Top 10 Ways to Create a Sense of Belonging for Remote Employees

A recent Gallup survey showed less than half of employees feel strongly that their employers care about their wellbeing. And according to research from Slack with remote employees across five countries, only a sense of belonging was much worse than before the pandemic. Follow these unique ways to create a better sense of belonging with your work-from-home employees. 

1. Excessive meetings actually reduce a sense of belonging. Be careful how many meetings you schedule with the same group of employees. Give employees a “get out of a meeting” card to allow them to skip a meeting when they feel a need to take a break. 
2. Learn to use digital tools to collaborate to their maximum capability. Whether through Microsoft Teams, Slack, Asana, Trello or other systems, learn them well and use them to permit inclusive idea sharing through in the moment connection and communications.
3. Request employees consider aligning personal goals with the team. Encourage all employees to set personal and career development goals. Present what the work team goals need to be and ask staff to see which of their personal goals can align with these initiatives.
4. Make one of your Zoom meetings a more personal one. Too many working meetings isolate us and limit personal connections. Let one virtual staff meeting be a roundtable conversation to discuss the current comforting and discomforting experiences of work and at home.
5. Know the names of each of your employee’s family members. For your one-on-one session with peers and employees, take extra time to learn about their home life and family. Find out the names of a partner, spouse, and children and ask about them at each meeting. 
6. Invite quieter employees to share their point of view in meetings. Get wider participation than just the same extroverted, creative people. Tell everyone you will ask for their input. Pose specific, engaging questions that all employees would be comfortable responding to.
7. Find out what people are working on that gives them meaning. Discover exactly what your employees are working on that makes them happy. Encourage these meaningful experiences by asking employees to share these activities with others and especially finished projects.
8. Appreciate people for everything that they bring to the table. Identify the rich cultural backgrounds of employees, their unique personal talents and interests, and come up with unique ways all these attributes and qualities could improve work and help one another.
9. Recognize people for the amazing contributions they make. Your employees want to have positive feelings about the people and organization they work with. You can do this by consistently recognizing staff for their positive actions and the contributions they make.
10. Reward people for the significant results they achieve. Properly acknowledge people whenever they go above and beyond in their work and move the dial on performance indicators to create a sense of belonging. Make sure you have the right rewards set up that you can give to people.

To be published in Incentive Magazine

Roy is no longer writing new content for this site (he has retired!), but you can subscribe to Engage2Excel’s blog as Engage2Excel will be taking Roy’s place writing about similar topics on employee recognition and retention, leadership and strategy.