Employee Engagement Tips for Remote IT Staffing

Unlock Your Tech Team’s True Ability

Employee engagement within IT staffing has always been critical to successful business outcomes. The pandemic forced your teams home in a rush. You’ve been left to pick up the pieces of a disrupted and detached tech team.

Remote IT staffing is likely to be here for the long term. An annual survey by Gallagher’s discovered that 86% of organizations will continue to work remotely as the U.S. emerges and resumes from the depths of the pandemic.

Employee disengagement is a costly risk. A report by Gallup showed that disengaged employees are 18% less productive, reducing profits by 15%, and costing their employers 34% of their annual salary.

It’s time you ramped up your employee engagement within your remote IT staffing.

The Effects of Disengagement

Working from home may leave your IT staff feeling isolated with a lack of social interaction, motivation, and supervision, as well as cause upheaval in their work/life balance. The damaging effects include:

• Damaged productivity
• Increased absenteeism (yes, even when working from home)
• Reduced quality of work
• Missed deadlines on project delivery
• Staff attrition increasing hiring costs
• Negative impact on a distorted team

These tips will help you avoid these disastrous effects.

Set the Guidelines

Be transparent on boundaries, what’s expected of your team, and the structures in place. Provide clarity on:

• Work hours – be clear on flexibility and how best to work together, with time zones and personal responsibilities in mind
• Communications – how you plan to implement communication tools, and the importance that everybody contributes to team collaboration and feedback
• Results – how you should measure individual and team successes and ways to improve

Make Ease of Communication a Priority

The office used to be your tech team’s cauldron of innovation. Replicate it as best you can, and create a communications hub tool for all your IT staff to gather and clash ideas. Such a tool will allow:

• Ease of communication of thoughts, ideas, or concerns
• A support network, accessing team or confidential channels at ease
• Feedback
• Engagement analysis

Ensure Staff Are Accountable

You value your tech staff’s individual contributions. You’ll reward them when they deliver. Make sure your staff feel accountable for and engaged in the tasks you set. They’ll strive to achieve and produce higher-quality work.

Create a Mindful Communication Strategy

You must give your staff time to complete their tasks. Be mindful toward their own personal trials as they adjust to a potentially hampering homeworking environment.

Consider varied communication preferences and ask your staff how best they’d like to be kept in the loop. 42% of workers felt more productive when uninterrupted, preferring convenient emails. Though communication must be regular, you must ensure it is received in the right way to be effective, and to engage your audience.

Avoiding unnecessary meetings will allow your staff to focus and reduce Zoom fatigue. Save video conferencing for high-impact moments.

Congratulate Wins

Set each employee a target to achieve. A mini target each day, and a challenge for the week.

Club together your community of tech colleagues, congratulating the successes and supporting those who need assistance. This is your opportunity to give your tech staff a sense of belonging and unison.

Team Building Activities

In times of uncertainty, disengagement is more highly linked to wellbeing and productivity. Do something to create the motivation and stimulation they all need. Teams who play together, stay together.

Monitor Staffing Levels

Don’t leave your current workforce working on skeletal staffing. You’ll create burnout, which will damage engagement further. Keep a close tab on your staffing levels, and adjust accordingly when projects require specific tech skills or timeframes that overstretch your team.

Partner with a specialist staffing agency. Here at NexTech we provide:

• Contract
• Contract-to-hire
• Direct hire

All of which will provide the skilled support your team needs, when they need it.

Onboard New Candidates Correctly

When new staff are brought in, welcome them to the team in a video conference. This is one of those ‘high-impact’ moments that will ensure your new members feel comfortable, and your current staff are fully informed, ready to start innovating and collaborating.

Start Maximizing Your Remote IT Staffing Potential Today

Employee engagement has always been a key ingredient to the success of a company. In the tech world, it’s crucial. Your IT staffing must be innovative, creative, productive, and engaged. With these tips, you will ensure you have the most skilled candidates achieving to the best of their ability – defeating the tech skills shortage, and upping your stance in an ever-developing industry.

Contact NexTech today. We have decades of industry expertise that will ensure successful staff augmentation for your required skills and business goals, through and beyond 2021.