Despite it being early in the year, we are already set for a big change over the next year to come. People working remotely is going to be on the rise and organisations are fearful of the challenges ahead for their employees. Some of the biggest fears from people at this moment in time is how to keep employees engaged and keeping them learning while working from their home office.

Understandably, with social distancing being enforced at this stage in time, most businesses must adapt to remote working in order to succeed in this tricky climate. Businesses need remote employees now in order to be able to succeed, although that doesn’t guarantee success.

Keeping People Connected

Going from working in a busy and buzzing workspace to working in an office space alone can either be the most exciting challenge or something people can dread. Loneliness can be a serious challenge for transition for people and empathy from employers is vital here.

Positivity, trust and keeping motivation high is an employer’s responsibility and is important while keeping remote employees happy.

How Does Working Remotely Affect People

Remote working can cause anxiety or stress for some people, which can be a huge hindrance when it comes to productivity.

How To Keep a Remote Team Engaged

Choosing a business tool that keeps employees engaged with each and encourages team building is important right now. Games can help with engagement and this can be a nice way to keep things light at times, the best tools that we have seen are:

• Team Building
• Virtual Meetings with games such as bingo
• Team Building with Donut on Slack
• Coffee Meeting

Keep People Learning

Encouraging learning among employees who are working remotely will provide them with a goal to achieve. This will also help them to grow as an individual, becoming both a better employee and a more fulfilled individual. If someone is able to work an hour before work or at the end of the day (when their usual commute could be), yet at the same time learn a new skill such as something technical, marketing related, HR, language, or sales related. This is beneficial for both them and the organisation, all employers should encourage learning at all, although especially now when morale is low.

How to Encourage Your Remote Team For Learning

Here is a list of companies that help to encourage learning among your remote workforce, they offer affordable, short and long courses:

• Udemy

  choose from thousands of short courses to suit your employee’s skillset/ development area

• Coursera

  courses, certificates and degrees, choose from lots of different courses and professional certificates

• EdX

  Free online courses offered from Harvard, MIT and more of the worlds leading organisations

Preparing for the future

Finally, with recent events in mind, the world of work will restore to some level of normality as it has done previously. Nobody can predict how long these changes will last, although with a motivated and educated workforce you can guarantee they’ll be happy. This can be achieved with continuous team building and games. And when things do finally go back to normal, you will have a newly educated team to go back to that loves your organisation.