Motivating Your Team When They Are Working Remotely

Working from home is our new world, and with how things are it looks like we’ll be here for a while. Adapting to our new environment, being productive and keeping motivated can be challenging. As a team leader the responsibility is now on you to learn a new skill of ‘remote motivation’.

To help we asked our partner John Slattery, of Inspo, for his best tips on motivating your team when they are working remotely.

Here’s what he had to say…

Remote Motivation

Here are three pieces of advice I’d like to offer create a unifying culture of motivation across your remote/virtual team:

1. Create Goals Specific to this Time

The majority of business set goals and objectives for 2020. And now the landscape has completely changed. So, the question is, do your goals need to change with it? I see huge merit in creating specific goals for the team to work towards to get through this period.

Create a mentality where it’s all in. Every shoulder to the wheel. As much as the country needs to fight the pandemic, create a narrative where we as a team need to fight to make these goals a reality to allow us to be able to come out the other side the way we want to. People enjoy fighting for a cause, working with a purpose. Create that for them through good team goal setting for this time.

2. This Time is Ripe for Development

Amy Wrezniewski and Jane Dutton coined a psychological concept called ‘Job Crafting’ in 2003. In it they identified five ways to maximise the sense of meaning and enjoyment you get from your role.

One is developmental crafting. This is where an employee carries out training, further development, education etc. specific to where they want to grow into in their career. If you have a scenario where team members have idle time, challenge them to find either paid for or free online training/tutorials on an area they recognise as important for their development as a professional.

Get them to share with you what the developmental area is, what success looks like in terms of what development they want to achieve and explore with them the best option to make the development a reality. We may never get such an opportunity to focus on development in work time again.

3. Make Team Morale Everyone’s Responsibility

Let’s face it, this is a challenging time. You as a team leader are feeling it. Your team is feeling it. All your families are feeling it. I suggest the job of keeping morale up belongs to everyone in the team right now. Or if it’s not, I suggest it should be.

This is an area where everyone can be become a leader. Someone doing something that lifts the mood of the team is as good as a sale just now. Encourage that leadership within the team in your own subtle way. Every smile is one smile closer to the finish line.

This is a difficult time. I wish everyone stays safe and well. This time shall pass. These three things may just help to make this time pass in a more productive, motivated, focussed and enjoyable way.

Inspo’s Offering for Barden’s Community During this Time

The ability to be resilient is at its high point of importance. It’s arguably the area that needs the greatest investment for as long as we are where we are. Our partner, John Slattery of Inspo is delivering a one-hour online resilience session to companies across the country. It’s providing that lift in resilience at a critical time for employees.

The ability to stay grounded in your thoughts and your breath is key too given the volume of information out there that can cause both to run wild on us. Inspo’s 6-week Mindfulness Course is helping employees in Ireland to create an anchor for their thoughts and breath during this turbulent time.

If you’d like to explore either as a brilliant investment in your staff, please contact John Slattery at john@inspo.ie.