25 Employee Engagement Ideas for Remote Teams in 2025

Recognition Programs: Implement formal and informal recognition systems to acknowledge achievements.In today's fast-paced environment, the demand for remote work is growing, as well as the importance of keeping remote employees engaged.

According to Gallup State of the American Workplace Report, remote workers are more engaged (32%) than office workers (28%). Engaged employees are often top performers who are committed to going the extra mile to achieve success. When remote employees don't feel engaged with their work, the entire organization is likely to suffer, and vice versa: having engaged employees has a positive impact on retention, customer satisfaction, company reputation and even stakeholder value.

What does working remotely mean?

Working remotely is a working style that allows professionals to work from outside the company’s office. In many cases remote work refers to working from home, but may include anywhere away from the office, such as a café, a library, the beach, a car, a train, or even a co-working space.

How intranets drive employee engagement

An intranet is more than just a digital workplace; it's a powerful tool to foster employee engagement. By providing a centralized platform for communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing, intranets can significantly boost employee morale and productivity.

Key Ways Intranets Drive Engagement:

1. Enhanced Communication:

   • Real-time Updates: Share the latest company news, announcements, and updates instantly.
   • Open Dialogue: Encourage open communication with forums, discussion boards, and comment sections.
   • Personalized Communication: Target specific groups or individuals with relevant information.

2. Improved Collaboration:

   • Project Management Tools: Streamline teamwork and track progress on shared projects.
   • Document Sharing: Easily access and collaborate on documents, reducing the need for email clutter.
   • Virtual Workspaces: Create virtual spaces for teams to work together, even remotely.

3. Knowledge Sharing:

   • Centralized Knowledge Base: Store and organize important company information, making it easily accessible.
   • Expert Locators: Quickly find subject matter experts within the organization.
   • Training and Development: Provide online training courses and resources to upskill employees.

4. Employee Recognition:

   • Public Recognition: Celebrate achievements and milestones with public recognition boards or awards.
   • Peer-to-Peer Recognition: Empower employees to recognize and appreciate their colleagues.

5. Employee Well-being:

   • Mental Health Resources: Offer access to mental health support and counseling services.
   • Wellness Programs: Promote healthy lifestyles with fitness challenges, wellness tips, and health resources.

Mobile intranet apps for remote team engagement

Roles across a workforce and across industries are far from being one size fits all, and there are large quantities of people who spend a majority of their time on-the-go, in the field, and away from a standard office and desk situation. Many times, those employees fall through the communication cracks and find themselves isolated from colleagues and from necessary information. It doesn’t need to be this way. 

A mobile app for your organization’s intranet helps tether on-the-go employees to the essential information they need to stay informed, productive, and aligned with their in-office counterparts. 

Every employee deserves to feel connected, and that connectedness as one team, regardless of location, is not only beneficial to each employee, but has massive business benefits. A recent study by Enboarder found that 94% of employees are more productive when they feel connected to their colleagues.

How a mobile intranet app benefits employee engagement

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is a concept that describes the relationship between an employee with its organization. Engagement defines the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals. An engaged employee is enthusiastic, involved and committed to their organization and to their work, and will typically go the extra mile. 

We realize that engaging with remote employees can be a challenge for organizations. Our remote working solutions make it easy for teams to communicate and collaborate, and feel engaged across borders and different time zones. Learn why remote-employee engagement is important, what are the challenges that come with it, and how to overcome them with our ten ideas on how to boost remote employee engagement.

Where does engagement end and adoption begin?

Imagine your intranet as a bustling city.

Engagement is like the number of people walking the streets, visiting shops, and participating in the city's activities. It's about the level of activity and interaction within the city. Engaged employees are actively using the intranet, commenting on posts, sharing documents, and participating in discussions.

Adoption is like the extent to which the city's infrastructure is used by its residents. It's about how well the city's roads, public transportation, and buildings are utilized. Adopted intranets are integrated into employees' daily routines, used for essential tasks like finding information, collaborating on projects, and accessing company resources.

