In 2025 HR professionals still have the same set of problems when engaging their remote workforce: synchronization challenges, meeting fatigue impact, declining invites, etc.
Without fresh ideas for remote employee engagement, consequences become visible in work patterns. For example, exit interviews show that “feeling isolated” and “lack of connection to the team” are increasingly cited as reasons for departure.
In this article, we will go over some fresh ideas and strategies that can boost employee participation and increase satisfaction. Then, we will show you some great tools that can help you with employee engagement, like custom AI avatars for Zoom meetings.
4 Best Ways to Engage Remote Employees
Overcoming time zone differences, employee burnout, and lapses in communication will help create and maintain a sense of belonging, encouraging open dialogue, and promoting collaboration.
Now that we've addressed the challenges of managing remote teams, let's dive into the top everyday strategies you can implement to improve employee engagement and create a more connected, productive workforce.
1. Virtual Team Events
One of the most effective ways to bring remote teams closer together is by organizing periodic virtual events. These events provide opportunities for employees to interact with one another in a more relaxed, informal setting.
When planning virtual team events, you want to consider the diverse interests, backgrounds, and personalities of your team members.
A major problem for HRs when organizing virtual events is different time zones. Here is a pro tip:
Schedule “parallel events” instead of trying to find one perfect time slot. For monthly team celebrations or gatherings, run three identical 45-minute sessions across different time zones.
Each has the same agenda and activities, but employees can join whichever works best. The fascinating side effect? People will start attending multiple sessions just to connect with different colleagues.
Here are some of the more popular ideas for virtual team events:
Food-Sharing Fridays: Ditch the basic "show your lunch" format. Instead, send $15 gift cards three days before and assign cooking challenges like "weirdest sandwich combination that actually tastes good" or "recreate a fast-food item from scratch." Create a dedicated Slack channel where people post their grocery lists the day before to build anticipation and increase participation.
Virtual Birthday Celebrations: Virtual birthdays work best in small batches, so celebrate all monthly birthdays in 20-minute team ceremonies every first Friday. Each birthday person gets a digital gift card plus a “memory montage” where teammates record 30-second video clips sharing a funny or meaningful moment with them. Important detail: We send calendar holds six weeks in advance with clear instructions for video submissions to ensure quality content.
Ugly Christmas Sweater Contest: The ugly sweater contest thrives on preparation, so send a “sweater creation kit” ($20 budget) three weeks before, containing basic craft supplies. The twist: participants must incorporate something representing their role at the company, so developers add keyboard keys, salespeople add toy phones. This personal touch doubles participation and creates natural conversation starters.
Virtual Game Nights: For game nights, avoid complex multiplayer games. The most successful format is a 45-minute “Observation Room” where teams of 4 study a cluttered virtual room (Use a shared Figma board) for 3 minutes, then compete to answer rapid-fire questions about details. Simple, zero learning curve, highly engaging.
2. Digital Feedback Channels
Easy and accessible ways to leave feedback and offer constructive input to leadership is great for maintaining open communication. Create dedicated digital feedback channels to demonstrate your commitment to hearing and addressing the concerns, ideas, and suggestions of your remote team members, regardless of their location or role within the organization.
Feedback channels to incorporate anonymity and ease of use, or else your team members won’t be motivated to use them. The feedback process should be simple and intuitive, requiring minimal time and effort on the part of the employee.
Many remote employees may feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts and opinions if they can do so anonymously, without fear of retribution or judgment.
Typical feedback systems through Slack or traditional surveys won’t boost your engagement. Use “Traffic Light Thursday” in Microsoft Teams: Employees react with red, yellow or green buttons to three key questions posted weekly about workload, team communication, and project clarity.
Skip the standard suggestion box. Instead, create “Solution Pairs”: every two weeks, randomly matched employees spend 15 minutes discussing one specific company process that frustrates them and submitting a joint improvement proposal.
3. Collaborative Goal Setting
Engaging remote employees in the goal-setting process creates a sense of ownership, accountability, and alignment across the team.
When setting goals with your remote team, it's important to involve employees at every stage of the process, from brainstorming and ideation to defining metrics and milestones.
This collaborative approach helps ensure that goals are realistic, achievable, and aligned with the strengths and interests of each team member.
