How to Manage Employee Happiness While Running a Remote Team

How to Manage Employee Happiness While Running a Remote Team

Though the arrival of COVID-19 led to many more people working from home, it’s worth noting the appetite for remote work preceded the crisis, with research showing that 80% of employees wanted to work from home in some way or another. Fast-forward to 2025, and the latest data shows less than 10% of workers want to be on-site. 

Five years on from the initial outbreak — and subsequent remote working revolution —  companies worldwide are still trying to iron out issues with this new approach, and one of them concerns keeping employees happy. When you’re in an office, you can engage with someone much more easily. So how can you be comparably personable at a distance? Here are some tips:

Have a clear onboarding process in place

Remote work can feel isolating at first, especially if your employees are new to it. Yes, remote/hybrid work is relatively commonplace now, but it’s still far from universal. Many of your junior hires may not have been of working age during the pandemic’s lockdowns — the moment when the world first experienced remote work on a large scale. This means they may have little to no direct experience with the structure, communication style, or tools that come with remote work. As a result, a thoughtful and thorough onboarding process is essential to help these employees adjust, feel supported, and hit the ground running.

Whether you choose to hire in the UK, the US, or further afield, every onboarding session should start by setting clear lines of communication.  Let your employees know where they should go for support, how to access resources, and who to reach out to for specific questions. Whether it’s via a messaging platform, email, or video calls, being easily reachable and approachable creates an atmosphere where employees feel valued and understood. Also, make sure expectations are clearly laid out from day one. This includes outlining work hours, key responsibilities, and even informal matters like social channels and team events. When new hires know what to expect, they can integrate more smoothly and start off on the right foot.

Trust people to be productive

Trust is one of the biggest restraints to remote work — business owners tend to fear that their employees won’t perform unless bound to the office. But this assumption hasn’t shown any signs of being accurate, since many companies across a variety of sectors boasted record productivity figures under lockdown.

Much of this can be attributed to letting workers control their own personal schedules. Home life is less predictable and controlled than office life, and your staff can be pulled away from their keyboards for all manner of valid personal reasons: collecting kids from school, taking pets to the vet, answering important phone calls, and many more.

The key thing to remember is that none of this matters if they’re getting the work done. Trying to micromanage staff in their own homes is a critical mistake, suggesting that you’re ultimately a control freak. Instead, let them maintain flexible hours. Unless a piece has a strict deadline, it shouldn’t matter when it’s done at 8am or 8pm.

Reach out to your team

Working from home has huge upsides, but it isn’t perfect, and it isn’t for everyone. When people start working remotely, it can impact the companywide sense of togetherness, resulting in colleagues feeling isolated and unmoored. You should thus be looking for ways to bring your employees together, helping them socialise and grow closer.

Zoom, alongside other communication tools like Slack, has proven invaluable in the remote-working world by enabling virtual-face-to-virtual-face meetings and conferences. You can’t fully replicate regular office chat and passing updates, but you can achieve a reasonable stand-in, allowing you to establish a strong online office experience. 

Rebuilding a sense of community, even digitally, will boost the mood of everyone in your company. From collaborating on assignments to having simple social hangouts, shared events are essential to keeping people feeling motivated and satisfied as parts of a team.

Invest in your employees’ home office equipment

Over half of remote workers believe their employers should be investing in better home office technology, so if business owners want to make remote working effective in the long term, they need to invest in the proper equipment. However, building an effective home workspace is more nuanced than throwing money at a fancy new laptop and desk combination. There are many technical considerations to take into account.

Take the staple of multiple monitors. It’s easy to have them in office spaces, but expensive (and logistically complicated) to bring them to home offices. And what about seating? What will a plush chair bring to the table (as it were)? It ultimately comes down to thinking about what your employees want, what they need, and what you can afford. Somewhere in the middle lies the road you should take.

Allow employees to use this time to learn and develop

Working in offices has always involved downtime, but that downtime used to be obscured. Anyone in the office was thought to be working, with days viewed as containing contiguous blocks of productive hours. In truth, of course, there are long stretches during which there’s no work to do (or just no progress to be made) — and while some business owners expect their employees to take advantage of these, the truth is that most will feel guilty about them.

It’s your job to reassure your employees that they can use that downtime to learn and develop their skills. This will make them more productive, more motivated, and more likely to stick around at your company (steadily returning more value) as they work through their careers. Reach out to suggest great training programs, and give them projects to work on.

It can be highly helpful to look into online training programmes such as Skillshare, LinkedIn Learning, or Digital Garage. There are so many exceptional courses out there that it isn’t a matter of finding something good: it’s a matter of making a final decision about what to invest time and money in.

Working remotely doesn’t automatically solve workplace issues, and people can easily become dissatisfied in remote positions. Ultimately, all you can do is facilitate the best environment for your team to work in. Consider and implement these steps and you’ll be well on your way to running a more successful business.

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