While a city with high engagement (lots of people walking around) is good, it's even better if the city's infrastructure (adoption) is well-used. For example, if everyone is walking but there are no efficient public transportation options, it limits the city's potential. Similarly, an intranet with high engagement but low adoption means employees are active but not necessarily using the platform to its full potential.

The goal is to create a city, or an intranet, where both engagement and adoption are high. This ensures that employees are not only active users but also rely on the platform for their daily work.

In this way, intranet engagement serves as a precursor to adoption. When employees are actively engaged with the intranet, they are more likely to:

• Recognize its value: They perceive the intranet as a valuable tool for their work.
• Understand its functionality: They are familiar with the platform's features and capabilities.
• Trust its information: They believe in the accuracy and reliability of the content.

As engagement increases and habits are formed, adoption rises. Engaged employees are more likely to utilize the intranet for a wider range of tasks, from information retrieval and collaborative efforts, to the place where they search first before asking and find relevant information.

Strategies to transform engagement into adoption

To maximize the impact of your intranet, it's essential to focus on driving adoption. Here are some proven strategies to encourage employees to embrace and utilize your intranet:

Crafting a Compelling User Experience

• Intuitive Design: Prioritize a clean, uncluttered interface that is easy to navigate. Use clear and consistent labeling, and minimize the number of clicks required to access information.
• Mobile Optimization: Ensure your intranet is fully optimized for mobile devices, allowing employees to access information and collaborate on the go.
• Personalized Experience: Leverage personalization features to deliver tailored content and recommendations based on individual user preferences and roles. This can significantly enhance user satisfaction and engagement.

Providing Clear and Concise Information

• Well-Organized Content: Structure information in a logical and hierarchical manner, using clear headings and subheadings. Employ a consistent information architecture to make it easy for users to find what they need.
• Plain Language: Avoid technical jargon and complex language. Use simple, direct language that is easy to understand.
• Regular Content Updates: Keep your intranet fresh and relevant by regularly updating content. Remove outdated information and add new, valuable content.

Encouraging User-Generated Content

• Create a Culture of Sharing: Foster a culture where employees feel empowered to share their knowledge and expertise.
• Provide Easy-to-Use Tools: Equip employees with user-friendly tools for creating and sharing content, such as blogs, wikis, and discussion forums.
• Recognize and Reward Contributions: Acknowledge and reward employees who actively contribute to the intranet. This can be done through public recognition, awards, or other incentives.

Offering Training and Support

• Targeted Training: Provide tailored training sessions to different user groups, such as managers, employees, and IT staff.
• On-Demand Resources: Offer self-paced training materials, such as tutorials and FAQs, to allow employees to learn at their own pace.
• Dedicated Support Team: Establish a dedicated support team to answer questions and resolve issues promptly.
• Regular Communication: Keep employees informed about new features, updates, and best practices through newsletters, announcements, and other communication channels.

By implementing these strategies, you can significantly boost intranet adoption and create a more engaged and informed workforce. Remember, a successful intranet is not just a tool; it's a platform for collaboration, innovation, and growth.

How to engage remote employees?

We know that increased engagement in remote work has proven to help boost productivity, but managing a remote workforce isn’t always easy. So how to engage remote employees? In this article, we’ll cover 10 of the best ideas for engaging remote employees, all centered around three main elements: communication, understanding, and appreciation.

Challenges and benefits of remote employee engagement

Remote work may be new to the majority, but for some of us it’s business as usual. The world is ever-changing and organizations need to adapt quickly to the remote work trend if they want to stay in the game. 

However, remote working comes with challenges for both employers and employees. There’s a variety of distractions – from kids to parents and pets, to preparing lunch and doing the dishes. Another challenge is communicating and collaborating efficiently: messages won’t be answered as quickly, and some of them will just be forgotten, while last minute changes in schedules take place more often. Inefficient communication and collaboration can ultimately lead to disengagement – a risk you should avoid at all costs.

There is no doubt that creating an engaged remote workforce is vital to the success of a business. Engaged employees are more motivated and care about delivering quality work full-time. By investing in remote employee engagement, businesses can reduce absenteeism by 41%, turnover by 59% and the associated hiring costs. Managers may also increase productivity with up to 17% while retaining top talent.

