How not to feel isolated? How to reduce feelings of isolation?

For Employers

6. Offer remote workers a co-working space stipend.

In the same way you offer perks like free coffee, catered meals, or fitness classes to help retain your on-site employees, set up perks that benefit your remote workers, too. Consider offering remote workers a monthly stipend to cover or defray the cost of membership at a co-working space, or a monthly budget to work out of a coffee shop, to proactively help team members prevent feeling lonely. Other perks for remote workers could include a budget to outfit their home offices so they feel fully set up and enjoy spending so much time there every week.

If the bulk of your corporate perks is only beneficial to in-office employees, you'll need to rethink ways to help retain your best remote workers to make them feel included and a part of the community, and addressing loneliness is a great place to start.

7. Schedule team-wide or company-wide virtual meetings that allow employees to connect.

It likely isn't possible or convenient for remote employees to travel to spend time with their team on a weekly or monthly basis for in-person collaboration, but team leaders can use technology to build virtual hangouts so remote employees can feel more connected with their in-office teammates. Whether that virtual socialising takes the form of a video meeting where everyone shares a coffee or adult beverage together or weekly lunch and learns, technology makes it easy to build time for relationship-building that all team members can benefit from.

8. Facilitate monthly or quarterly visits to headquarters or a common location.

Depending on how many remote employees work on each team or within the entire company, leaders should build a budget to bring remote employees into the office on a semi-regular basis. This is important for remote employees to build relationships and networks, and it's important to make sure teams are working together in sync on a day-to-day basis.

If you're a fully-remote company or remote employees are distributed around the world, you could consider organising regular travel to bring remote employees located in the same country or continent together, too. Scheduling a mini-retreat for remote employees to spend time together and share their productivity tips will help them build relationships with peers and feel more connected to a community when they're at work.

9. Schedule all-company events at least once yearly.

If you have a significant number of remote employees, or if you're a fully-remote company, you should be scheduling an all-company retreat once per year at an absolute minimum. Humans crave human connection, and organising a week-long event with time for programming, collaboration, fun and socialising will help your teams work better together and make remote workers feel more engaged in the company mission and culture. If you're concerned about the budget involved with planning an event like this, it could cost less than constant employee turnover or employees missing deadlines because they don't work well together.

10. Set up meetings to make remote workers feel included.

Team managers and co-located team members in the office should make a significant effort to make remote employees feel more included and a part of the team, no matter where they work. When scheduling meetings, co-located team members should always make sure to add a video conferencing link to the calendar event so remote attendees are prepared to join the meeting. If the team needs to use their computers during the meeting, everyone attending should log into the video conference to prevent side conversations from happening in the physical meeting room.

Source:

OwlLabs