How to Keep Remote Employees Engaged Long-Term

As remote work has become more common, organizations have found that employees can perform well from afar. The problem? Maintaining long-term remote employee engagement can be difficult.

The issue is often less about an employee’s engagement with work and more about their engagement with colleagues and the company culture. Away from a bustling office, remote employees often feel distant.

A 2025 Gallup report finds that 31% of remote workers report feeling engaged, higher than hybrid and on-site employees. But it also found that 45% of remote employees report feeling more stress, 30% more sadness, and 27% more loneliness than on-site employees.

And CEOs worry that remote employees will lose out on company culture. Without in-person communication with a team, executives fear that remote employees will experience weakened motivation, poor alignment with their team, and, eventually, diminished performance at work.

“Remote work is awesome, and it’s also terrible,” says Kim Svoboda, a Vistage speaker and member, as well as founder and CEO of Aspiration Catalyst. “You can tap into new talent because now you have access to literally anyone in the world, as it doesn’t really matter where they live. From an individual perspective, it gives us a lot more flexibility to live our lives professionally and personally.”

But too often, Svoboda says that remote employees lose out on the deep communication that on-site employees get daily. For example, Svoboda serves as the chair of the board of directors of the Better Business Bureau in Chicago. Recently, she led a meeting in which 40% of participants attended remotely.

It’s too bad, she says, because they are missing out on the great informal networking and relationship building that happens before and after meetings, something lost over a video call.

There’s also an inherent inner-office conflict in remote work, according to Dr. Kent Wessinger, a Vistage speaker as well as CEO of 3 WINS! and previously an academic. While older employees have become more open to remote work — 35% of Baby Boomer and Generation X employees are fully remote, according to Gallup, compared with 23% Generation Z employees — there’s still resentment in organizations where some people need to be in the office, and others can work remotely due to their function at work.

“As leaders, we’re not managing that internal conflict well,” Wessinger says.

But remote work is not going away. The Vistage CEO Confidence Index reports that in the 3rd quarter of 2025, 8% of organizations were fully remote and 43% were hybrid. That means more than 50% of businesses currently manage some number of remote employees.

And Gallup reports higher numbers. In May 2025, it found that 28% of companies were fully remote, compared with 21% fully on-site.

The answer cannot be to assume remote work will sort itself out over time. Instead, executives must engineer long-term engagement of remote employees.

What Remote Employee Engagement Looks Like

Organizations looking to improve long-term remote employee engagement must intentionally prioritize clarity, trust, and connection as core values.

Svoboda, who runs a fully remote business, says it’s more difficult to build relationships through tools like Zoom and Slack than face-to-face. In person, communication can often just happen — people pass in the hall or meet in the lunchroom. To build relationships with remote employees, leaders must intentionally communicate, even informally.

“The leaders who are doing well in this new remote environment are thoughtful about how they’re creating setting expectations and creating opportunities for people to connect,” Svoboda says.

One of Svoboda’s clients hosts quarterly in-person meetings for all employees. Bringing everyone together for a couple of days has helped them forge stronger connections.

Clients have also seen success by setting clear performance expectations for all employees. These can be KPIs, success metrics, or as simple as the number of calls sales employees need to make each day. Whatever the measure, clear expectations help remote employees see what success looks like in their roles.

Perhaps the most important way to create trust, clarity, and connection with remote employees is to set regular communication touchpoints, Svoboda says. These meetings don’t have to be long, perhaps 10 to 15 minutes each week. But they can be an intentional way to check in with employees about their work and how they’re doing on a human level.

Instead of meeting on Zoom every time, Svoboda suggests finding more informal ways to connect with remote employees. Often, she’ll talk with employees over the phone and go for a walk together, which often leads to deeper, more intimate conversations that extend beyond day-to-day work.

While these conversations may sometimes delve into success metrics and KPIs outlined for employees, that’s not necessary every time. These are often lagging indicators saved for performance reviews, Svoboda says, where managers and employees can dig into what went well and what didn’t. But delving deeply into them each week may feel more like micromanagement than accountability.

