How to Build a Sense of Community When Your Workers Are Remote

Keeping community, camaraderie and culture alive when your people are working from home is one of the biggest challenges facing businesses in a post-Covid era.

You want to respect people’s home lives and give them autonomy, but you don’t want them to feel like they’re forgotten about, left entirely to their own devices, or working without any sort of support. It’s a balancing act – and one that can be really difficult to get right.

It can also be hard to keep an eye on the wellbeing of your teams if you rarely get any face-to-face interaction, but with the twists and turns and untold changes to the world of work over the past couple of years (not to mention economic uncertainty and ever-evolving health concerns), you know your people are likely to need a little extra support from time-to-time.

So how do you traverse the tightrope of supporting – and building a sense of community amongst – your remote workers?

Practical Steps for Building Community in Your Remote Workforce

First things first, you’re here; which means you care about your people. Which also means you’re already half-way there. Couple your honest intention with some of the suggested steps below, and you’ll be building a strong sense of community across your teams before you know it:

Start with a plan

Being intentional about creating community for your remote workers has to start with an outline of where you are now, what you want to achieve, and what you’re willing to invest to get there.

Seek honest feedback

It’ll be easier to create a step-by-step plan if you have a clear understanding of what’s working, and what’s not, in the current status quo. Ask people how engaged they feel and how connected they are to each other, and the company mission.

Be willing to experiment

Trial and error is the mother of all invention. Once you’ve listened to your colleagues about what’s important to them, try a few things out. Experiment with different approaches, and keep in mind that not every approach will work the same for every member of your team.

Stay connected

This might sound obvious, but you’re never going to achieve a sense of community if you don’t connect – regularly, and meaningfully. If your company uses tools like Slack, it’s especially important for senior members of the team to make the effort to drop their colleagues a line, check they’re okay, and tune in to how people are acting during daily meetings.

Catch up in smaller groups

As well as having team-wide catch-ups, break out into smaller groups (or even 1-2-1s) once a week to give people a chance to get to know each other at a different level. Mix up these groupings every time.

Create opportunities to work together in different ways

It’s easy to get hung up on habits, but the advent of remote working is the perfect time to try something new. When holding workshops, training sessions, team meetings or general catch-ups, put people in groups (or pairs) that wouldn’t normally work together.

Be respectful of people’s time

Camaraderie and community thrive on good feeling. And while there are untold advantages of working from home, good feeling can quickly disappear if virtual working leads to working longer and longer hours. Make use of tools that can schedule when emails or slack messages are sent, and actively encourage your teams to switch off out-of-hours.

Don’t over-connect

On that note, it’s important not to over-connect (we did say this is a tricky balancing act!) Keep in touch with your teams, check-in regularly and make sure they know your door is always open, but don’t inundate people with messages, phone calls or emails. It can be harder to stay focused when working from home, and too much communication can be a distraction.

Introduce a shared wellbeing platform

Not to blow our own trumpet, but an employee wellbeing platform, like BetterSpace, can really help to inspire a sense of community in your teams. Having access to a huge range of resources sees people sharing what works for them – which also opens up important and community-building conversations around mental health at work.

To find out more about how BetterSpace can help to create community across your remote workforce, book a free demo of our entirely customisable science-backed platform, or get in touch for the low-down on all things workplace wellbeing.

ABOUT BETTERSPACE

BetterSpace is the employee wellbeing platform putting control where it belongs: in the hands of the individual employee. Our groundbreaking solution has been developed with medical and domain expertise and is aligned to our Six Pillars of Wellbeing. BetterSpace empowers your workforce to understand and fulfill their mental health needs.

This approach has achieved engagement rates of 94%, compared to the average usage rate of 2-18% for Employee Assistance Programmes and 10-40% for points solutions.

Want to know more? Schedule a product demonstration with us today.