Set clear goals, communicate in real-time, and other advice for keeping far-flung teams on the same page.
Maintaining a healthy, productive, and fast-moving team that’s located all over the globe can be a real challenge. In my company, much of our work spans multiple offices, with nine different time zones on three continents.I’ve learned first-hand that to successfully manage a distributed workforce, it’s less about managing offices and much more about managing people, their priorities, and the work they do. Taking the time to have a personal bond helps foster a better working relationship both in good times and bad.Studies have shown that inefficiency and outdated workflow are costing companies money. Lots of money. In fact, McKinsey Global Institute estimates consumer goods and professional services companies alone stand to gain as much as $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in annual value if they just figure out how to better collaborate. Even if a small fraction of that is truly accurate or achievable — that’s a lot of dough!Here are tips that I’ve found to be helpful when managing a global team:Set common goals for the team: there should never be any question regarding shared team strategies and goals — make them obvious and HIGHLY visible
It sounds like a no-brainer, but the majority of the companies I have consulted for or worked at don’t do this well, or at all. When you have a remote team it becomes that much more important to make sure everyone on the team has a clear vision of the goals and alignment. If everyone is working toward the same set of strategic goals, it makes it much easier to manage progress and recognize when things are headed off track.
Define and track work in one place
One of the biggest deficiencies I see is the lack of a “system of record.” Too many people attempt to track work in their email (which contributes to inbox overload), in a notebook, or worst, in their heads. None of these tools are collaborative and actually create more work and require more frequent communication around “updates”, which are non-productive time wasters. Creating a simple workspace for a team where tasks are visualized and trackable is key, so that employees can easily stay on track with due dates and deliverables. At many of the high-growth, international companies where i have been a leader (managing teams between Tel Aviv, Barcelona and the United States), we simply could not manage the quality of work and steadily deliver at the high velocity we do without a simple workspace where we can track, manage, and share our efforts among team members.
Accountability and alignment are at their peak when everyone at the organization can track individual goals and progress. Don’t limit access to this data, make it available to all, 24x7
Hold face-to-face meetings
Having a distributed team makes it more difficult to meet in person or as a team on a regular basis. My solution is to hold a regular video conference. Being able to see everyone on video is key because phone calls make it too easy for participants to disengage with any number of distractions on email, IM, and push notifications on tablets and smartphones.
TIP: Watch for people who are checked-out and on their personal devices and call them out on this behavior. It’s also important to read the room to see how team members react and engage with one another.
Employees Who Are Checked Out are Passive Aggressive and Holding Back Progress and Alignment.
Ensure a live, “face-to-face team interaction”, whether in person, or by video, Track and report on progress. The work that your team does should be tracked and reviewed periodically. When this information is publicly available, the added visibility is an incredibly effective motivator to get things done on time. At my last company, I installed large monitors in every office to show the sales pipeline, individual rep performance and the customer satisfaction rating for every one of our top 25 customers. The bright light that I was using to highlight everyone’s performance was “illuminating” to say the least, and created a better culture of accountability. Nobody wants to let the team down or underperform in front of their peers. I’ve found this to be a great way to keep remote teams focused on key objectives and goals without a lot of additional business travel and intensive management.
Communicate in real-time
Let’s face it: Email stinks and we all know it. You’ll need a system for quick check-ins, responses, and team communications. Relying on email is too slow, and messages are often lost in the shuffle or swallowed by your inbox entirely. A simple, lightweight means of chatting with one another — SMS, chat, or other tools — will enable you to stay connected with remote teams on the fly (as the work is happening) and manage them anytime, anywhere.
Centralize work and communication
With the recent consumerization of IT movement, there has been an overabundance of cloud and SaaS applications as a way to solve singular problems. Each office or department seems to select their own products to use, from Office365, Dropbox, and Zoom to wikis and personal to-do lists. This has created a sprawl, where information becomes harder to find and actually causes a drop in productivity. I have found that the creation of a single team workspace, project room, or “destination” eliminates confusion, helping us connect with team members more quickly, and ensures that everyone is working off the same system and with the same information. Remote teams can be a challenge and even a business risk, but they don’t have to be. In fact, it could become your business advantage. With these tips and suggestions, I hope you can create a productive and successful environment where your global team works as efficiently at 5,000 miles apart as they would within five feet. I hope this article was worth your time and brought you some value. If it did, please share it with your network. I love helping companies improve their go-to-market, team effectiveness and execution. Please free to reach out if you’d like to discuss with me: dan@hightide-advisors.com