Today, no matter where you are in the world, it’s not unusual to find yourself working alongside an analyst from Amsterdam, a strategist from San Francisco, or a designer from Dubai. As companies look increasingly further afield for workers, they unlock a range of benefits—from wider talent pools that make it easier to find specialized talent to the injection of new perspectives that offer insights into diverse customer bases.
While most business leaders agree that developing the right workplace model is crucial to their company’s success, only 24% feel their organization is actually ready to fully embrace a distributed workforce. The list of potential reasons for this is long. Common worries include navigating different cultures, time zones, legal requirements, and compliance hurdles.
We recently investigated how these problems manifest at each stage of the employee lifecycle—hiring, onboarding, and management. Here’s what we discovered about the challenges of managing global teams, and the solutions.
The challenges of a global workforce
There are three main areas of difficulty facing distributed organizations.
Operating on a global scale
Traditional methods of hiring global workers, such as opening legal entities, are clunky and costly. Managing compliance across the globe is no joke—navigating laws across multiple countries increases chances of misclassification penalties and other legal troubles—which is why more companies are pivoting to an employer of record (EOR) solution.
Creating a unified team
Building teams across multiple countries comes with logistical and cultural hurdles. Clear communication is much harder than it might be in person, especially with workers operating in different time zones. This means global HR teams must create robust internal communication policies and guidelines to help teams stay engaged and in-the-loop.
Leading from a distance
Global workforce management is the ultimate test of leadership qualities. Employees with different cultural backgrounds may have varying communication styles, work expectations, and even attitudes towards hierarchy. If managers aren’t sufficiently aware of and sensitive to these differences, morale-draining misunderstandings and conflict are oftentimes the result.
These are thorny, intertwined problems, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be solved. Here are some concrete solutions that you can use to support your own workforce.
Operate on a global scale
Operating on a global scale is not purely a problem. Indeed, it’s one of the main draws of building a global workforce in the first place. A distributed team can cater to a global client base, with sales and customer service staff online to close deals at all hours and offer 24/7 support.
The challenge is that operating round the clock introduces significant potential for silos between regions. As a survey revealed, working across different time zones ranks among the top five challenges of remote work.
Helping managers maintain seamless collaboration and customer engagement despite time zone differences means setting clear expectations around communication. For instance, businesses should embrace forms of communication that don’t require individuals to be simultaneously present, such as pre-recorded videos or shared kick-off documents.
And if you’re a global organization, you should act like it. Recognize the time zone burden and rotate meeting times, rather than defaulting to the time zone of a manager or a large office.
Create a unified team
Nailing communication isn’t just good for operations—it’s at the core of any effective team. How can an organization function if its people don’t know what everyone else is doing? Little wonder that a study from McKinsey found that companies with effective internal communication can boost productivity by as much as 25%.
But good communication is especially key in distributed environments, requiring extra effort on the part of everyone. Among distributed teams, communication has to be intentional—whether it’s via email, a video call, or a chat message.
Crucially, a good communicator knows not only when to communicate, but how to limit non-essential noise. That means limiting participants in a meeting to only those who truly need to be there, or finding the right medium to communicate a specific point—a video, for instance.
Lead from a distance
Leadership looks different in a global company, and those with experience working in a culture different from their own have a clear advantage. Such people will naturally have gained the ability to navigate cultural differences and demonstrate self-awareness regarding their own biases. One study found that 89% of people who worked abroad said it improved their ability to work well with people from other countries and cultures.
This doesn’t mean that it can’t be taught, however. It’s a skill that anyone can learn with the right framework of encouraging self-awareness and modeling the behaviors that make global teams a success.
For instance, small demonstrations of leadership can mean a lot to workers, showing that managers care about them as people, not just commodities. It’s worth brushing up on headlines for the location of the person that you’re about to talk to and understanding what might be happening around them.
From challenge to advantage
While there are difficulties to operating a distributed team, all can be turned into positives. By prioritizing communication, cultural understanding, and self-awareness, you can unlock the full power of a global workforce.
Sagar Khatri is cofounder and CEO of Multiplier.
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