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Half The World Away: How To Manage A Growing, Global Team

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In the not-too-distant past, putting together a high-performing team was, in terms of logistics, pretty simple.

All you had to do was find the best candidates, hire them, and put them to work together in relative proximity. But the technological revolution of the late 20th to early 21st Century changed all that. Probably forever.

In came email, project management software and video conference tools like Skype. Out went the need to have people working anywhere near each other—not even in the same hemisphere. A team leader could be in Toronto managing workers in cities as disparate as Lima, La Paz and Lagos. That’s three different continents, four different time zones, and an almost unknowable number of cultural differences.

While that sounds like a nightmare to organize, a 2018 meta-study published in the International Journal of Human Resources found that “work in global teams has become the modus operandi in multinational organizations.”

So what’s the appeal? Are there any major challenges? And how do you motivate and get the best from workers who never set foot in the same room together? Let’s delve a little deeper and see.

The international neighborhood

We operate in a global economy, so any business that chooses economic isolationism over enterprise closes its doors to new markets, trade and talent. With interconnectivity bringing the wider world closer to us than ever before, why would any employer, executive or entrepreneur settle for the best local candidate for a role when they could appoint the best candidate in the world?

After all, when you bring such levels of knowledge, skill and diversity into a business, you encourage greater efficiencies and drive innovation. But it’s not just about what a business gets out of it—global teams are appealing to employees, too.

A 2019 Global Employee Survey by professional employer organization, Globalization Partners, revealed that an astonishing 72% of people said they like to be part of a global team. So, if you have staff dotted around the world showing similarly high levels of engagement, managing them should be easy, right?

Challenges to overcome

It’s hard enough to get some in-house employees to buy into a business’s ethos and objectives, so think how much harder it can be for someone who works in solitude 5,543 miles away. And with such distances, collaboration isn’t as simple as sitting around a table to talk through a problem or plan out a strategy.

Say you have staff based in the west of the Americas, central Europe and Africa who work a standard 9 to 5. You have a narrow window of about two to three hours max where everyone can get on a conference call together.

Instead, you might collaborate over email. But that medium sacrifices the tone, intonation, nuance and body language of working together in person. Think about it: how many times have you read an email that came across as harsher than it was originally meant?

Another issue for remote workers is that they may feel somewhat forgotten about and isolated, which could lead to disengagement and, before you know it, they’ve moved on.

For every challenge described here, there’s one constant: communication. And it’s your most important tool for managing a global team.

Communication matters

As hard as it might be to accommodate people working in such wildly varied time zones, successful execs still find a way to make themselves available.

Create global organizational structures that are consistent with the way you work in-house. Hire strong supervising managers who buy into your company culture to cover specific regions or teams. You could even post your top people on secondment to newer markets where they can install what they already know works well back at HQ.

Standardize the way everyone communicates—wherever they are and whatever their level—making sure everyone has a consistent tone and approach. Wherever possible, use the more human experience of video conferencing and conference calls instead of emails, and try to make one-on-one time with remote workers to show them they’re valued. And you can always go one better.

If possible, bring the entire global team together for a conference or some kind of event, perhaps once or twice a year. Coming together helps boost company buy-in, builds trust, and can make it easier for remote workers to make the move in-house or vice versa.

What’s next for global teams?

Today is just the dawn of the global team, and there are growing pains to get through. Change is inevitable—and for the better—and technological advances will be at the center of that.

Where there are communication challenges today, new technologies will certainly arrive to make them a thing of the past. It’s what the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil coined "the Law of Accelerating Returns:" when technology reaches a barrier, a new one comes to help us break through it.

It’s likely that management covering long distances will one day lose its impersonal and remote nature, and the world will feel closer and more personal than ever. So when those changes do arrive, the most successful will be the ones who readily embrace them.