How to Support Your Remote Employees

Employee wellness is an essential part of any business’s success, but it takes on a heightened level of significance in the face of an unprecedented challenge like transitioning an entire workforce to working remotely during a pandemic. 

Many Boston companies faced this trial in the last month and are learning how to provide their fully remote teams with the resources they need to stay healthy and productive. 

Transparency and communication have evolved to include frequent check-ins from leaders to get a pulse on how employees and their families are doing, and what they might need. Team members are given greater flexibility to work on a schedule that suits them best. Company-wide meetings are regularly scheduled to give business updates. Team members are urged to exercise via digital workouts and yoga sessions that break up long days.

 

 

Most impactful change: HCS helps patients with their treatment experience through phone and digital support. So for our team, the most powerful motivator each day is recognizing the positive impact we have on patients. We feel this sentiment now, especially as telehealth becomes the only support channel for some. We are providing more visibility, more frequently, into how we are helping patients, receiving feedback from patients and clients, and highlighting successes we achieve.

 

Remote engagement tools: We’ve been set up for effective remote work since founding, and our geographically diverse teams connect through Slack, video chat, virtual whiteboarding and other tools. So we focused on new ways to utilize those tools to promote engagement and productivity. We have redefined company culture norms: people’s kids join video chats and we build breaks — like 20-minute yoga sessions — into long meetings. Leaders also promote flexible schedules and checking in with colleagues.

 

How Human Care Systems supports teams: We always offer an annual program for employees to receive reimbursements for health and wellness expenses like gym memberships, race entry-fees and massages. And one of the first things we did when the pandemic forced us to go fully remote was double that benefit amount. We also expanded the qualifying criteria to make sure our teams could set up a sustainable workspace at home and stay connected. Our team has leveraged it to get new workout equipment and ergonomically friendly workspaces and find new ways to socially connect.

 

Most impactful change: We definitely increased our usage of video conferencing tools and collaboration applications. We were actually in the process of migrating to Microsoft Teams, and this situation helped us to rip the Band-Aid off. We do the virtual team lunches and happy hours that have become a mainstay in everyone’s LinkedIn feeds; ours typically include a theme or game to keep things interesting.

Video calls directly via Teams have become the new norm, where a regular old phone call would have been enough to get the job done. And we have various social channels with an organic flow of informal chatter similar to what would normally be in an office environment.

 

Remote engagement tools: The HouseParty app – like FaceTime but with games — is being used for an upcoming happy hour. We also have a team Snapchat group where we share more informal or personal tidbits from our remote work days like funny email typos, strange things seen on walks and “Top Chef”-style recipe attempts. There is a lot of content featuring kids, significant others, parents and puppies. 

A lot of our collaboration typically happens in Box and Salesforce. With all of these efforts combined, we might be more connected now than we’ve ever been before.

 

How TechTarget supports teams: Our CEO records weekly video updates that address topics like departmental successes, layoff concerns and the evolving competitive landscape. We also have smaller team meetings and one-on-ones to allow for candid discussion. Our teams are encouraged to bring up questions in this safe space for getting issues addressed.

“We also urge employees to make mental health a priority by taking breaks to enjoy some fresh air, stick to regular business hours and sign off when they would normally leave the office. We’re also doing things to maintain our culture. For example, we like to make a big deal out of team birthdays and there’s one coming up. So I’ll be sending a quarantine survival kit with toilet paper and Clorox wipes to that person’s doorstep.

 

Most impactful change: Being that the design and development work we do is already conducive to remote work, we didn’t need to make huge changes to our workflows. The Boston team did, however, make a small addition to our daily stand-ups that added some levity and humor to our morning routine. We instituted “quarantheme” days, where each day we dress up or do a show-and-tell according to a different theme. For example, on “throwback Thursday,” we show off an old band tee or an embarrassing relic from our past. 

It’s been fun to share fun personal things that we wouldn’t normally have access to in the office. And overall, it’s helped us boost morale, bond and get to know each other better.

 

Remote engagement tools: We recently made a shift to using Basecamp instead of Slack for contributing to long-term projects and conversations asynchronously. The Boston studio uses Remo to simulate our natural tendency to break off into groups during lunches, coffee walks or Friday happy hours. It’s been a great way to handle these office-wide social events. 

