Team-Building Activities to Engage Remote Workers

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With the growing popularity of remote and hybrid work, leaders need to understand how remote work can affect team building and learn about activities that can strengthen relationships. Leaders must create a virtual culture that encourages employees to build authentic connections and an environment where employees are excited to come together and collaborate, no matter their time zone and geographical area.

Importance of remote team building

When you’re in a physical office, you’re surrounded by your team and have a support system. You get to know each other’s personalities, quirks, and hobbies at the breakroom’s water cooler.

These daily interactions facilitate expectation-setting and relationship-building. Employees are constantly exposed to their peers’ behaviors and can grasp performance and communication expectations. Social interactions also foster workplace engagement, trust, and satisfaction. A Gallup study found that employees with an office buddy are seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs, better at engaging customers, and produce higher quality work.

Building relationships, no matter where you are at, takes work. Being remote can make it harder, making it essential that leaders engage their employees in team-building activities.

Team-building activities

You can keep your employees engaged and connected wherever they are by building a fun virtual team-building plan. Consider these popular activities for remote teams:

Encourage check-ins

When employees do not have opportunities to “bump” into each other at the water cooler, they miss out on those “getting to know you” moments. If you don’t work with someone regularly, interacting becomes even more challenging because they don’t have those few Zoom minutes to chat about life. Consider encouraging your employees to schedule regular calls with one another just to hang out. The point of the call is not to talk about work, though! You want to encourage them to talk about non-work-related topics. Another idea to consider is creating a virtual break room where people can hang out on their lunch break or if they need some quick socializing to relax.

One-on-one or small group check-ins are great for team building because people start to understand who others are outside of work. The check-ins can also create a snowball of new activities when people realize they have shared interests. Maybe some people realize they love movies or reading books; they can take that common ground and create a virtual movie or book club with virtual meet-ups or discussions over a company chat channel!

Consider peer recognition

A key benefit of being part of a team is the sense of community and spirit. Team members come together to support and celebrate one another. Nurturing this community and support system can be more challenging for remote teams, leaving remote employees to be 10% less likely to say someone cares and recognizes their contributions. Remote employees cannot freely get up and go to their peer’s desk to say, “Great job!” or “Thank you!”

One way to foster team celebrations is through peer recognition. When employees appreciate and celebrate each other’s hard work, it brings the team together, regardless of location. Peer recognition can also help with the negative impact of not working close to others.

Create non-work-related communication channels

Remote work can be lonely sometimes, and people need an outlet to share good news. You can give people this outlet by creating Slack or Teams channels for these conversations. The channel does not have to be merely for good news, though. You can create different channels to get people talking, such as a recipe channel or a random channel for people to send snapshots of their day.

No matter the message, it can be a great conversation starter and create a sense of community.

Sustain the team

You can foster a team that thrives together, supports one another, and collaborates to innovate and achieve organizational goals by creating opportunities for your employees to connect. But your leadership does not end there!

Team building, nurturing connections, and maintaining relationships is a process that needs constant attention. Leaders need to implement team-building activities and encourage them regularly. Remind people about their check-ins, participate in the communication channels with your good news, and celebrate your team.

 

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners

Photo by thelivephotos

5 Employee Benefits Trends to Watch in 2023

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Soon, it will be 2023, and with it comes deciding on employee benefits that not only help you attract new employees but retain your current ones. Your peers and colleagues are keeping this top of mind, as a study shows that 53% of small business employers and 70% of large business employers are already planning to up or enhance their benefits offerings.

Here are five benefits trends to keep an eye on in 2023.

Full coverage of healthcare premiums

A survey shows that healthcare is still a worry for employees and their families. Currently, the national average of coverage for healthcare premiums is 83%, but something to consider when attracting and retaining employees is paying 100% of an employee’s healthcare premiums. Some employers embracing this trend ahead of 2023 feel it will benefit their bottom line and positively impact employees’ overall well-being.

Financial benefits

The pandemic continues to affect people financially, with half of U.S. workers saying the pandemic will make it harder for them to achieve their financial goals, and 62% of U.S. workers stressed by their current financial situation. Offering a 401(k) and monthly stipends are great financial support. To supplement that, you can help employees feel secure in achieving their financial goals by offering assistive tools like financial tracking software to help them regain financial agency and improve their spending behaviors.

Caregiver benefits

Did you know that caregivers make up half of the U.S. workforce? Did you also know that of those caregivers, 70% of them feel they’ll have to leave the workforce to properly care for their loved ones? You may not even know if your employees are caregivers. If you want to offer a caregiver benefit, survey your employees to find out how many of them are caregivers and how much time they spend caregiving a week. Then, use the information gathered to give your employees the needed resources.

