How to Engage Remote Employees: Tips to Lead Distributed Teams

Level-up Engineering

Interview with Greg Dick, Senior Engineering Manager at Hudl about building engagement with remote employees in distributed teams. They miss out on a lot of professional and personal interactions, and don't integrate well into the team. Check out Greg's tips to learn how you can kickstart that process as a manager!

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In this interview we're covering:

• Definition of remote employees and distributed teams
• Integrating remote employees to distributed teams vs remote teams
• Challenges of managing remote employees in a distributed team
• Engaging remote employees in the office chit chat
• Engaging remote emplyoees in team building activities
• Tips to set up the office to better engage remote employees
• Managing the return to the office in distributed teams
• Increasing retention by getting remote employees engaged

Excerpt from the interview:

"A few years ago, I had a remote member on my team who left the company after about a year. I asked him what happened and he said, “I saw all the cool stuff you all were doing in the office and I wanted that too.” It turns out, he considered moving to Lincoln to work with us in the office, but he had family ties, so he ended up joining a local company that had a similar culture to ours.

This left me wondering how much of this is our fault for bombarding him with reminders and videos of the office events. These might feed his feeling of being left out. Holding events every few weeks was an integral part of our engineering culture, but you had to be in Lincoln to partake.

Currently, we make our events visible in a way that if somebody is interested, it’s easy to find them. This is valuable to remote employees when they’re looking for times to visit headquarters. Looking at the calendar and picking the events they like makes this choice easier."

Click here to read the full interview!