How to Build a Successful International Workforce
The complexion of the working world has changed utterly in just a few short years. With the intervention of the Covid-19 pandemic and the country-wide lockdowns, more focus than ever before was shifted to remote work. The ways of making a success of remote work were trialled and figured out, and the advantages and disadvantages were argued and heckled over in boardrooms all over the world.
Despite initial resistance in many quarters, it does look like increased remote working is here to stay in most sectors, and this brings with it the opportunity to bring in international workers, as well as those who physically live within the country you operate from. There are several reasons you may want to do this, from cost considerations to skills shortages within the UK that make it hard to find qualified people.
Running an international workforce is not without its challenges, and to make sure that it is performing at maximum efficiency, there are a few things that you will need to take into account. Some of these are relatively small considerations, and some of them are larger, and we will go into this in detail below.
Ideas to Help International Teams Succeed
Make Different Time Zones Work For You
If you have different teams that take on various aspects of a task, try to time it so that one team completes their portion when the other team from elsewhere in the world comes online. This makes the most efficient use of the time for each group and means that the task is still being advanced when the first team takes their well-deserved downtime.
Asynchronous working is an excellent time-saver for businesses due to the ability to effectively have multiple teams who start and end around the clock in different locations worldwide. It is something that isn’t appreciated yet by too many businesses outside of financial institutions and stock trading centres but it could be a big trend in years to come for UK-based businesses.
Use Online Collaboration Spaces
One way to make a cohesive team is to have them all use the same online collaboration spaces. Whichever you choose, whether it is Asana, Hubspot, Monday.com, or some other workspace, seeing what other people are doing takes away the feeling that they are working in a void. It makes the whole work experience make sense, to be able to see ever changing lists and documents that other people are working on and gives you a better sense of the whole.
Being able to place your contribution into the context of a larger effort can really help many remote workers to understand that they are part of something and that there is a purpose behind the work that they are doing.
Encourage Communication Between Your Teams
Many organisations do this by setting up a company-wide channel on Slack, so that people can ask questions and share knowledge about aspects of their work. If you have people in different locations working on aspects of the same project, it can be useful to be able to contact the others who have had a hand in it to ask them directly what they meant to happen, in a certain part of it.
It is a way to find collaborative solutions and help everyone to work together better, even when they are actually far away in terms of physical distance. Just because they are located far apart, it doesn’t need to mean that their ideas are miles away from each other. It is still possible for good collaboration to take place when people are working from different locations.
Appoint Local Team Leaders
If you have teams based around the globe, it doesn’t make sense for all of the team leaders and management to be located in the “home” country. Take on some people in leadership roles in some of your remote locations, devolve the responsibility to them to manage their own teams, collaborate with them on the hiring and firing of staff.
This will allow the remote teams to be managed by people who are also remote so are aware of the challenges that they face and how best to overcome them. Being able to take charge of a remote team can be a real boost for someone who perhaps didn’t have all that much management experience. This allows them to develop and upskill and perhaps be even more of an asset to the company in the future as a result.
At the very least, they will advocate for the employees in the same position as them and will figure out how to ensure that they are getting the best productivity and results from their team and feeding them back into the system. Being able to increase the amount of productivity that each worker is capable of is a huge advantage to remote work.
Monitor and Analyse Results
It is human nature that if people think that they can get away with something then they are far more likely to try it. One of the best ways to ensure that remote teams don’t drop the ball in terms of productivity is to make sure that you are monitoring and analysing results and that everyone knows how you are measuring them. This means that there is no excuse when someone or even a team is coming up short when it comes to results.
If one team isn’t managing to get the results you had hoped for, discuss it with their team leader first, in case there are any logical reasons such as slow internet or a crash by the collaborative software company that lasted for a few weeks in their country. If there has been nothing like this though, the onus should be on the team leader for that country to talk to their team and let them know that the poor performance has been noted. Most remote workers value remote work above most things, so explaining that the work may be taken back in-house if there isn’t improvement should be enough to see an uptick in productivity.
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