Bereavement and grief benefits

When employees lose a loved one or a beloved pet, they need time to grieve, and they need employers who understand their grief and are willing to work with them. Grief affects employees’ work performance and productivity, and you don’t want your employees to feel like they must soldier on through the workday during a difficult time in their lives. Having bereavement and grief benefits lets your employees know you have their back.

Family planning

Family planning is important for employees, as 30 to 50% of a workplace’s employees are in the stage where they want to start or expand their family. The pandemic shifted priorities and focus, and more people want to spend time with their family, regardless of whether they are beginning or expanding it—both mothers and fathers alike. While you may already have a PTO (Paid Time Off) policy, consider offering a separate policy for family leave so parents can take the additional time they need to spend with their children.

Contributing to work-life balance

Overall, for 2023, it seems the trend is offering benefits that contribute to an employee’s work-life balance. Letting them know they don’t have to choose between work and whatever is going on in their lives goes a long way. As always, survey and ask your employees what benefits they want—and need. Reviewing and updating your employee benefits will help you stay competitive in the job market and may help you improve your bottom line by improving employee productivity, loyalty, and retention.

 

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners

Photo by fizkes

What is Leftover Toxicity, and Why Should You Care?

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A toxic work environment can hit any business with lethal force, driving up turnover rates, reducing productivity, and damaging reputation. Despite our best effort, toxic behaviors can often creep into our teams unnoticed. They can be subtle—even unintentional—but their existence will only solidify if they aren’t addressed. One of the most impactful things you can do to maintain a positive company culture and work environment is to address it consistently.

A genuinely excellent company culture is a bit of a rare thing. Most people have worked in environments where they were expected to show up sick, work long hours, never call out, and bend over backward to please a cranky manager. It’s even more common in specific industries.

The service industry is a perfect example of an industry that often relies on employees sacrificing their health and well-being to save their jobs. If an employee calls out sick even once, they can seriously damage their standing at work. Not only do their coworkers resent them for having to cover a shift, but their boss begrudges having to make last-minute calls to employees who weren’t supposed to work that day.

Bringing old baggage

Now consider a new hire who just came from that work environment. While their personality might be fantastic, they may have leftover baggage in the form of toxic behaviors they developed to succeed in their last position. So, what happens to these behaviors when that person gets hired at a new company? They don’t go away. While the person might have left the toxic environment, the behaviors they developed to succeed there can linger. And sooner or later, those behaviors will affect the rest of your team.

Despite a person’s best intentions, leftover toxic behaviors can significantly affect their approach to their job. Whether they developed these behaviors at their last company or whether they developed them while growing up in their family, it can be hard to rid oneself of them once they’ve been ingrained.

Here are examples of common behaviors stemming from leftover toxicity:

  • Showing up to work when sick
  • Working long hours unnecessarily
  • Making excuses for not responding right away to an email or communication
  • Not using allotted PTO
  • Scrambling to come up with answers when a simple “I don’t know” or “I can find out” would suffice
  • Bragging about how busy they are

This pattern of behaviors and beliefs stems from a desire to survive. The key is to help people recreate their understanding of what it takes to survive and thrive in their new environment.

Build a communal vision

Ask your employees to describe what a positive workplace environment looks like. Encourage them to get specific. Together, paint a picture of this positive workplace. How would people be recognized for their work? What type of boundaries would there be to protect their well-being? Ask them to discuss past work experiences they disliked and uncover what went wrong. Then ask how they would have improved the situation. Ask them what behaviors they would avoid.

By helping them put a voice to their desired work environment, you can help them build self-awareness around those behaviors that reflect a poor work environment. The leftover behaviors they’ve been carrying around will become easier to identify and halt.

Always respond

Even with the best intentions and heightened awareness, some may still struggle to let go of their toxic behaviors. When this happens, leaders must know how to respond and redirect the employee. The components that make up a positive work environment must constantly be reinforced.

  • Boundaries to protect work-life balance
  • Clear expectations around communication
  • Reasonable deadlines and manageable workloads
  • Psychological safety
  • Prioritized employee wellness

If an employee talks about how late they worked into the night, avoid praising them for overworking themselves. Instead, find time to ask them if they have too much on their plate or if they need help with their work. Remind them that working late consistently isn’t expected, nor will it help them advance in their career. Remind them that a well-rested employee with a strong work-life balance is more productive and valuable than a tired, burned-out employee. Take note of who they were talking to and reinforce that message to them as well.

The key is consistently showing up in the face of toxic behaviors with a response. As your team sees how you respond to toxicity, they will develop new behaviors that help them survive and thrive in a positive environment.

 

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners

Photo by pressmaster