It’s official: the switch to WFH is permanent. With huge corporate organisations like EY announcing that their staff will work from home at least two days a week post-lockdown, there’s no going back now. It only makes sense that organisations change the way they reach their employees too. We expect to see more businesses investing in captivating digital employee experiences (like digital destinations) for their hybrid-working teams.
What’s the split between office and WFH?
We asked our network how often they’re back in the office. Nearly 80% said that they now go to the office 1-2 times a week.
Modern professionals have embraced the culture change and are more productive as a result. But remote working can come at the cost of employee engagement.
The trouble with engaging remote workers
Remote engagement is hard. Any manager can tell you that. HubSpot learned that 27% of remote workers have encountered a work-related problem because they weren’t in the same place as their team.
On the other side of the screen, remote working has been a challenge for those feeling isolated. WFH-ers report lower levels of satisfaction in their job and more “anxiety, depression and stress, and concerns about social isolation”, particularly over the lockdown period.

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How to get remote employees engaged with your content
It’s vital to find engaging ways to communicate with hybrid WFH/office-based teams. We think digital destinations are a great tool to help you close the loop. In this article, here are a few ideas that use digital destinations to help take remote employee engagement to the next level.
1. Gamify the mandatory gumph
Setting compulsory reading around dense topic areas (such as regulatory and compliance training) can be a tough task. Ensuring it’s understood remotely can be even tougher.
Digital desktop destinations can remove the “dull” from processes and turn passive scroll-to-the-bottom-and-hammer-the-OK-button situations into active participation with techniques borrowed from games and behavioural economics.
Imagine a digital escape room: employees can complete their learning through piecing information together from clickable information strategically placed around a virtual space. They can test their knowledge in a quiz for rewards, acclaim, and something a little different to anything they’ve tried before.
Incorporating this into onboarding can have a considerable positive effect on employees. 58% of employee onboarding focuses on processes and paperwork. When organisations strengthen their onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and employee productivity by over 70%.
2. Make employee pulse surveys not feel like surveys
The average employee pulse survey is 12 questions long, but what happens when you need deeper insights? Surveys over 30 questions suffer from lower-quality answers and high abandonment rates.
EY designed a 100-question employee survey but disguised it in the form of three quizzes inside a 360° digital destination. Each quiz aimed to find out how employees felt about a different aspect of EY’s new strategic direction.
Turning surveys into quizzes worked well: out of over 7,000 employees, the EY 360° quiz game achieved an 84% response rate.
3. Transport remote and office employees to the same place
For athletes, consistency is key to peak performance. When consistency is disrupted, quality suffers.
It’s not as easy to deliver the same learning experience across hybrid office/remote-working teams. However, digital destinations can ensure that office-based employees and WFH-ers get the same experience.
Take Fidelity International’s Virtual Pension Centre: a digital benefits fair roadshow that helped clients understand their pensions better. Wherever in the world they are, employees can explore and learn as they would in any traditional event space or meeting room. Teams can chat with live agents in real-time to ask questions on what they’ve learned.
Similarly, IHG used a digital destination to train 15,000 General Managers across the world in several languages. Their digital destination delivers a consistent training experience at scale.
In conclusion
Digital desktop destinations are exciting, proven ways to get remote employees engaged without alienating office-based folk either. Check out our employee engagement resources for inspiration on building your own digital employee destination.