How do you rejoice the people working for you in several locations and time zones?
When you’re managing distant employees, shoutouts that used to occur in staff meetings now occur in virtual huddles. As a substitute of bringing donuts to the office, you would possibly give everyone a present card for coffee. Teams that reach their targets get a bonus or unique gift.
Conventional wisdom says these strategies should help with distant worker engagement. Unfortunately, human behavior rarely follows conventional wisdom.
Worker recognition isn’t any different.
Making a culture of recognition and boosting distant worker engagement means breaking with conventional wisdom in a single vital way: equal treatment could make recognition ineffective.
To get recognition right, you will need to first understand the person personalities who make up your team and what motivates them.
Only then are you able to foster a powerful distant work culture that celebrates exceptional effort.
We’re here to enable you to do this in a good, sustainable, transparent, and effective way.
Is distant worker engagement not possible?
Although distant work has many upsides for organizations and employees, there are challenges. Namely, distant employees report experiencing disconnection from company culture, isolation, and a scarcity of purpose.
Gallup’s research from 2023 found that exclusively distant employees felt increasingly disconnected from their company’s purpose.
Less than one-third (28%) of distant employees agreed that “The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is vital,” down 8% since 2020.
That’s in comparison with 33% of on-site (but remote-capable) employees and 35% of hybrid employees.
This decline follows the trend of worker engagement, people knowing what’s expected at work, and employees receiving recognition no less than weekly. All these signals declined since 2020, according to Gallup’s long-term analysis.
Interestingly, they’re the identical reasons outgoing employees gave at the peak of the Great Resignation.
One McKinsey study from January 2022 found that “Greater than half of employees who left their job prior to now six months didn’t feel valued by their organization (54%) or manager (52%), or they lacked a way of belonging (51%).”
When you’re making intentional efforts to acknowledge and reward your team, then these insights will not be latest to you.
But they’re still value your attention as a team or organizational leader. Counteracting the unintentional consequences of distant work requires intentional effort.
Effort in the shape of tailored distant worker recognition strategies.
Worker recognition advantages everyone
We all know instinctively that praise is healthier than punishment. But just how a lot better is it?
Rather a lot, it seems. When organizations get recognition right, the advantages even reach outcomes which can be tricky to influence when managing distant employees, like connection to culture, absenteeism and safety.
Two Gallup studies the ability of recognition, one in 2022 and a follow-up in 2023, saw significant differences in organizations that prioritized meaningful recognition. Employees who felt recognized were:
- 3.7x more prone to be engaged of their work
- 68% less prone to experience burnout symptoms
- 9% more productive on average
- 22% less prone to be involved in safety incidents
- 55% less prone to be actively job searching
- 22% less prone to be absent from work
This backs up our understanding of workplace wellbeing, that engaged employees are healthier, more productive and more precious.
Seven in 10 employees who strongly agree that recognition is a vital a part of their company culture also agree that they feel connected to that culture.
Getting recognition flawed may be costly
Failing to acknowledge employees’ efforts in meaningful ways will only deepen their dissatisfaction until they disengage, burn out or quit. None of those are a very good final result.
This shouldn’t overshadow the price to employees’ health and wellbeing. Employees who lack meaningful recognition suffer stress, emotional strain and resulting health issues.
When greater than 8 in 10 employees (82%) experience regular burnout symptoms, recognition looks like an efficient countermeasure to a widespread and worrying problem.
A fast sidenote on distant worker recognition
We want to say one thing before going further. Whatever you do to acknowledge and interact distant employees, you’ve earned our praise for doing it. Leaders who prioritize praise already understand the worth of recognition. From here, it’s only a matter of fine-tuning your approach to motivate, retain and empower the individuals who will help your organization grow.
Our latest guide provides more insights into the challenges facing today’s teams and the importance of worker retention.
Finding balance: Distant worker engagement and a culture of recognition
So, we all know that retaining a connection to culture stays a challenge when managing distant employees. We’ve also established that recognition is effective at counteracting worker disengagement.
