What are some tips and tricks to keep a remote workforce engaged?

There are a couple of techniques that I’ve learned. One is, for the first 2-3 months, you need to have dedicated people who are committed to making a remote team successful on both fronts: local as well as remote. My strategy was to hire a head of operations who’s not a technical guy but takes care of all the people, finance, taxes, office, office needs, supplies, everything. This is a person who’s going to take care of all the overhead or all the distraction that is going to come when you start a new office.

When it comes to engineering, what you need is an engineering leader or manager on your team who’s going to be the liaison between the team here and in the remote office. So you need someone who’s constantly making sure that the teams are getting the requirements satisfied and they are not getting unblocked.

What I’ve seen work best is to bring a couple of senior people in on-site. So it starts creating this relationship between the local team and the remote team. When you put a face against the name, it creates a personal connection versus just talking to someone on the phone.

It takes a great deal of trust between us and our remote workers to allow them this flexibility of being a remote worker and you hope to have hired a person with integrity and a good work ethic.  Given that, I would agree with others, having some sort of regular video style meetings give you an assurance your worker is engaged.  

I would also like to say that making sure you have meetings that involve video chat etc. is very helpful too.

Many have mentioned this but video chat is a must. Without a strong collaborative environment with the onshore team, any remote resource will naturally drift away.

regular telepresense meetings. independence.