Now that 2020 is behind us, it’s left quite an impression. And nowhere has this been more prevalent than in the workspace. 88% of business organizations across the world mandated or encouraged all their employees to work from home, due to the pandemic. Furthermore, about 97% of the organizations immediately canceled all work-related travel. Effectively, the entire world shifted to working remotely.
While the shift left no business function unscathed, companies had the most number of challenges switching the techies to a work-from-home setup. After all, there’s so much access control, software, and infrastructure requirements, and security issues that come into play when you work remotely. Over time, most companies have been able to move their IT infrastructure and ensure that their developers can work remotely without any glitches (or bugs!). That being said, most businesses have overlooked the need to engage these techies.
If you want to go beyond infrastructure and create an environment that your techies enjoy working in, then this article’s for you!
1. Keep the conversation going
A recent study shows that with the absence of face to face interactions and endless Zoom meetings, employees feel a sense of drudgery and malcontent. Earlier, these things could be sorted out during water cooler conversations or tea breaks. However, that’s not the case anymore. With everyone working in isolated silos, it’s easy to get so lost in work that you’re left feeling like a drone at the end of the day.
How do you solve this? By talking. Sure, you’re using Slack for internal communication and shooting of messages, but did you know that it has got games and plugins that can break the monotony of work? Not only do these games give your team some outlets to have fun, but can even maybe inspire one of your engineers to build a simple game themself!
You could probably go beyond your regular work-related Slack channels and create channels for non-work banter. For instance, there could be an Amongus channel for your team members to connect and blow off some steam. Similarly, there could be a channel for bookworms to share their latest reads and talk about them. The point being, you need to create virtual spaces to keep the conversation going.
2. Keep Your Team Refreshed
We’ve all heard the adage that a rolling stone gathers no moss. That holds especially true for your tech team. Doing the same work day after day gets boring fast, and while some people may welcome that feeling of steady and constant plugging away, the typical tech worker lives in fear of falling behind the technology curve.
So help them stay ahead. There are plenty of courses on platforms such as Udemy which can teach people the skills they may either wish to learn or help them brush up on existing skills. Making sure tech workers are constantly stimulated with new challenges and tools is a surefire way to keep them engaged. Another way is to shuffle your team around, moving people to new projects or changing their roles on an existing project. Give them new challenges and feed their hunger for growth and knowledge. Any chance to learn a new tool or skill translates into an opportunity to grow, not just for your team but for your company as well.
3. Integrate Tech
A key thing that many office managers and team leaders bemoan is the lack of visibility and ownership with remote teams. Conversely, team members often feel that there is too much micromanagement. So, what’s the solution?
There’s a plethora of task management apps and systems online, such as Trello or Asana which help you set tasks, priorities and check on task statuses in real time. These things make team collaboration easy and can help managers feel at ease, knowing which project is at what stage or work station, without constantly hounding their teams.
Project management tools can be then integrated with developer tools like Git, and help track work and deployment easier. You don’t want your dev team to get flustered fixing bugs of unrecorded deployment all the time. That brings us to our next point.
4. Make Sure Everything Is Recorded
While programs like Dropbox or Google Drive are great for sharing documents and files in most companies, how do you do that with your tech workers? After all, it’s not like they can send you lines of code, and projects that they’re working on maybe split over a fair number of days or split over teams. This means that their project must be available for other members to access and go over at any point, improving efficiency and effectiveness.
Enter Git.The world’s largest development platform in the world, Git (or GitHub as it’s more formally called) allows teams across the world to upload their code to the cloud, with easy access to rewinding any changes and keeping everyone in sync. Not only that, your teams can work off existing codes and projects, thereby cutting down their time and learning something new, side by side.
Why Should You Care?
If reading this article is still making you wonder why should engagement matter to you, after all, here’s what we can tell you. Aside from the obvious business savings that remote work brings (Estimates say that companies can save upto $11,000 per remote employee each year), there’s also the fact that flexible, remote working options lead to happier and more productive employees.
According to a study conducted by Owl Labs, a whopping 83% of employees have reported that the option of working remotely, even in a limited capacity, would make them happier, and that companies that offer remote working opportunities have a retention rate of 25%. However, according to a Buffer study, more than 20% of employees report that collaboration and communication problems during remote work leave them feeling drained. The takeaway is that while it’s important to give employees the option to work remotely, it’s just as important to keep them engaged.