Now, let’s revisit a degree from earlier: equal recognition isn’t at all times effective.
If you’ve gotten tried financial perks, free coffees, team celebrations and weekly shout outs, you would possibly wonder why some employees perk up and others seem nonplussed.
It comes all the way down to the various personalities in your team. Specifically, their intrinsic motivations.
What’s intrinsic motivation?
Intrinsic motivation is an individual’s drive to have interaction in activities for their very own sake. That’s, for the satisfaction derived from doing them quite than for some external reward.
Within the context of distant teams, intrinsic motivation refers to the inner desires that drive an worker’s engagement with their work.
There are three major elements of intrinsic motivation:
- Purpose: Feeling like their work contributes to a bigger goal or makes a positive impact.
- Capability: The will to learn, grow, and grow to be an authority of their field.
- Autonomy: Having the liberty and control to administer their very own work and make decisions.
Purpose and mastery are especially hard to know without face-to-face interactions and the frequent feedback of traditional offices. It’s also hard to feel in charge of an overloaded schedule.
Although intrinsic motivators don’t need external rewards, they’re still fueled by feedback. Research on this space says that aspects like cooperation, competition, recognition, control and overcoming challenges can increase intrinsic motivation.
For instance, let’s say one in all your team takes on the challenge of designing a brand new analytics dashboard. They’re motivated by mastery and see the aim within the task.
Nonetheless, after they finish the dashboard, the correct person needs to acknowledge the accomplishment and its value to the organization. Otherwise, the worker will feel like their work was for nothing. They won’t volunteer to construct the following dashboard.
Interestingly, research shows that external rewards could make an intrinsically motivated task less rewarding. This known as the “overjustification effect”. Essentially, the external reward replaces purpose, capability or autonomy because the motivating force, rendering the duty less satisfying.
What this implies for distant worker recognition
Understanding intrinsic motivations is important for managing distant employees to their full potential.
It’s helpful in several ways:
- Allocating tasks to the correct people.
- Designing the correct form of flexibility into work schedules (e.g. location, time or hierarchy flexibility).
- Providing meaningful recognition.
- Stoking the engine of self-motivation.
- Offering development pathways.
- Pairing employees with mentors.
- Identifying support needs and shortcomings.
- Achieving harmony in team dynamics.
- Replacing resource-draining external rewards with meaningful, frequent recognition.
After all, none of those ideas apply universally. Intrinsic drivers, inspiring aspects and motivation triggers will differ from one person to the following.
That’s as true for distant worker engagement as for sports teams, artists, students and your free-time hobbies. It’s why some people spend their weekends mountaineering up mountains and others with a very good book.
The query is: Are you working with mountain climbers, readers, or one other personality type?
10 personality varieties of distant employees and what engages them
Not all employees are engaged by the identical things. Understanding your team’s different personality types and motivational aspects is essential to crafting a recognition strategy that engages everyone on their very own terms.
We’ve outlined 10 personality types below to enable you to understand your colleagues’ traits.
Nonetheless, a word to the sensible first.
There are dozens of popular personality tests starting from pseudo-scientific to purely speculative. Although the outcomes may be enlightening, they’re never 100% accurate or all-encompassing.
Persons are complex. Personalities are flexible.
Effective recognition requires a blended approach that prioritizes the person’s needs over personality typecasts. By combining workday data, formal and informal feedback, and experimentation, you may hone recognition strategies that work to have interaction your team.