Still, Svoboda says that there are leading indicators that can be discussed in these weekly meetings. How do the employees feel about their work? What’s going well? What isn’t going well? Are there any areas where they feel lost or need help? These conversations can help keep both remote employees and their managers engaged.

Create a Path of Growth and Success

For the past decade, Wessinger has been researching people’s perspectives on work, particularly across multiple generations and roles.

Wessinger found that 83% of leaders today are concerned about the future of their companies regarding the younger workforce. His goal with clients is to help them build confidence through a few simple practices that benefit both on-site and remote employees.

The first practice Wessinger found is creating a clearly defined path of growth and success for each employee within the company. This helps employees understand how to succeed within the organization and, for those who move up, feel recognized and appreciated at work.

“If leaders want to retain a talented younger workforce, they’ve got to have a clearly defined path of growth when they’re onboarding people,” Wessinger says, something that is especially true for companies hoping to engage their remote workforce. “That not only attracts talented employees, but it also keeps them engaged.”

Another successful method to foster engagement has been to create small-group mentorship programs, populated by a mix of remote, hybrid, and on-site employees. These are small groups within the company that are not focused on careers, Wessinger says, but on growth, success, and life. These groups meet once a month for an hour, allowing them to stay in touch without overloading their schedules with meetings. Group members often end up holding each other accountable at work, he says, even if the groups aren’t focused on work.

Today, Wessinger says he’s helped companies build groups with more than 30,000 employees participating, and he’s received feedback that these companies experience greater trust and accountability among their employees. Trust is what Gallup calls “the Achilles’ heel of remote work,” as only 57% of employees say they feel trusted by their manager to be productive when working remotely. Similarly, only 54% of managers with remote employees trust their teams to be productive when remote.

These groups address what Wessinger says is the top reason younger, often remote, employees leave a company: not feeling their voices are heard at work.

By giving employees a small group, he’s found they’re more likely to trust their coworkers and feel understood within the organization. Once per month, for one hour, he says these groups gather in person, which strengthens trust and connection within the groups and across the entire workforce.

Wessinger says, “When trust is intentionally engineered into the culture of the company, people do not leave. It costs on average, $34,000 every time someone walks out of your door,” Wessinger says. “If you lose 10 employees a year, that’s $340,000. I’ve seen companies losing more than 1,000 employees per year when they come to me, and I’ve seen very few P&L statements that accurately reflect that expense. It comes straight out of profitability.”

No employee, remote or otherwise, takes a job wanting to leave. Leaving happens when employees feel stuck and unheard — and when remote employees don’t feel trusted or engaged by the company. By creating pathways for growth and small mentorship groups focused on whole-life development, organizations can build trust and engagement among remote employees.

Building Remote Employee Engagement that Lasts

Once executives know the toll of isolation, career stagnation, and lack of trust, they can intentionally build a system that engages everyone. That means creating remote-specific engagement levers for remote employees.

Leaders must set clear expectations, Svoboda says, to drive clear goals, accountability, and strong communication. The best leaders are intentional about setting the standard for how communication happens with all employees, she says, including training managers to keep remote employees engaged.

In his clients’ small groups, Wessinger says that managers and C-suite executives get their own groups. This ensures they aren’t intruding on employee groups, but also that they’re living up to the standard they are setting for the company’s culture.

These groups can be especially helpful for managers, who can better learn to communicate one-on-one with employees and identify when a remote employee is drifting early.

Forming a culture of mentorship is a must, Svoboda agrees. If a company doesn’t build a small-group mentorship program, she suggests creating a one-on-one peer-mentorship program for remote employees from day one.

For on-site employees, organizational mentors often form naturally when a new employee talks to someone nearby about culture, expectations, and life at work. But for remote employees, this must be done intentionally — they should be assigned a point of contact they can call or chat with with questions or concerns.

