It’s no secret that this recent pandemic has changed how employees engage in their work. Since 2020, a Finances Online report has shown that 80% of corporations worldwide have transitioned to hybrid and remote workspaces, moving away from the traditional office. Even more important, 64% of these companies have said this move will be permanent. These changes bring new challenges. Namely, how to keep and improve your employees’ engagement in their work?
With many employees looking for a new job after the pandemic, now is the time to prepare as other companies fight for your employees. At XQ Innovation, we believe in solutions that work. That’s why we recommend using assessments to help improve remote employee engagement.
What Is Employee Engagement?
When we talk about employee engagement, we’re referring to how employees invest in their work. This can include productivity, quality of work, and communication within their teams.
By boosting your employees’ engagement, you are essentially increasing how they engage in their work. This can be very important when dealing with a remote workforce.
How Can Assessments Improve Employee Engagement?
The good news is that the use of assessments is a great way to improve employee engagement. Three key areas that assessments focus on are:
- Communication
- Development
- Culture
Develop Communication
Using assessments is a great way to create a shared vocabulary among your employees. Team members can use this shared vocabulary to communicate about work behavior and their motivation.
This is even more important with remote workers who rely on video calls to communicate with team members.
Promote Development
Another way assessments boost remote employee engagement is through investing in development. When your company takes time to invest in assessments, you’re showing your employees that you care about their development.
This is crucial for employees who work from home due to the isolation they might face. Investing in assessments lets them know that you appreciate their input and work. This can go a long way to keeping them engaged.
Create Company Culture
Finally, using assessments is a great way to instill values and cultural norms crucial to developing an engaged workforce. By creating a company culture, you’re giving employees a reason to stay with your company. With many companies hiring, this is a great way to retain talent.
What Type of Assessments Can You Use To Boost Engagement?
There are two main types of assessments used to measure employee engagement. These are issuing an employee survey and holding a town hall meeting.
The first, an employee survey, is also known as eNPS (or Employee Net Promoter Score). An eNPS survey uses questions and rankings to create a score. Questions can focus on such topics as recommending the job to friends or how satisfied they are with their work. Using these focused questions, you can get a great idea of what is working in your workforce and what is not.
The second type of assessment is holding a town hall to ask questions directly. Doing so can be tricky, but by asking questions directly, you can get better feedback.
You can start by asking your teams to share their feedback with team leaders. From there, leaders can share their findings with your company. You’ll also want to reward team members for coming forward with the feedback.
Some Final Thoughts
At XQ Innovation, we have all the tools to help you with your assessments for your remote employees. Along with the assessments already mentioned, you can utilize other tools to help promote engagement. This includes holding chats, using virtual whiteboards, and sharing calendars.
The goal here is to create concise expectations for all team members. With the many distractions from home, it’s easy to become disengaged. With that said, it has been reported by a Standford study that remote employees are 13% more productive than their in-office counterparts. Keep that in mind when you look to use assessments to boost remote employee engagement.
