How To Engage Remote Warehouse Employees: Have Some Fun

We’ve reached Part III of How to Engage Remote Warehouse Employees. In Part I, we talked about how to engage remote warehouse employees through communication; and that communication needs to be at the center of your relationships with your employees.

In the second article, How to Engage Remote Warehouse Employees, Take a Chance on Me; we discussed ways to empower your crew so their observations and insights can be used to make your warehouse better.

So, finally we’re going to discuss part III of engaging remote warehouse employees; it’s to have some fun!

Our past blog post, Creating Company Culture With A Little Help From My Friends, explains that culture is about building relationships with your co-workers, which has many benefits such as increased productivity. Ultimately, working with friends makes work more fun.

Here are some ways our remote warehouse employees have fun at work:

Shift Challenges: To foster team bonding between the shifts at a warehouse, the manager decided to host a paper airplane contest. Each shift designed and built a paper airplane they thought could fly the farthest. Once all the research, design, and building was complete for their airplanes, they sent them flying. The winning team received bragging rights until the next out-of-the-box challenge, along with a gift card to a local restaurant.

Celebrate birthdays and personal achievements: As a company, we recognize each employee’s birthday and work anniversary through a post card sent to their home signed by leadership along with being mentioned in the monthly newsletter. It doesn’t take much time or effort to go the extra mile to acknowledge a co-worker on their special day. Or, if they’ve finally achieved a personal goal or participated in an event outside of work like running a 5K or entering their hobbies into a contest.

Reward when goals are met: Another way to have fun at work with your co-workers is to create challenges around the team’s goals and reward them for meeting or exceeding the goal during a certain time frame. A little competition between teams or shifts is a great way to motivate your warehouse to meet their goals, along with provide them a chance for team bonding and camaraderie.

View Keller Logistics Group’s New Capabilities Video

It’s not just remote warehouses that like to have fun with their co-workers. Often times, the corporate offices have planned events for their employees and that’s great. But, it’s always a good idea to try to keep the remote locations involved as well, if it is possible. So, when the corporate office is planning a holiday party, be sure to either invite your warehouse staff or provide the warehouse manager with the funds and/or resources needed to host their own holiday party or maybe just a meal outside of work together.

So, there are 3 parts to engaging remote warehouse employees:

Communication: What is your communication strategy for keeping your remote employees in the know about everything that is going on at the corporate location and other remote locations?

Empowerment: Giving your remote warehouse manager the authority to operate the warehouse as they see best is a powerful way to engage your employees. Look for ways they can help with Strategy and Solutions along with Sharing their Success with all of those in the company.

Lastly, as we reviewed earlier in this post, have some fun! Find small ways your team can have fun at work and outside of work.

The secret to success isn’t that complicated, it’s just communication, empowerment, and fun!

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