We know that increased engagement in remote work has proven to help boost productivity, but how to keep remote employees engaged? Throw the traditional work mentality out the window – of your dining room, in all likeliness. Adapt your schedule to your remote employees’ needs, understand asynchronous communications, minimize the number of meetings, and reinvent your Internal Comms process. 

We know that keeping remote employees engaged can be a challenge to companies, especially when you run out of ideas. In case this is something you’re struggling with, here are some of the best ideas for engaging remote employees.

25 remote employee engagement ideas

Top 10 employee engagement strategies

If your company wanted to increase sales or improve customer service, they would create a plan to achieve these goals. In the same way, remote employee engagement needs to become a part of your overall business strategy. Developing a remote engagement program could include objectives such as improving Internal Communications or implementing company-wide pulse surveys on a regular basis. Share these objectives to raise morale and empower remote teams. 

There is no point in setting goals if you cannot measure their impact. Once you have identified the main focus of your remote employee engagement program, you should develop S.M.A.R.T goals. These are objectives that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Be clear about what you want to achieve, and make sure to set milestones and KPIs so there is accountability as well. 

Regular one-on-one meetings are important to keep remote workers engaged. These meetings give managers the opportunity to receive valuable feedback while understanding the needs and concerns of their employees who work from home. There are a variety of topics that can be covered during one-on-one meetings, including:

• What are your goals and priorities this week? 
  
  
• How satisfied are you with company communications?
  
  
• What can we do to make your job more efficient?
  
  
• How do you feel about your work-life balance right now?
  
  
• Is there anything we didn’t cover that you would like to discuss?
  
  

In order for one-on-one meetings to be effective, they need to happen on a regular basis. Google Meet is the perfect face-to-face video conferencing solution to set these events and keep them organized. Even better, Google Meet allows users to schedule these video calls in their work calendars based on time zone differences and availability. 

Make remote calls a moment to connect and enjoy the simplicity of being present with other people when we can’t enjoy their physical presence. We’re happy to offer some ideas to make your remote calls enjoyable. Let’s bullet-point our way through to avoid the fluff.

• Know your software. A meeting can’t be fun when spending the first 5-10 minutes explaining how to enable the tiled view in Meet.
  
  
• Be punctual. 
  
  
• Introduce everyone to avoid awkward silences. 
  
  
• Facilitate small talk and dedicate a meeting entirely to fun-related activities.
  
  
• Ask if people understood your message, right then and there – don’t guess that they did.
  
  
• Make sure everyone’s voice is heard and valued.

3. Create a remote employee reward system

Rewarding hard work is one of the best ways to engage remote employees and improve company culture. Company rewards could include career coaching and professional development opportunities or financial benefits such as bonuses and gift cards. Managers can conduct a quick survey to determine which rewards are most desired among the group. 

Financial incentives are not the only benefits remote workers are looking for in a job. Recognition among colleagues can have a long-term impact on employee engagement and job satisfaction. This means leaders need to go out of their way to notice and acknowledge when an employee makes a positive contribution. Public recognition during a company-wide meeting is a great way to celebrate achievements that impact the business as a whole and give workers a sense of belonging. 

With the rise of home offices, digital platforms and applications have come a long way in keeping remote employees engaged, even if teams are scattered in different time zones. When looking for the right communication and collaboration channel, consider what features will be most beneficial to your specific needs. Remember that no matter how good your remote work platform is, your employees still need to be trained to use it to be productive and feel engaged.

Traditional offices may have used faxes and emails in the past, but remote employees work, communicate and engage in very different ways. When it comes to platforms for remote workers, the choices are robust. The best ones enable remote employees to communicate and collaborate seamlessly regardless of their location or working hours. Our suggestion? Happeo is the intranet platform and the one-in-all digital workplace that integrates deeply with Google Workspace’s productivity suite.

