Social Media Strategies for Boosting Remote Employee Engagement: A Guide for HR Professionals

The landscape of how work is conducted worldwide has undergone a significant transformation in recent years. Recently, remote work has become more prevalent than ever – and for good reason.

While this shift to remote work brings many benefits for both parties, it also presents unique challenges, particularly regarding employee engagement. 

What are we aiming at here?

Well, the physical separation from the original workplace can create a gap in communication and connection. This makes it essential for HR professionals to explore innovative solutions to these newly-created problems. 

If your company is facing the same problem, you’ve made the right click.

In this guide, we’ll delve into the challenges posed by remote work setups and the ways in which social media can be harnessed as a powerful tool to enhance employee engagement. 

The Growing Importance of Social Media in the Remote Work Era

Here’s an interesting fact that you might or might not have known so far.

Looking at Upwork's insights, it's anticipated that by 2025, approximately 32.6 million Americans, making up roughly 22% of the workforce, will be engaged in remote work.

It’s a serious transition. Now, let’s focus on the aspect that interests us the most – social media. 

While it offers numerous advantages – flexibility, and access to a worldwide talent pool – remote work also presents unique challenges.

Social media is one of the critical tools that have emerged to address these challenges. 

Although most of us view social media merely as a tool for DM-ing friends and boosting posts on Instagram of each other, it has now become an indispensable resource for fostering online relationships in the remote work era.

For starters, there’s the communication aspect. Social media platforms provide various channels for communication. You can hop on simple messaging apps and video calls or participate in group chats. 

Basically, you have the freedom to reach out to anyone at any time, however you like.

Besides communication, it offers a chance to showcase your personality and humanize your online presence. You can share your interests, glimpses of your daily lives, and even some snapshots from your workplace. 

The best thing about using social media while working remotely? You can share achievements and mutual milestones even if you’re one continent away from each other.

Hold on to that thought – we’ll mention it along the way.

All of this sounds great at first, but it’s not all sunshine. Remote work can also lead to strong feelings of isolation, burnout, lack of motivation, and even communication online.

That’s where social media strategies kick in.

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4 Social Media Strategies Tailored for Remote Engagement

Boosting employee engagement is a burning issue, and it’s in need of instant solutions. So, without further ado, here are 4 effective social media strategies for boosting remote employee engagement.

Time to take notes!

Setting Clear Goals

Setting clear goals is a fundamental aspect of ensuring productivity and engagement among employees. 

Setting clear goals provides employees with a sense of purpose and direction during their working hours. When working remotely, employees may sometimes feel detached from the broader organizational objectives, which is completely understandable. 

So, well-defined goals act as guiding beacons, helping employees understand their role in achieving these objectives.

There are dozens of online social media tools that can help your organization with setting clear goals. You can download Todoist, Trello, Asana, Microsoft To-Do, GoalsOnTrack, and many more. You can share them with your colleagues and see how far you’ve come in your tasks.

A great thing about setting clear goals while using social media tools and calendars is transparency. These apps are easy to use and navigate, and you can share them with other members of your company. 

Of course, acting managers should jump in and engage in meaningful dialogues to help employees set clear goals and cooperate while taking into account their challenges and circumstances.

Choosing The Right Platform

Although social media offers an array of platforms for us to communicate and reach out to one another – they’re not all the same in effectiveness. It’s completely natural for some platforms to perform better than others, and as a growing business, you should take notes.

Did you know:

Zoom currently serves 504,900 corporate clients, with a total of more than 3.3 trillion minutes spent in annual meetings and an additional 45 billion minutes dedicated to hosting webinars each year.

How to make the right choice?

First, you need to understand the preferences of your company in terms of social media platforms. Do they use specific platforms for social media tools already?

Ask and you shall receive your answer.

Next, you should analyze your top candidates – Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Slack would be the best-performing ones. Evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and see which one sits the best with your remote team.

Also, explore tool integration of each of these platforms. This will do wonders for your remote workplace and make it ten times easier to streamline certain tasks.

Last but not least, make sure that the platform you choose is also mobile-friendly. You’ve got to remember that your employees will not have their screens next to them 24/7 – and that’s completely valid. 

Choose a platform that’s easy to install on their smartphones as well.

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Hosting Virtual Events

Your time zones might not allow you but technology is here to save the day and help you stay in touch with your employees and connect. 

The answer? Virtual events. 

Many businesses believe that this is a key strategy when it comes to enhancing remote employee engagement. Virtual events are an excellent choice for team building, social interaction, and learning when you’re sentenced to long-distance.

To maximize the effects of this strategy, you should consider diversity – meaning you should host different types of events – webinars, virtual team launches, workshops, and even online games. 

While you’re at it, make sure to stick to relevant topics. If your goal is enhancing engagement, you should focus on topics that promote discussion. You need to be 99% certain that your employees will willingly speak and participate in your virtual event.

Don’t make these events monotonous – instead, add a little bit of flair – polls, breakout rooms, Q&A time, and so on.

You can also invite hosts to speak about something that’s interesting at the moment – choose engaging partners and witness how your remote workspace thrives. 

Celebrating Team Milestones

Celebrating each other’s milestones is absolutely fundamental!

Just because you’re not in the same office doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t acknowledge each other's achievements. On the contrary, utilizing social media to highlight milestones and celebrate the next steps is highly effective in enhancing engagement.

There are dozens of ways to kick off this popular trend. 

You can host virtual celebrations, chat with your colleagues in group chats, make customized certifications and badges, encourage peer recognition, or just send out the good old virtual e-cards.

With Workmates, any team member can give a digital ‘kudos’ as a form of acknowledging a colleague’s efforts. This not only benefits employees but helps foster an excellent workplace culture!

The Benefits of Boosting Remote Employee Engagement

If you decide to incorporate the above-mentioned strategies in your remote workspace, results are guaranteed. So, here’s what you can expect in the long run:

Enhanced Productivity

Oftentimes, your remote employees just needed a little pat on the back to work more productively. As we said, the transition from regular office hours to remote work is a major change, and it can be rough at first.

Luckily, once they feel encouraged and noticed, remote employees will feel empowered and ready to seize the workday!

Job Satisfaction

When you move out of the office and into your own home, you have plenty of time to sit back and really think – ‘Do I like my job, or am I in it just for the money?’

Once your collective starts implementing the strategies that we mentioned, you’ll have a clear answer – of course, you like your job, you just needed a little push!

Stronger Team Collaboration

Working remotely might create a sense of isolation and alienation – especially if it’s been a minute since you’ve talked to anybody from your team. That’s precisely why we took the time to emphasize virtual events and celebrating milestones.

These simple strategies yield positive results. 

Now you have a chance to chat with your employees and talk about something that’s not strictly work-related. You might even discover that you have similar hobbies.

The Final Verdict

By now, we have covered everything regarding enhancing remote employee engagement in the current age. It's time to review the most important points.

What we can definitely conclude is that remote work is inevitable and that it will take over the work landscape by 2025, almost completely. With such statistics and knowledge, it is important to pay attention to employee engagement.

To secure positive results, businesses are encouraged to implement strategies that involve social media: setting clear goals, choosing the right platform, hosting virtual events, and celebrating milestones.

In the long run – enhanced productivity, job satisfaction, and team collaboration is guaranteed.

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Author Bio:

This article is written by a marketing team member at HR Cloud. HR Cloud is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications & engagement, and rewards & recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.