend virtual team meetings, and post their own content just as readily as in office workers. In this article, we’ll provide four strategies to boost their connectivity, and explain how the Sociabble communication platform empowers frontline and remote workers, by generating powerful remote employee engagement.

1. Personalized Content Feeds to Engage Remote Employees

The challenge, when it comes to work-from-home and frontline scenarios, is simple: to ensure that all employees, especially remote ones, receive relevant information. Essentially, that they get the updates they need to be able to do their job effectively. However, this means overcoming the challenge of long-distance communication, which is so often present when trying to engage remote employees, and all others engaged in remote work projects for the company. 

Fortunately, there are remote work solutions. The Sociabble communication platform, for example, offers a personalized content feed of tailored information for each employee, based on their role, location, and interests, ensuring maximum relevance and engagement. This is accessible remotely on a desktop, or via a mobile app for those without a computer at the ready. 

As to benefits, the platform’s targeting capabilities increase content relevance, enhancing remote employee engagement and knowledge among remote employees. Remote workers are getting the personalized information they need, on whatever device they use.

2. Gamification and Recognition for Remote Workers

Another challenge that remote employees experience is the problem of feeling unrecognized and undervalued–disconnected from the company culture. They may not experience the sense of camaraderie or recognition that comes with working in a physical office, surrounded by supportive coworkers and managers. This can lead to feelings of exclusion and underappreciation for those engaged in remote work.

Sociabble’s gamification and recognition program features offer a solution to boost employee engagement, by motivating remote employees and by celebrating their achievements. By giving employees the ability to win points and earn badges and engage in friendly competition with their office co-workers, they become involved and engaged. And peer-to-peer recognition features allow remote workers and office workers alike to congratulate each other on a job well done.

Together, these employee rewards and recognition features help to build a culture of appreciation, and in turn, to boost remote employee engagement by improving motivation and productivity among the remote workforce. Team spirit and an appreciation for company culture is created by the experience of engaging in contests and earning kudos for accomplishments.  

3. Unified Communication Channels for Remote Employees

The problems of communication tool overload and disconnection among remote teams is commonplace, especially for long-distance and frontline workers. Often, they feel there are too many apps, too many tools, too many information streams coming at them at once–resulting in a sensation of being overwhelmed, and a desire to disconnect. 

Sociabble resolves this issue by serving as a unified communication hub that integrates with existing tools like Microsoft Teams and offers diverse channels, ensuring seamless connectivity. All of the news and updates remote employees need are in one place, that’s easily accessible and always at the ready. This consolidation helps to keep remote workers engaged and involved in company life.

Sociabble’s unified approach streamlines communication, ensuring inclusivity and comprehensive remote employee engagement. Employees don’t feel overwhelmed or bogged down by information–remote teams get the targeted updates they need, all from a single source. 

4. Frontline Worker Engagement and Communication

Another unique challenge is faced specifically by frontline remote workers, often considered the most “remote” of all employees due to their physical distance from traditional office spaces. Unlike many desk-based remote employees, they may not even have a company email or a desktop computer they can access. Retail staff, factory workers, delivery personnel–these kinds of employees can easily feel cut-off from company life.

Sociabble takes a unique approach to connecting frontline remote workers, by including mobile-first strategies, offline access, and the ability to participate in corporate communication without a professional email. Frontline workers can access Sociabble via the mobile app, giving them exactly the same level of capability and connectivity as office staff, including access to virtual meetings, and to “cold” reference locations if they need them, like a remote working resources library or collective media drive. They can even create and add their own content and videos, enhancing their role as part of the company. 

Sociabble’s frontline-focus ensures that frontline remote workers are as informed and engaged as their office-based counterparts, fostering a unified corporate culture and sense of belonging, based around employee engagement. No one is left behind or excluded, regardless of where and how their workday is spent. Engaging remote employees on the frontlines becomes an integrated part of company communications. 

Analytics: The Backbone of Engagement Strategies

What’s been discussed above are all key areas to focus on, in order to turn remote workers into engaged employees. But beyond the specific strategies to engage remote and frontline workers, the underlying force driving continuous improvement and strategic alignment is analytics. Progress in terms of employee engagement needs to be measured before it can be improved; to increase remote employee engagement, data needs to be compiled and analyzed, before fine-tuning can take place. 

Again, the Sociabble platform has this covered. Sociabble’s analytics module provides direct reports and actionable insights across all engagement strategies, from personalized content effectiveness to gamification participation rates and communication channel efficacy. Furthermore, employee engagement surveys and polls can easily be distributed to back up the quantitative data with qualitative reports.

By harnessing these insights, organizations can refine their remote employee engagement tactics, ensuring they meet the evolving needs of their workforce and maximize the impact of their remote employee engagement activities.

The Vinci Energies Case Study: A Sociabble Client Success Story 

Vinci Energies is a French company specializing in industrial maintenance services, digital service infrastructures, and engineering. It supports organizations worldwide in their environmental transition by deploying tailor-made technologies. With 90,000 employees located in 57 different countries, Vinci Energies operates in four business areas within its 1,900 companies. These companies are grouped around major global brands, as well as regional brands. All of which means that with so many remote employees spread all across the globe, keeping them connected came with some obstacles.

To address these communication challenges, Vinci Energies chose Sociabble, whose unique features allowed the company to keep all employees connected–even those engaged in frontline and remote work. Sociabble offered a solution specifically tailored to the company’s unique needs and aimed at connecting a diverse workforce that was highly dispersed and generally decentralized. Employee engagement ideas and solutions were created with unification and maintaining a common identity in mind.

Sociabble’s Solutions:

Here are the tailored employee engagement solutions provided by Sociabble to meet Vinci Energies’ unique remote team needs:

• The creation of 42 local platforms offering targeted and segmented content for different groups within the organization, to help keep all remote employees engaged.
• Deployment of instant machine translation features allowing content to be accessible and understandable in real-time across languages.
• Full customization of web and mobile platforms to align with Vinci Energies’ brand and enhance user experience.

The implementation of the Sociabble platform was a major success, engaging and unifying employees across the globe around a single information hub, which provided relevant news that was tailored to their specific roles and needs. For those engaged in remote work, it offered the digital link they required to stay connected, and feeling like part of the company.

The Vinci Energies case study demonstrates Sociabble’s ability to tackle complex communication challenges in large, dispersed organizations dependent on remote work from team members. The flexibility of the platform caters to the diverse needs of global companies with large numbers of remote and frontline employees, and as the partnership with Vinci Energies shows, can translate into real-world benefits for a large, multinational corporation.

Conclusion: Sociabble is a Solution for Remote Employee Engagement 

In this article, we have discussed key strategies for connecting with remote team members and frontline workers, which include the following employee engagement activities:

• Personalized content feeds for those working remotely 
• Gamification and employee recognition 
• Unified communication channels for team members
• Frontline worker engagement and communication
• Analytics to measure remote employee engagement  

All of these highlight the need for robust remote employee engagement strategies tailored for both remote and frontline workers in today’s diverse work environment. Which is why a solution like Sociabble can prove so effective for a remote team, achieving this goal through personalized content, unified communication, gamification, and analytics-driven insights.

If you’re interested in bringing your company’s employee communication to the next level, while also exploring ways to engage remote workers, we’d love to chat. We’ve already partnered with global industry leaders like L’Occitane, Coca-Cola CCEP, and Primark to enhance their employee comms, and we’re ready to discuss ways we can bring the same level of engagement and performance to your business as well.