For goal setting, we scrape the quarterly OKRs in favor of "6-Week Sprints with Swap Days." Teams set ambitious 6-week goals, but explicitly build in two “swap days” where priorities can be officially reshuffled.
Each goal should have a “virtual buddy” from another team who checks in weekly via a 5-minute Loom video, as this cross-team accountability has proven to be more effective than manager oversight.
Make your videos interesting with AKOOL:
4. 1-on-1 Check-Ins
Regular 1-on-1 check-ins with remote team members are important for maintaining strong relationships, addressing individual concerns, and ensuring that employees feel supported and valued.
These check-ins provide an opportunity to discuss progress on individual goals and projects, address any challenges, provide feedback and recognition, and measure satisfaction and engagement levels.
Traditional check-ins may feel boring, overwhelming, or too official for many people
For employer & employee check-ins you can try the "3-2-1 Doc" format: Three wins since last meeting, two current blockers, one area where they need your opinion, all filled out 3 hours before the meeting.
The manager must select one item from each category to screen-share and deep dive into for exactly 5 minutes, with a visible timer. This structure eliminates vague check-ins and ensures both technical and personal growth discussions happen naturally.
Also, try monthly "Pressure-Free Previews", 15-minute casual calls where manager and employee review the next month's calendar together, spotting potential burnout points or deadline clusters before they hit.
Learn how to automate employee onboarding.
For teams you can organize skill sharing 1:1 or "micro-cohorts” (matching 3–4 people who never work together for specific skill-sharing sessions).
For example, pairing a senior engineer with a marketing writer and a sales rep to teach each other their most valuable daily productivity hacks. These 30-minute sessions will have great attendance rates because people love being the expert and learning practical skills from other departments.
How to engage international employees?
Engaging international remote teams can be a challenge on its own due to language and cultural barriers. Here are some tips to improve the engagement rate:
- Adopt "Local Time Respect Zones". It works by marking team members' local holidays and important cultural dates in a shared calendar, and then actively respecting these times when it comes to meetings or deadlines.
- If you have teams who struggle with English use "Visual-First Updates" with the "4x4 Rule". Every presentation must follow four strict guidelines: a maximum of 4 bullet points per slide, 4 words per bullet, abundant visual aids, and all key numbers displayed as both figures and graphs.
- Automated real time translations: A CEO’s company-wide message can be instantly translated into multiple languages, with an AI-generated avatar that perfectly lip-syncs the message, making every employee feel directly spoken to in their native language.
Check out AKOOL’s video translation feature.
- Localized training & onboarding: Employees across different regions can receive personalized training videos, where an AI avatar presents instructions in their preferred language, eliminating the need for costly reshoots or subtitles.
Here is how you can make repetitive processes, such as “employee training”, fun:
The Best Tools for Remote Employee Engagement
1. AKOOL
Tools like Faceswap and Streaming Avatar can make remote team events more engaging, inclusive, and interactive.
During a company-wide town hall, an AI-powered avatar of the CEO can deliver a speech in multiple languages with realistic lip-syncing, ensuring every employee feels directly addressed.
In team-building activities, virtual nights or themed meetups, employees can join as expressive avatars, to make everything less official and more relaxed.
For training sessions and workshops, avatars can be used as digital trainers, adapting to different learning styles and languages while maintaining an engaging presence.
Learn how to create AI training videos in a few steps.
Virtual awards ceremonies can also be improved with faceswap technology to create personalized shoutouts from leadership, making remote employees feel recognized and valued.
2. Matter
Source: https://matterapp.com/
If you’d like to create customizable online rewards and personalized employee recognitions, MatterApp is a user-friendly platform that is perfect for your needs.
By integrating this app you can celebrate achievements, work anniversaries, birthdays, and international holidays in an automated but fun way.
3. CultureMonkey
Source: https://www.culturemonkey.io/
CultureMonkey is a survey tool that assists with feedback gathering and analyzes employee KPIs. You can use it to create engaging surveys in a few steps, collect answers and support your decisions with data.
With omnichannel and multilingual options, no international worker will be left behind.
4. Captello
Source: https://www.captello.com/
Captello is a great gamification tool for marketing and online events. If you’d like to make your online team events more interactive, this tool has over 60 interactive games and leaderboards, supports multiple game play, and creates waypoints and treasure hunts.
It is flexible, easily integrates with any platform, and highly customizable according to your company and team needs.
