Want to Keep Virtual Employees Motivated? Use These 6 Tips

One of the bigger challenges opened up by outsourcing is how business leaders would stay caught up with their pool of virtual employees. More than ever now, keeping employees motivated, regardless of their physical and virtual locations, is something that employers should recognize how to do.

Ensuring that staff culture thrives remains an important facet of work environment 2.0. While it’s difficult providing the personal touch when working with a virtual staff initially as compared when managing full-time teams that work together in an office, but not a second such should disappoint nor stop you from hiring virtual employees.

Little adjustment is required to make things work between your staff from the virtual world and from your office. As an employer, be open about changing how you deal with virtual employees. Be more understanding and adept at motivating each team member. Don’t refuse giving a “pat on the back” or dispensing good responses as well to manage virtual staff more effectively.

Here are five ways that you can seize to motivate your virtual staff to work hard, up-to-speed and energized when dealing with workloads.

Recognize and Respect. Let’s start with this because this is highly important. Being the respectful boss of virtual employees can spell a whole bunch of difference than treating your remote staff or virtual team as if they’re your slaves from outer space.

Try to be nice all the time with your virtual or remote staff. Communicate calmly, be patient, and make your statements clear all the time. Even if they’re from Manila or Beijing, talk or communicate with your virtual employees as if they were merely in the same room as you.

The sense of personal attention you give can help the entire team feel more comfortable working with each other.

Teamwork = Team Effort. Making your pool of virtual employees genuinely feel like they belong to your team would help a lot in making them feel motivated. A team member who feels appreciated or recognized for the cooperation they render could help push the project moving forward through to its completion.

As a result, you will achieve more when the hidden wall dividing two separate units of your employees – from the virtual world and physical location of your office – are broken. Working as one single unit could help ensure that your projects and goals are being achieved successfully.

Get in Touch Often. It helps a lot touching base with your employees as often as possible. Getting intimate with them helps ensure that everything that you’re building up is going there to where you want it smoothly.

Promote team cohesion by holding meetings on a weekly or bi-weekly frequency to keep everyone up-to-speed. As for your virtual employees, hold one-on-one meetings. What good is this for? That’s the perfect question to ask. Well it allows you to ask specific questions about the tasks they’re working on and it also impresses that you’re as invested in they’re project as they are.

Then see how much you’re making your employees feel more motivated.

Reward Team and Individual Effort. Recognize great efforts by all participants within your team or your organization. When dispensing appreciation with praise or rewards, include your virtual employees.

When employees know how their hard work pays off for the organization and you acknowledge, they’ll feel more energized and motivated. Giving gift cards or surprising your virtual worker with package delivery to reward exceptional work may be simple, but it go a long way in improving team morale and work culture.

Be reasonable. It’s vital that you keep everyone’s workload in perspective. Ask around just how much every employee has on their plate. Doing so would help you understand and decide which tasks to assign to your full-time and virtual employees. You’d also be smarter putting realistic deadlines and setting benchmarks to follow.

When employees feel they’re immensely understood, given realistic deadline and reasonable workloads, they’ll be more motivated to contribute and do the job assigned them.

Employee Management Tools. There are systems that you can use to keep track of hours, project deadlines, and more of the likes to keep every member of your team on the same page. More often, it is through smart and smooth management style that keep employees motivated and virtually in synch with the rest of your workflow.

Managing your full time employees is already difficult and the same can be said of virtual workers. Keeping a productive virtual team can prove to be a big challenge. Follow these six ways to keeping morale up and making your employees more motivated.

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