6 Tips to Help Stay Connected and Engaged with your Employees

As businesses work through the stage 4 restrictions and closures, thousands of employees also need to come to terms with what working from home, being stood down or part time work means for them.

To get an understanding of how and why it’s important to keep your employees informed and connected, we can look at countries such as New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the USA who have been through shut downs and furloughs already.

In our businesses, employees often spend a large portion of their time together, and between being stood down and losing this connection, could be feeling lost and confused. As employers, we want to keep our teams together and ensure that the culture, connection and social aspects are not lost. Recreating these while re-opening your business when the time comes could place even more stress on you as the employer.

Here are some tips on staying in touch:

1. Make the Time – schedule in some time each week to follow up and keep in contact.

2. Keep it Personal – Check in, say hello, see what they’ve been up to first, then let them know about work matters. We are people first, then employees, so keep that in mind.

3. Recognise important dates – don’t forget about birthdays – a quick team zoom to sing Happy Birthday reminds everyone that they are part of the team

4. Lend Support – don’t let your employees feel alone, there are resources below that you can share with your employees

5. Provide Business Updates – keep your employees in the loop of any changes or expected return dates. If you are using email, then ensure that the communication goes to their correct personal email as well.

6. Social time – have you read a great book or watched a great show? – then tell each other about them. Maybe you could launch a book club or something similar.

Remember, across a normal work day, you would normally have a chat about the weekend, celebrate an occasion or have a catch up, so don’t lose these connections while you are away from the workplace.

For more details on these tips, and some other suggestions as well, you can view this factsheet from One Digital.

Susan Beniston
Visitor Servicing & Development Officer

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There are great resources online for supporting your employees as well:

• Safe Work Australia

• Beyond Blue

• Heads Up Small Business Resources

• Heads Up Mental Health

• Black Dog Institute

• Deloitte