It is trite to say that we work in a global economy, but over the past decade more companies have begun to hire workers from different regions of the world and have them work in teams that are separated by large distances. Through video conferencing and messaging platforms, it is easy to share information among remote teams, but there are still significant challenges in enabling these teams to work well together.
Several interconnected factors make managing global remote teams complicated. It is hard for them to meet face-to-face, because of the distances people have to travel. There are only a limited number of hours that team members are working in common, which can make meetings and check-ins difficult. And there may be language and cultural barriers that affect the way team members interact.
Here are three key lessons to keep in mind when managing team members based around the world.
Creating in-person opportunities
Remote work is tough. When the team is geographically separated, it becomes particularly difficult. The team may silo along geographic lines, because the people who work similar hours will spend more time with each other, and because the people who live in similar time zones may also have similar cultural backgrounds.
To create a more cohesive team experience, your organization should invest in regular opportunities for teams to meet in person. Ideally, these face-to-face meetings should focus on particular projects, so that the time spent traveling feels like a good investment. But there should also be a day set aside for strategic engagement and developing team cohesion. It is also useful to add some social events so that people can get to know each other as humans in addition to working as colleagues.
There is a lot of evidence that we treat people who are far from us in space, time, or social stratum more abstractly than people close to us. An implication of this research is that colleagues who are physically far away become caricatures rather than fully three-dimensional people. These visits may be expensive, but they pay back the investment in improved cohesion and coordination.
Managing work schedules
When you have teams spread between continents, there are often significant time differences in people’s work days. That creates interesting challenges. For one, tasks that require input from people across continents may be slowed down, because the individuals who need to contribute may be off work or asleep when others are at work.
There is a temptation in these situations for people to put in additional hours checking emails and instant messages to see whether their input is required on projects that are going on while they are not on the clock. That work schedule can lead to frustration and burnout, because it may feel like there is no downtime.
Leaders of distributed teams must set expectations about when people should work and about overlapping schedules. If a team member is expected to work outside normal business hours, that should be specified clearly in their job description and they should be given a reasonable set of work hours to ensure that they are able to sustain their effort over time.
In addition, project timelines should be developed to ensure that there is enough time for collaboration despite differences in when people are on the clock. Responsibilities should also be scheduled so that work can be passed from one team to another to take advantage of their full workdays.
Addressing language and cultural differences
When teams are separated by geography, they are also frequently separated by language and culture. This means that some team members are communicating most frequently with colleagues in other regions using something other than their native language. In addition, cultural differences may play into these interactions.
When communicating in a second language, people may miss subtleties that can affect their ability to work. In their book Words Matter, Elizabeth Keating and Sirkka Jarvenpaa give some nice examples of problems caused by language differences in distributed offices. People often communicate indirectly and nonliterally in their native language in ways that may pass over the heads of nonnative speakers. An American who says, “Can you take care of that?” really means “Please take care of that.” But a nonnative speaker may interpret the statement not as a request, but rather a desire for something to be done if there is time.
Because we tend to remember what we meant to say or what we heard rather than the specific words that were used, frustration can arise later when one person thinks they communicated clearly what needed to be done, while the other remembers only a suggestion. As a result, managers in distributed teams must communicate more literally and clearly than they would with people who share their language and culture.
Cultural differences can affect interactions, as well. One such difference is between more hierarchical and more flat cultures. In a hierarchical culture, there is little room for lower-status people to question or argue with people higher in status.
In flat cultures, people can (and sometimes are expected to) argue with higher-status individuals. The United States is a flat culture. If global team members come from a more hierarchical culture, they may not give their opinions on management’s course of action when they disagree with it, even though their input is desired. Leaders from a flat culture will interpret the lack of comment as agreement, and that can lead to tensions down the line.
Worse, critical input to projects may not be given. So, in addition to speaking clearly and literally, leaders have to create processes to provide clear statements of what is required that address cultural differences in workplace expectations.