These conversations can flow more easily if leaders invest in high-quality collaboration tools. But leaders must be careful to avoid surveillance tools, which breed mistrust, and resist the urge to inundate remote employees with meetings to foster engagement. While some level of connection and control of schedule is good — Gallup finds that 76% of employees with self-directed schedules face burnout — too much can become a business problem. A study by Otter.AI and Dr. Steven Rogelberg found that one-third of meetings were unnecessary.

If an organization struggles with engagement now, that does not mean that will always be the case. One of Svoboda’s clients was struggling to engage remote employees, so Svoboda began by guiding the company in setting expectations for each employee. What does success look like for each role? The company worked to answer this for each employee.

Next, she says that the organization had everyone take the Clifton Strengths Assessment. This assessment serves as a “secret decoder ring” for the different talents each team member has, Svoboda says, giving executives, managers, and employees a full view of their own strengths and others’. This especially helps when some or all employees are remote, as it gives others a deeper understanding of who they are.

“Especially when there are remote employees, this Assessment is great because they get to know each other,” Svoboda says. “I might have people from all around the country that are on a Zoom call together, and they’ve got a much deeper connection with each other because they see their commonalities. It’s a great way for us to appreciate ourselves, but also each other.”

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Unique Rituals to Engage Remote Employees

Executives can also try a unique competition that Wessinger says has generated better-engaged remote employees and created new lines of income for his clients.

Each year, many of his clients host a Shark Tank-style competition in which employees in small mentorship groups develop new ideas to strengthen client and employee relationships with the company. Many of Wessinger’s clients have generated new revenue streams through this competition while also enabling employees to speak up, feel heard, and potentially be rewarded at work. These are all things that drive engagement of remote and all employees.

Five years ago, one of Wessinger’s client companies in Atlanta offered each member of the winning team a $200 Amazon card. This past year, each member of the winning team received a Chevrolet Silverado.

“They can do that because the revenue streams from those ideas get larger and larger every single year,” Wessinger says. Last year’s revenue stream from the winning idea generated $13.2 million of new revenue. They want to continue to accentuate and extract ideas from their employees. They’re allowing their employees to be true innovators within their company. It removes a huge weight from leadership.”

At three companies he’s worked with, people generated ideas that became new departments or initiatives they now lead within the organization. “They actually created themselves a new job inside the company,” he says. This kind of potential for growth can’t help but engage employees, he said, and allows remote and on-site employees to have more unique interactions.

A Roadmap Toward Better Engagement with Remote Employees

Success won’t come overnight when installing a long-term engagement plan for remote workers. But a plan can be built month-by-month, expanding over time.

Month one: Establish clarity for employees by ensuring they’re clear on what success means in their role. Set up a KPI dashboard. Lay the foundation for engagement by scheduling regular meetings with employees.

Month two: Ensure remote employees have mentors within the company or perhaps set up a small-group mentorship program. Pilot a recognition program for employees. Start cultural rituals that make remote employees feel included in the organization.

Month three: Define a path of growth for each role so employees know how they can be successful. Plan for off-site or on-site meetings where all employees, even fully remote, meet in person. Consider unique ideas that foster engagement, such as Wessinger’s competition for employees to generate new ideas for the company.

While this may be an aggressive timeline, one that may take closer to a year to truly refine, Svoboda says that having a focused timeline can increase the chance of success. This is true even if the roadmap is a year rather than a quarter.

“You can really make great progress, and you keep your focus on just a couple of priorities, versus trying to boil the ocean,” she says.

Fueling Remote Employee Engagement

A well-engaged team can be sustained over the long term, Wessinger says, but it requires the fuel of accountability and community.

“Active accountability is the fuel that keeps this moving forward, while also fueling trust,” he says. “And while we missed the power of community a bit after the pandemic, it’s starting to rear its head again in a positive way. Both together are very powerful.”

For executives seeking to build an engaged workforce—remote, hybrid, and on-site alike—joining a Vistage group can help them identify the insights and practices that sustain engagement across the entire workforce.

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