On the surface, remote employees seem to have the best gigs in the world. Getting to work from home sounds like a dream to many people who have to get dressed five days a week and head to the office.
However, it isn’t uncommon for remote employees to experience feelings of loneliness and isolation, and many people often head to cafes and bookstores just to get out of the house.
For these employees, it is important that they feel important and part of the team, because they are!
Here are a few ways you can reward your remote employees.
Meet With Them In-Person
One of the biggest things many remote employees struggle with is feeling like they aren’t part of the team.
Because remote employees work primarily from home, it can be easy for them to feel detached from their in-office coworkers. Consider meeting in-person with your remote employees a couple times per month.
You can gauge this based on both of your schedules. But making it a point to meet with your remote employees on a regular basis is crucial to not only their success as a remote worker but the success of your company as well.
Having your remote employees visit your office from time to time is a great way to make them feel part of the team and let them know you haven’t forgotten about them.
If your remote employees aren’t able to meet with you in-person, consider Skyping them rather than talking on the phone. Being able to virtually see each other face-to-face will make both parties feel more present.
Be Available
Because remote employees don’t have the ability to stop by your office and meet with you one-on-one most of the time, it is important that you remain available online.
Whether you’re communicating primarily through email, Skype, or instant message, it is crucial that you let your remote employees know that they can reach you any time they need to.
Of course, there are going to be moments that you aren’t available. So be sure to let your remote team know this in advance.
Being as open and transparent as possible with your remote employees is imperative to the overall function of your company.
Offer Perks
Everyone likes perks and incentives, and remote employees are no exception.
Your remote employees work just as hard as anyone else in your office, so be sure to reward them as such. Things like generous vacation time, paid sick days, and parental leave are all basic perks that any employee would appreciate.
You can also get creative and offer additional perks, like discounts to local restaurants and stores, gym memberships, or healthy snack delivery service.
While working remotely may sound like a vacation to people who work in-office every day, remote workers deserve as much vacation time as anyone else.
In fact, many companies have started offering “unlimited vacation time”, which allows employees to take off as much time as they’d like as long as they meet any deadlines before they leave.
Consider a 3-day Weekend
It should seem obvious that exhaustion destroys our productivity, but we still have a chronic problem with overworking ourselves.
Of course, knowing about the problem doesn’t always make the solution straightforward. As always, we have too many things to do, and not enough time to do them. We schedule every second of our workdays, and then do the same to our weekends.
Thanks to the wonders of science, we now have available a growing mountain of evidence to support a seemingly crazy idea.
Our tendency to neglect ourselves in favor of maximum productivity actually decreases our productivity, rather than increases it.
We know that a tired mind quickly becomes an unfocused mind. Yet we still try to push through the fatigue and produce what should be our best work.
Even assuming you only tend to work the 40-hour standard week, you’re pushing the hours too hard, according to science.
The goal is to get more done, and to do it to the best of our ability, right? So why do we fall into the trap of pushing ourselves to the breaking point?
We’ve been mistakenly taught all our lives that more hours means more work finished. Like any investing, more in doesn’t necessarily mean more out. That’s why we need to play it smart.
Here’s where science comes in to save the day, literally.
Shaving one full day off your workweek can increase your focus and productivity so much that you’ll produce even more than you did before.
As if that’s not amazing enough, you’ll wind up with extra of that priceless commodity called time.
Think you can’t afford to miss a whole day of work every week? Rethink your budget and ask yourself whether you can afford not to.
More done in less time, remember?