How To Maintain A Relationship With Your Employees Online

Remote work may be convenient for employees but it represents certain difficulties for team leaders and managers. It’s easy to maintain a relationship with all your employees when you’re all physically together in one place. This becomes slightly complicated when your employees are scattered all over the globe and when getting them together is challenging thanks to different time zones.

And keeping in touch and maintaining a good relationship with your employees is highly important. A good working relationship makes everyone's job more enjoyable, increases productivity and engagement, and above all, it creates a collaborative environment.

So, how can you successfully maintain a relationship with your employees online? Here are some great tips!

1. Daily communication

Building a relationship between managers/leaders and employees is a process that takes time. Just like any relationship, a professional one also requires daily communication to be successful. 

Building a long-distance relationship with your employees is challenging but not impossible. The key is to keep in touch with them daily. Daily communication implies texting or emailing your employees, creating a group chat, using different collaboration tools, and so on. 

All of these mediums are important for maintaining healthy employee communication. And thankfully, with the help of technology, we can share information, and ideas and simply maintain a positive relationship between managers and employees of a company.

1.  Invest in tools

We can’t keep in touch if we don’t have all the necessary communication tools. When the team works remotely, having communication tools is essential. Relying just on emails today is not enough. Especially since not everyone checks and responds to their emails frequently enough.

Instead, investing in communication tools may prove to be a successful venture that will pay off right away. These tools will boost the communication between employees, they will boost job satisfaction, and allow you to keep in touch with your team easily whenever it’s necessary.

1. Switch to video

One such great communication tool turns out to be video. When meeting up in person is impossible, that’s where videos come swooping in. Video conferencing, video chats, and similar video tools are a great way to maintain professional relationships online. 

Even though the video isn’t a perfect substitute for in-person meetings, it can help you with visual cues that we often miss with verbal and written communications. Body language can convey important information that we may not register during verbal or written communication.

So, it’s safe to say that switching to video may prove to be the missing link in online communication with your employees. 

1. Build a feedback culture

We can’t stress enough the importance of a feedback culture. And when working remotely, feedback becomes even more important.

Tracking progress, giving and receiving feedback, and finding solutions with your team, can keep the employees satisfied and it might also prevent numerous mistakes that may affect the image of the company.

Creating a positive feedback culture can boost employee morale and it’s great for team spirit. So, regardless of whether your team is remote or not, you can build a great feedback culture with just the right tools.

1. Create space for informal conversation

It doesn’t have to be all work and no play. Building a relationship with your employees also means getting to know them better and learning little things about them. To do this, you can create a space for informal conversation. 

This dedicated space will encourage your employees to share little tidbits about themselves, their lives, what they like and do outside the work, and similar information. This and other similar strategies can encourage people to start an informal conversation and to talk about things that are not work-related.

1. Online team building activities

One such strategy that provides a bit of fun and outlet for the whole team is called team building. Team building serves to strengthen the relationships between teams and traditionally it’s done outdoors or through some corporate training.

But who says that remote workers can’t do some entertaining team-building activities as well? Online team-building activities are also a big trend that will only continue to grow as people continue to transition to remote work.

Some of the popular virtual team-building activities include digital card games, online trivia, meetups on Slack, recipe swaps, coffee breaks and happy hours, and many more. Team building is all about creativity, so make sure you involve your whole team in team building activity planning.

At first, it may seem like maintaining relationships with your employees online is a real complication that will only give you headaches. However, it’s all about being resourceful and creative. 

Since good communication is a stepping stone for any relationship, start with regular communication with your employees. Find useful communication tools and don’t be afraid to invest in them. Then, create a feedback culture that will make everyone's job a breeze. And lastly, don’t forget to have some fun from time to time.

And there it is, all the essential tips that will help you maintain a healthy online relationship with your employees.