Gamification is a growing workplace trend that has been shown to increase employee engagement and motivation. These games use an online platform to help employees reach different goals and objectives, offering rewards as they advance through the system. Gamification is useful when onboarding new remote workers or training existing employees on products and policies. The game dynamics, such as earning points and badges, makes the process much more engaging and fun. Companies can even assign real rewards for digital prizes.

Happeo recently used this tactic to train teams internally around the new Happeo mobile intranet app. Take a look at how this Easter-themed scavenger hunt helped to reduce the learning curve, ramp employee up, and 

All of us know this by now – working from home comes at a price. It can get hard to get the motivation, creativity, and spirits up and running. Although a majority of the remote workforce enjoys being productive outside of the office, communicating face-to-face is still essential to improve remote employee engagement. To solve this problem, managers may dedicate time during the day for extracurricular activities – the goal is for remote employees to feel connected with each other.

7. Meditation, yoga & well-being classes

The well-being industry is booming. Meditation, yoga, nutrition, and related practices, or simply a midday coffee break can have a significant impact not only on the well-being of your employees but also, surprise, surprise – on their output. New players have also taken a seat at the table, like the Wim Hof Method – a practice focused primarily on deep breathing and cold exposure with overwhelmingly positive anecdotal and scientifically proven results. Imparting a course about these methods and practices should not take longer than an hour or two out of your working hours, and the practices themselves can swiftly be incorporated into the tightest of agendas. A meditation practice can be carried out in ten minutes a day.

8. Online courses & workshops

Enable education in the workplace for long-term results. Providing your employees with memberships for audiobook platforms, e-book devices, online courses, and workshops will give them not only the freedom to choose what to learn, but also get them interested in new things that are beneficial for an organization striving to be broad-minded. Enabling education in the workplace gives long-term results and boosts employee productivity by 8.6%.

Simple measures work, but not everyone will be keen to join. It’s important to market your activities accordingly and to create excitement around them with the help of your internal comms leaders.

Oftentimes, management doesn’t participate in team-building activities or promotes solutions for teamwork. If your management, or anyone for that matter, is not joining or is not enthusiastic about team activities and remote calls, the logical step to take is to ask yourself why.

One of the main reasons that Jason Anthoine highlighted was that, when it came to senior management, some people were nervous to use new, tech-oriented solutions. What he realized was that they simply didn’t know how to use the tech. He understood that something as simple as talking to someone close to the person in question, and checking if they know how to use the technology usually did the trick. No one wants to feel like they’re falling behind, so a quick check-up on how people feel about new ideas can positively affect remote engagement.

Once you’ve made sure everyone is on the same page technologically speaking, take a look at your communication channels. A constant flow of information is often unnecessary and tiresome for all parties involved. Keep it simple, and market your internal activities appropriately – a message on a boring-looking intranet is not enough. Create custom approaches to your communications. A newsletter might work for one department, but a four-second video might be better to approach another. It doesn’t necessarily translate into creating lots of content to promote internal messages, but it’s good to know what people react to, and why. Personalization enables action.

10. Get creative to boost happiness

No matter how professional or serious one might be – everyone loves a good surprise. Not an okay surprise, but a good surprise is one of the easiest ways to keep everyone’s spirits up while working remotely. What if we told you you could hire Rey Mysterio, Snoop Dogg, Frodo, or Lando Calrissian to record a custom-made message for your employees, for the price of one company-paid lunch? Maybe not lunch-priced in the case of Snoop Dogg, but if you haven’t heard of Cameo, that’s pretty much the premise. A quick message or shoutout to your team members from their favorite celebrities can make more than one person’s day. 

We’ve heard some crazy good ideas like organizing Fashion Fridays, or creating face-to-face discussions in Google Meet to encourage deeper conversations among employees. These are just some of the dozens of good ideas that could be used to make your employees happy. Just be mindful of the different personality types in your organization.

Employees connecting over connecting employees. That’s the motto of remote employee engagement. Enabling connection and relationship development among employees, not forcing it down their throats. Things might start getting a little boring during remote working, and that could be indicative of some points of improvement in your approach to Internal Comms. Creating a community-centered workplace is, in general terms, what you want to be aiming for.

