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3 Tips to Help Keep Remote Employees Engaged and Motivated during COVID-19

Apr 06, 2020

For multinational organizations that have switched to a remote work setup (like Morningside), maintaining an off-site international workforce raises new management and HR challenges – with communication chief among them. As companies reinvent their way of doing business during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is critical to maintain engagement with home-based personnel. Here are three things you can do to ensure your remote employees feel connected and motivated during these trying times:

Provide interpretation support for online phone calls and video meetings

While it is unsafe to hold in-person meetings, business can run as usual with the use of online phone calls and video meetings. Platforms like Skype, GoToMeeting and Zoom (just to name a few) will support phone or video meetings with colleagues or clients based anywhere in the world – as long as they have an internet connection and no language barriers.

When you’re conducting online business meetings with multilingual participants, it’s important to ensure everyone can understand one another. If there is any risk of a communication barrier, a professional interpreter can make all the difference in the world. During COVID-19, you can rely on Morningside for video remote or phone interpretation services across a wide variety of industries. Our global network of 8,000+ linguists are experts in dozens of technical fields and subject areas, including legal, finance, life sciences, manufacturing, and consumer products, and our quality management system is ISO-9001, ISO-13485, & ISO-17100 certified.

Provide multilingual eLearning courses for employee onboarding & continuing professional development

With personnel working off-site, a genuine opportunity arises to connect with your employees by reinforcing and enhancing critical skill sets via online training and targeted eLearning assignments. Doing so will increase employee engagement, whether it’s for onboarding new team members or providing new learning opportunities for existing employees. Luckily, Morningside is an expert at helping companies develop and deliver successful multilingual eLearning courses for transnational workforces.

Note: There are two ways to provide eLearning modules – live courses or self-guided programs. When companies prepare self-guided eLearning models — which can include everything from PowerPoint presentations and audio scripts to video content and captioned graphics — Morningside will work tirelessly to ensure accurate translation and localization, seamless integration, and user-friendly deliverables that provide the same user experience as the source content. For live sessions, our simultaneous interpreters help present information and graphics clearly and accurately. Audience questions receive the same treatment, allowing for a lively back-and-forth that helps keep employees engaged.

Encourage virtual team coffee breaks or water cooler chats

Social distancing is necessary, but that doesn’t mean we should completely change our ways. Chatting over a cup of coffee or by the water cooler can play an important role in your employees’ happiness and satisfaction at work. So while we can’t take physical breaks together, employers should encourage virtual team breaks where groups gather on Skype, Zoom, or GoToMeeting just to talk. Breaks should be scheduled and timed, but obviously no agendas need to be planned. This is a time for people who are used to spending so much time working right next to each other to catch up and chat in a stress-free environment.

An opportunity not to be missed

Interestingly, recent research reports that people who work at home have been found to be more productive than those operating in a conventional office environment — and that remote workers even put in extra time (the equivalent of 1.4 extra, unpaid workdays each month, or 16.8 days per year). With that in mind, employers can choose to look on the positive side during these restrictive times, and focus on the value that increased multilingual support will bring to employees and clients around the world. For more information on Morningside’s remote interpretation or multilingual eLearning services, please contact us.

 

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