| The Analyst Strengths: -Organized -Detail-oriented -Accurate -Reliable Challenges: Motivation aspects: Engagement tip: |
The Climber Strengths: -Ambitious -Driven -Results-oriented -Proactive Challenges: Motivation aspects: Engagement tip: Set clear goals with measurable outcomes and rejoice their achievements. Provide opportunities for leadership and taking over difficult projects. |
| The Illusionist Strengths: -Can appear charming and competent -Good at self-promotion. Challenges: Motivation aspects:Recognition Engagement tip: Assign them high-profile projects with visibility. Acknowledge their ideas and contributions during meetings. Nonetheless, be mindful of credit going where it’s due for team efforts. |
The Individualist Strengths: -Independent -Self-motivated -Resourceful -Creative Challenges: Motivation aspects: Engagement tip: Give them ownership of projects and respect their preferred work style. Provide resources and support for his or her creative endeavors. |
| The Motivator Strengths: -Enthusiastic Energetic -Inspiring -Optimistic Challenges: Motivation aspects: Engagement tip: Highlight instances where their enthusiasm energized the team. Offer opportunities to mentor or lead team-building activities. |
The People-Pleaser Strengths: -Helpful -Cooperative -Team player Puts others first Challenges: Motivation aspects: Engagement tip: Thank them for his or her helpfulness and express appreciation for his or her positive attitude. Offer opportunities for collaboration and team projects. |
| The Perfectionist Strengths: -Detail-oriented -High standards -Produces excellent work Challenges: Motivation aspects: Engagement tip: Acknowledge their dedication to excellence and showcase their work for instance to others. Offer opportunities for feedback and self-evaluation to deal with their need for continuous improvement. |
The Performer Strengths: -Outgoing -Charismatic -Confident -Enjoys public speaking Challenges: Motivation aspects: Engagement tip: Provide opportunities for them to present their ideas or lead brainstorming sessions. Acknowledge their successes and contributions publicly, but ensure it’s balanced with team recognition. |
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The Worrier Challenges: Motivations: Engagement tip: Provide regular feedback and clear guidelines. Acknowledge their efforts and express confidence of their abilities. Create a secure space for them to voice concerns. |
The Upward Employee Strengths: -Ambitious -Desirous to please -Respectful of authority Challenges: Motivations: Engagement tip: Provide opportunities for skilled development and mentorship. Express your confidence of their potential and offer opportunities to showcase their skills to superiors. |
How do you recognize who’s who?
While these personality sketches offer a helpful framework, recognizing them in your team members can feel subjective. That results in all types of problems with distant worker engagement, similar to perceived favoritism, unbalanced workloads, and ineffective recognition strategies.
Reliable data on working habits, productivity levels, schedules, website usage and distractions enables managers to glean precious details about each team member’s preferences and strengths.
Workforce analytics also removes bias from managing distant employees. Big personalities don’t overshadow quiet achievers; everyone may be recognized for who they’re.
Using data to fine-tune distant worker engagement
By analyzing how employees spend their workday, you may tailor your approach, from setting the correct challenges for the Ambitious Climber to providing the Independent Thinker with autonomy over their projects.
You may also track the outcomes in real-time to know whether your efforts resonate.
Plus, with 60+ software integrations, you gain complete visibility over how your team and organization tackle projects.
This data-driven understanding enables managers to trace every person’s contributions, recognize outstanding efforts, assess development and discover support needs.
It also empowers employees to self-manage flexible schedules and improve productivity. Worker-friendly dashboards provide limitless fuel for intrinsic motivation.
Whenever you put all these together, the final result is a team that understands one another and works together higher.
Bring all of it together to create a culture of recognition
Personalized, real and frequent recognition is a robust and underutilized motivator. In a time when finding and retaining good people is harder than ever, and reinvention is the one option to survive (let alone grow) as a business, corporations can’t afford to let good people burn out or walk.
As a people leader managing distant employees, you will need to get recognition right.
We’ll finish off with some excellent news. It’s not entirely as much as you as a manager.
You furthermore mght have your team to support you.
Truly effective recognition is ingrained in workplace culture. Consider it like an intrinsic motivator shared throughout your team.
You possibly can encourage this by demonstrating healthy and fair recognition strategies, acknowledging team members who exhibit desirable behavior, and providing dedicated platforms for peer recognition.
The precise form that recognition and motivation soak up your team will rely upon the unique personalities that make it up, the goals those people share, and the direction your organization is heading in.
You’ll have the chance to see first-hand how employee-friendly workforce analytics can assist to discover your team’s unique talents and create a culture of recognition.