Internal communicators and senior leaders to share knowledge are there to enable conversations to happen, to create a constant and clean flow of information across the organization. They are the ones who listen to people, see what’s getting stuck, and keep your comms channels active. For this to happen, they need channels not only top-down, but also bottom-up. Everyone needs to have a voice, regardless of the position one has in an organization because Internal Comms focuses on people. Take a thorough look at what’s being said, by who, and why, to highlight what needs to be addressed.

Last but not least, let your remote employees experience a loose-work culture. Don’t underestimate the liberation that can be felt when not being restricted, micro-managed, and supervised at all times:

• 77% of employees feel higher engagement and 87% feel higher job satisfaction when well-being is made a priority at their workplace
  
  
• 58% consider work-life balance benefits an important part of the internal strategy
  
  
  

However, too much of a good thing can have unwanted results, and in this case, flexibility can create ambiguous working conditions. To avoid those, there are set-in-stone practices like designating a workspace and setting working hours. You can also encourage learning about work-life balance, and if you’re on a budget, Coursera and EDX are great platforms to get free courses from the best Universities in the world.

Additional tactics:

• Employee Resource Groups (ERGs): Foster a sense of belonging through affinity-based groups.
• Social Events: Organize team-building activities, celebrations, and social gatherings.
• Open-Door Policy: Encourage open communication with managers and leadership.
• Employee Surveys: Gather feedback through anonymous surveys to identify areas for improvement.
• Mentorship Programs: Pair experienced employees with newer ones for guidance and support.
• Volunteer Opportunities: Encourage community involvement and give back to the community.
• Employee Appreciation Days: Dedicate specific days to express gratitude and appreciation.
• Company Culture Committees: Involve employees in shaping the company culture.
• Job Rotation: Offer opportunities for employees to experience different roles and gain new skills.
• Employee Referral Programs: Reward employees for referring talented individuals.
• Employee-of-the-Month Programs: Recognize outstanding contributions and celebrate individual achievements.
• Flexible Benefits: Offer a variety of benefits options to cater to individual needs and preferences.
• Transparent Communication: Share company news, updates, and strategic plans openly and honestly.

Need more engagement ideas?

Happeo’s new eBook, One Year to a More Engaged Workforce, provides guidance for how to increase intranet engagement with 12 months of practical, fresh ideas to get your users on the platform to create adoption-building habits. Consider ideas like:

• New Year, New Ideas: Encourage employees to their ideas on the intranet for the company to reach their corporate objectives. This is also a great opportunity for leadership to recognize feedback, answer questions, and be engaged in conversations.
• Kudos: Create a space where employees can share kudos with co-workers who have helped them out, earned some recognition, or share what they love about the culture of and working at your organization. 
  
• Workplace Wizardry: Encourage employees to share their favorite work productivity hacks/magic to increase productivity and learn from one another. Bonus points if the hack involves your intranet platform!

For these and dozens more engagement ideas, download the eBook free today.

How Happeo drives engagement for Rayonier

Rayonier, a global forestry company, struggled with an outdated intranet that was difficult to update and lacked employee engagement. They implemented Happeo to create a central hub for communication, collaboration, and a single source of truth for company information.

“It was an easy decision for us to choose Happeo. From the beginning, we have seen 100% participation and engagement from our employees across the globe." –Emily Stimler, Employee Communications Manager at Rayonier

Read the full story

Let Happeo power your employee engagement

All and any activities, projects, or ideas to engage remote employees are reliant on two things: creativity and culture alignment. Real changes are an inside-out process and need organization-wide adaptability. It’s easy to underestimate how much reinventing your Internal Comms strategy can cause organization-wide remote employee engagement, especially in times of change. 

Happeo is an intranet and collaboration platform that helps organizations build long-lasting relationships with their remote teams and keep all employees engaged, informed, and connected.

We are proud to work with organizations of all sizes to ensure success through digital cloud-based solutions. Get the latest on Internal Communications and Google Workspace productivity by planning a personalized demo.