Project-wise, our teammates have used tools like Mural, Miro, Tuple and Figma to foster real-time collaboration and brainstorming. Teams have left Google Hangouts open all day so they can ask questions and banter as if they were working in the same room together. We’ve also been using the Google Meet Grid View plugin for meetings, which is helpful because it shows every attendee at the same time in a grid view.

 

How thoughtbot supports teams: “Our managing director hosts open office hours every day during lunchtime for anyone seeking support or an outlet to vent or ask for help. I run biweekly one-on-ones with each designer as well as weekly check-ins via 15Five. There’s a weekly design team share where we take an hour and discuss side projects or client work for critique. 

We show up everyday knowing that we have each others’ backs and that each of us can take whatever time we need to decompress. This shared understanding is what helps keep us human and sane throughout this time.

 

Most impactful change: One significant change is proactive check-ins with our teams via phone or Zoom. We ask how they’re doing, how their family’s health is, how they are dealing with distance learning or if they are trapped in a “Tiger King” vortex. Ironically, we may be doing better at showing how much we care now than when we did when we were in the office. It’s easier to take the welfare of your team for granted in the office, and I hope the proactive check-ins last beyond the coronavirus.

 

Remote engagement tools: Beyond the Zoom-Slack-Google trifecta, we rely on project management tools like Jira and Trello, increasingly shared calendars and new cybersecurity protocols. Asynchronous communication is more necessary, and the COVID-19 era only reinforced the value of an online collaboration tool for agile development. 

We’ve been increasingly using a shared calendar. Working from home changes the use of one’s time. While there is pressure to add more meetings, there is less time for them. People don’t have the same schedule predictability to be able to create long meetings, which puts pressure on better calendar management.

 

How Guardicore supports teams: Listening, exercise, cooking lessons and a continued focus on work are the ingredients to solving our working challenges at this time. Some of our colleagues are schooling us on bootcamp workouts one can do in any room. So paired with the yoga classes, we are keeping physically active. There have been a couple of how-to cocktail-making or recipe-cooking sessions.

 

Most impactful change: We’ve always had work-life integrations that allowed our talent acquisition partners to choose remote working options. So that team was ready to help others in our organization convert from office to remote working. To optimize our workflow for efficiency, we built interview panels with fewer interviewers but better questions and coordinated remote orientation and onboarding with our people ops team. Finally, we continue to advocate for ‘talent without ZIP codes.’ We don’t want to limit the talent pool to one location for roles that aren’t customer-facing or require physical execution.

 

Remote engagement tools: We use Slack daily to stay connected. We also increased our social media usage. While our talent brand team has always been active on social media, they now see our talent acquisition team members engage with more of their content. Also, more of our team started writing their own content and sharing it on our internal website and LinkedIn.

 

How Medidata Solutions supports teams: We reinforce that employees should always prioritize their health and their families over everything. Work will always be here. We also have numerous touch points throughout the week while allowing for the normalcy of our previous structure, such as our biweekly company meeting and weekly scrums for each team. And I see our leadership checking in on employees, asking if they are OK and seeing whether they need anything. 

 

Most impactful change: The most impactful change has been a simple one: the introduction of daily team stand-up meetings. At first, meetings had a heavy focus on deliverables to ensure productivity, but they evolved into ones focused on the future, continual improvement and teamwork.

 

Remote engagement tools: Our sales teams have seen success migrating prospecting activity over to LinkedIn with the help of LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator platform and social selling tool ViewGen. Our account management teams leaned into peer-to-peer feedback loops facilitated by the 15Five application, with a Slack integration, to keep engagement and spirits up. 

Personally, I have kept it old school and have started making phone calls a lot more than I used to. Twice a day, I randomly call a teammate, customer or an industry friend just to check in. The resulting conversations have really helped me get through this.

 

How Teikametrics supports teams: I try to thank our employees as often as I can. I remind them to take care of themselves and each other. I encourage them to stay productive but also to be kind to themselves. However, the best thing I’ve done is given our employees my complete trust.

Also, our director of revenue operations is a yoga instructor who has organized virtual sessions for the team. Our director of insights is a trivia junkie who organized a virtual team Jeopardy game. Our senior VP of marketing started doing team “show-and-tell” happy hours.