Remote-employee burnout is very real. In fact, more than 75% of remote workers have experienced burnout since the pandemic, according to recent US research. In this week’s guest column, diversity expert Perrine Farque advises leaders on how to better engage staff working from home and help to avoid remote burnout.
Managing a company remotely is challenging, particularly during a global pandemic, an economic downturn and in national emergency situations. As companies across the world transition to a remote-work environment amid Covid-19, surveys reveals that remote workers are suffering burnout and becoming disengaged.
According to a survey carried out by FlexJobs and Mental Health America this summer, 75% of remote workers have experienced burnout at work since the pandemic. Approximately 40% said they’ve experienced burnout during the pandemic specifically, and 37% are currently working longer hours than usual since the pandemic began. Another recent study carried out by CBDistillery found that 67% of those working remotely feel pressured to be available to their employers at all hours of the day. Around 65% admitted to working longer hours than ever before, and 60% feared that their job would be at risk if they didn’t go above and beyond by working overtime.
BURNOUT RISKS
Research carried out by VitalSmarts prior to the pandemic found that remote workers felt shunned and left out. It also revealed that the remote cohort was more likely to feel unrepresented, and ganged up against by colleagues. In fact, some of the biggest struggles for remote workers include: unplugging after work (22%), loneliness (19%), collaborating, and/or communication (17%), according to tech firm Buffer’s State of Remote Work report, carried out last year.
These studies cite longer work days with no boundary between work time and personal time, a constant fear of job loss, anxiety about taking time off due to a concern a job loss, back-to-back video conferences, the lack of casual encounters around the coffee machine as the main reasons for remote burnout and disengagement. The impact of employee remote burnout for a company is lower employee engagement and a significant decrease in productivity.
MOTIVATING REMOTE TEAMS
So what do leaders need to know about engaging remote staff? How can they better engage and motivate employees in remote-work? Here are a few pointers:
Make time for small talk
When leading remote teams, it is convenient to only talk about what needs to get done and jump off your call. However, if that is all you, you will be missing out on a critical part of leadership. You must build rapport with every team member. Rapport comes from getting to know your employees as a complete person. Ask your team members what they are interested in, about their friends and their family.
Demonstrating that you care about them is important to them and critical for you to really understand their motivations. Taking the time to do so this will also help them like working for you. Furthermore, rapport will help you work through difficulties that each employee has. This will also help to develop trust, so they are more likely to come to you with any problems or admit mistakes. Tools such as Lighthouse can help you keep track of creating rapport with your team. Professional leadership development training, can also teach you how to become an inclusive leader and boost employee engagement and productivity in remote work.
Have more one-to-ones
Since you no longer have those coffee catch-up moments in the office to build rapport, make up for it by setting aside more time for more one-to-ones. It is time to acknowledge that your ‘open door policy’ is failing in remote-work. If you forget to update your availability on Skype, Teams, Slack, etc, your remote employees have no idea when your door is actually ‘open’.
The best way to handle this is to give remote employees a full hour every week for one-on-ones. This ensures you have enough time to cover a wide range of topics and dive into challenges that you might not be aware of. Some remote-specific one-to-one questions you can ask include:
- What is the one thing I could do to better support remote staff like you?
- Which of your colleagues do you wish you had more time with? How would that help you?
- What’s your daily work routine like?
- What’s your favourite/least favourite part about working remotely?
Most importantly don’t cancel a one-to-one meeting. One of the fastest ways to build discontent in your team is regularly cancelling one-to-one meetings. Remember that remote employees miss out on a lot and they also miss out on the kinds of information that would naturally come across in an office. These meetings provide an opportunity to make up for that, as well as handle all the little things that build up over the course of a week. If you absolutely have to, reschedule it, but never cancel it.
Prioritise career paths
With distance bias at play, it is easy to forget about your employees goals and hopes for their future. Remember remote employees have aspirations too. Ensuring they make progress on their goals for growth and understanding the career paths avoids frustration. If you have an hour for a one-to-one with your remote employees, you will have plenty of time to talk about their career development. Professional training on how to become an inclusive leader remotely can help to prioritise employee career paths and boost engagement/productivity.
Ensure remote staff ‘are kept in the loop’
When working remotely, it’s easy not to add a colleague into a discussion as it can be perceived as not worth the hassle. However, as a leader, you must set the example. When such situations arise, you should go out of your way to get the other remote person into the conference call. If you would have interrupted someone in the office, then it’s worth bringing them in. When you convey that it doesn’t matter to loop in your remote team members, the rest of your team will follow your lead.
Send goodies
Everyone loves branded t-shirts, jumpers or caps. Send company goodies to all your remote staff to make them feel more connected to the team and not forgotten. You will get extra bonus points for sending the right sizes or something for their partners, kids or anyone else in their household. Chances are the whole household will wear them and share pictures on social media, showing off your company’s brand.
Ensure remote workspace is properly set up
If your employees work from home all the time, you must ask them if they are comfortable and properly set-up at home. This is vital, especially if they live in a small studio apartment, or they have a partner an/or kids in quarantine with them, because it may be hard to find a working space. For example, be mindful that working parents may be taking shifts to ensure round-the-clock childcare. So one might work mornings, while the other works afternoons.
Trust your staff & avoid micro-managing
Remote employees need space to get work done without a manager monitoring their every login, slack status, etc. As a leader, you need to place some trust in your remote employees to do the job in their own way. Give your remote workers the space to embrace risk and try out new things. Managing remote employees will include taking some risks. Let your remote team innovate and figure out the best ways to connect and get work done.
ENSURING SUPPORT
Remote-employee burnout is a real problem that leaders need to address to boost productivity. Employee disengagement in remote-work significantly decreases productivity and is a key factor in the downfall of organisations. Remote teams should feel supported, valued and connected to their team and manager. Our professional training on how to become an inclusive leader remotely and how to create a culture of inclusion, can significantly help leaders boost employee engagement and productivity in remote work. When remote teams are supported by leaders who support them, their engagement and productivity soars and they perform well over the long term.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Perrine Farque is an award-winning diversity, inclusion and equity advocate in tech who was nominated in the Top 50 Most Influential Women in UK Tech. She drove the strategy at technology companies including Facebook, PagerDuty, Pivotal, Nlyte Software and AvePoint for over a decade before setting up her own D&I consultancy – Inspired-Human. During her career, Farque has spoken at many industry events including Dublin Tech Summit, WomenTech Global Conference, Women 2.0, Vault Platform conference and PagerDuty Leadership Summit. She has an extensive track-record of motivating and inspiring teams and creating a diverse company culture within tech companies.
Check out her other guest columns:
- How startups can implement an effective diversity and inclusion strategy.
- The benefits of hiring neurodiverse talent in tech: How to embrace and nurture neurodiversity to gain a competitive advantage.
- How to successfully hire and retain diverse talent remotely to ramp up productivity.
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