Engaging with Employees in Virtual Environment

Employee engagement is the extent that an employee believes in the mission, purpose and values of an organization and demonstrates that commitment through their actions as an employee and their attitudes towards the employer and customers. Employee engagement is high when the statements and conversations had reflected a natural enthusiasm for the company, its employees and the products or services provided.

People are the primary source of competitive advantage. If the people or employees of the organization can be effectively “engaged”, then achieving the organizational goals becomes an easy task. The widely- used term “employee engagement”, embraces two attempts of management- motivating the employees and focusing their commitment to achieve the organizational objectives.

Employee engagement further emphasizes the willingness to help out colleagues at par with organizational citizenship behaviour. In the broader sense, employee engagement goes beyond job satisfaction, job involvement, motivation, etc.

There are three organizational forces that enhance employee engagement as follows:

• Lower Attrition Rate- An employee who is engaged in his assignments is unlikely to leave the organization. High attrition rate causes loss of huge amount of talents that could have been well-groomed and retained if provided the required environment.
• Better productivity- The quality of work is more relevant than quantity of work. An involved person has to have an understanding of what is expected of him and what goes far ahead for him to perform his/her best in the company.
• Enhanced profitability- Every company desires to enhance profitability, for which the organization must enhance its employees’ abilities. A person with complete dedication and commitment, and who is more engaged, can contribute to a greater extent to organizational profitability.

Employee Engagement- 3 Types:

• Cognitive Engagement- Extent to which employees focus on their work tasks. An actively engaged employee is rarely distracted by small interruptions at work.
• Emotional Engagement- This consist of here and now experience that the employee has while working. This involves their own feeling of the degree of involvement in the job.
• Physical Engagement- The extent to which employee take steps for his/her own development. A voluntary nomination for a training program is one such example.

Challenges faced by Virtual Teams

The prevailing COVID-19 pandemic has forced the companies to switch to a remote work model at a rate and scale they’ve never experienced. As a face-to-face collaboration has been replaced with e-mails, chat rooms, video conferencing, the responsibility of an HR department is to maintain key relationships and connections with employees. HR managers have to do difficult work under difficult circumstances and keep the employees productive, motivated, engaged and connected. Leaders and teams across the world are trying their best to inculcate some daily habits to bridge the gap and promote team bonding.

Usually when companies permit employees to work remotely, or transition entire departments to the virtual office, it’s a part of planned and well-resourced strategy. Unfortunately, during the recent novel Corona Virus pandemic, millions of workers and teams managers have had to make that transition with no preparation whatsoever, putting in many cases setting them to up to fail.

The fact is, working virtually is very different from face to face. The communications skill required to work, lead and collaborate in a collocated environment are different from those required when working virtually. Feelings of disengagement and isolation are more. Pronounced, miscommunications are more common, and teams more often than not fail to achieve their objectives, even under ideal circumstances. Given the added stress of near global stay-at-home orders and mandatory quarantines due to COVID-19, and virtual teams are under even more pressure than they would be ordinarily.

Although technology enables organizations to bring diverse and dispersed team members together, teams that interact virtually often have difficulty collaborating effectively, gaining a shared understanding of goals and tasks, and /or achieving and maintaining the necessary levels of trust and social cohesion between team members.

Common issues faced by virtual teams are:

• Frequent miscommunication

• Technical glitches

• Inefficient,  unproductive team meetings

• Poor communication between employees and managers

• Work-life balance issues

•  Difficulty in understanding policies and procedures

• Absenteeism

• Feelings of isolation

The world is different today than it was a few months ago. COVID-19 has swept across our world and nation. Uncertainty is at an all time high, as we experience a complete disruption in our homes and workplace. There is no quick fix.The Best we can do is to is lean in. Listen to the employees, empathize with their greatest concerns, communicate with them frequently and confidently, and be flexible and supportive to meet their needs. As an HR our mission at quantum workplace is to make work better every day.