International Team Management
As companies continue to grow and expand their global workforce, managing and working with people from around the world is becoming the new reality. While international growth and team diversity may pose unique challenges, such as time-zone differences, cultural differences and communication differences, working in multicultural teams can also offer many rewards and benefits.
To ensure things run smoothly, you need to have a clearly defined structure in place. This includes establishing your brand’s goals and objectives, defining expectations and having a backup plan if there is a natural or political disaster.
From Inlea we want to give you 5 ways to successfully manage international teams:
1. Create and sustain trust
As an overall framework you’ll need to make sure that the group and the people or organisations within which an international team operates always has a baseline of trust. Without it everything will come to a standstill sooner or later. Trust doesn’t come easily. You’ll have to continuously cultivate it. It’s amazing how easily it slips away.
2. Communicate frequently and regularly.
Frequent communication is important for all teams. It’s especially important for international and global teams. Regularly scheduled meetings can be an important time for team members to exchange information and knowledge, to learn from one another’s experiences and to keep people current on organizational and team developments and updates.
3. Choose (video) calls over chatting and emails.
With Skype and email being available at everyone’s fingertips, it is tempting to chat and send a quick email whenever there is something to discuss. This can easily lead to misunderstandings. With virtual teams, video calls or at least regular calls are more than a way to avoid misunderstandings. They connect the team members on a more personal level.
4. Make room in your budget for international travel.
Face-to-face meetings are an essential component of building trust and good working relationships for all teams. This is even more important for global teams.
5. Use project management tools.
Project management tools can be ideal to keep track of deadlines. They also send alerts and reminders for deadlines and give you a quick daily, weekly or monthly overview of what needs to be done, by who, and when. Things like Google Docs can still be a great addition and the same is valid for time tracking applications.
Managing global teams comes with its own set of unique challenges, but finding ways to connect across borders and leveraging a diverse skill set can strengthen team cohesion, employee engagement and boost workforce productivity.
