Tips for Engaging a Remote Workforce
As flexible work policies become the norm, institutions must rethink their approach to employee engagement and workforce culture. Here's how Southern New Hampshire University is building a remote-first workplace centered on the employee experience.
Southern New Hampshire University is well known for innovation in online learning, so it may surprise you to learn that prior to the pandemic, its workforce was rather traditional: The majority of staff members worked on site, and employee culture was largely reliant on a face-to-face environment. But in March 2020, the abrupt shift to fully remote work required a new approach to employee engagement.
We spoke with Jennifer LaFountain, director of people experience at SNHU, about how the institution is developing a culture that allows employees to feel connected no matter where they are located. The following conversation features highlights from the Campus Technology Insider podcast, and has been edited for length and clarity.
Campus Technology: Thinking back to the start of the pandemic, how did the sudden shift to remote learning impact staff at SNHU?
Jennifer LaFountain: Believe it or not, prior to COVID, SNHU had less than 100 employees working remotely. We had just begun discovery work on building out our remote work policies. So even though we obviously have a very rich remote learning learner base, it was new for most of our employees. We are a company that is well known for its culture, but that culture was really fixated with being on site, particularly in New Hampshire, from an employee perspective. And so the big challenge for us in going remote was, how do we recreate that culture in a virtual way?
CT: Were there other challenges that the pivot to remote introduced or just exacerbated?
LaFountain: With any quick change there are challenges, and like other organizations, we've continued to face challenges with recruitment and retention and managing the volume of communications. But ultimately, our North Star is meeting the needs of our learners, who are experiencing all of the same obstacles that we are experiencing. So from an empathy perspective, we're in a great position. And the good news for us is, we're used to moving quickly. We innovate in higher education, and so we were able to very quickly innovate from an employee experience perspective, to create and implement a full, robust distributed workforce program, which we call Synergy. This has opened us up to recruiting from over 15 states that we previously were not recruiting from, which has ultimately allowed us to more deeply connect with our learners. We have learners everywhere. Our goal is to have employees everywhere, so that our learners see themselves in our staff. And now, all of our employees are basically remote learners. Many folks have kids, pets, parents in the background that they're caring for as well as trying to work, potentially in a very small room in their house that they've never had to work in before. Guess what? That's what our learners have experienced, even prior to the pandemic. So it's a real level playing field now.
The big challenges that I think were exacerbated by going remote so quickly were really about change fatigue and change management. I don't think that's a surprise to anybody — folks were experiencing all kinds of changes in their personal lives, and then changes in their work lives. So we have focused on creating places and spaces virtually for folks to connect, just to have that human-centered connection to hopefully ease some of that change fatigue.