Tips for Engaging a Remote Workforce

• 09/14/22

CT: How do you track the effectiveness of the Shine program? Did you have goals that you set in terms of results you're hoping for?

LaFountain: For our first 30 days, our KPI was a 60% adoption, meaning that we hoped 60% of our employees would be engaging in the system, either by sending a card or receiving a card. We blew that out of the water. We currently have over 85% engagement, and we've issued over 2,000 service awards.

We're now developing KPIs for our third phase, which is going to be monetary recognition, and also looking at what is the overall benchmark for where we want to be. I can't imagine we'll get any higher than 85% engagement; I think probably 80% is going to be our sweet spot.

CT: Besides recognition, what are some other ways that you've engaged remote employees and cultivated a sense of connection and community?

LaFountain: My team is responsible for creating spaces and places for employees to connect with one another, and we do that in a variety of ways. We have over 20 formal and informal employee communities that my team is bringing together, establishing governance, creating a hub so that people can find those communities, and tying those communities into new hire training and manager training. Our communities are almost exclusively virtual — we do most of this work in Microsoft Teams. We have communities of practice — for example, there's a project management community of practice, where folks come together and share expertise related directly to business processes and skills. We have communities of interest, which are literally just fun groups — we have one that's a baking one, where people share baking recipes, what they've baked, baking fails. We have employee resource groups, and then we have communities of connection, which are akin to affinity groups. We just launched a parent community of connection, and we're launching a military community of connection.

In March, we hosted our second annual Employee Appreciation Week. We had over 20 virtual events that over 50 employees designed and implemented for their peers. Everything from a "feel-good huddle," which is a 15-minute dance party — we have a resident DJ, he plays music for 15 minutes in a chat, it is one of the most joyous things we do — all the way to a career seminar on how to help yourself stand out and network in order to further your career at SNHU. And it was all designed by employees for employees. So we are constantly looking for ways to use the technology that we have, with very little money, to bring our employees together to connect in whatever fashion, whatever topic makes the most sense for them.

CT: What are the university's plans moving forward with remote work?

LaFountain: We are committed to being an employer of choice, which means we are deeply invested in keeping our workforce distributed. We still have our physical campus, which is in New Hampshire, but we are in 19 states at this point, with a goal of building out as many as it makes sense, because it's the best way to serve our learners. And so we'll continue to keep a remote-first mindset with regard to our workforce.

CT: Do you have any advice for other institutions that are trying to engage a remote workforce or embrace that remote-first philosophy?

LaFountain: Listen to your employees and honor what they tell you. It's not enough just to listen, but you have to actually do something with what you hear. But all of that being said, my biggest piece of advice is to try things. When we first went distributed, I was really focused on replicating what we previously had. Halloween is a really big deal for SNHU. There was a huge onsite parade that happened — very big deal, elaborate costumes, super fun, very, very big. And I was like, "We can do this virtually! We can do it!" It was an epic failure. Nobody was interested in doing a virtual Halloween parade. It just did not work. And that was okay. We didn't say, "Oh, man, we can't do this virtually." We said, "That's not it, but what is?" And so we just kept trying new things.

One of the things that we found through trying and trying and trying is, you've got to do it where the people are doing the work, and at SNHU people are doing the work in Teams. So we do a lot of stuff in Microsoft Teams. We would not have learned that without failing at that first Halloween parade.

I tell my team, "I have a ton of ideas. Many of them are not good ones." And that's okay. It's okay to fail. In fact, I think you get a lot of credibility with your workforce when you transparently say, "That didn't work." And then you try something new and parts of the new thing work and parts of it don't. But don't be afraid to try.