6 Tips for Managing Successful Global Teams

We now have the capacity to communicate directly with a wide range of businesses and teams from all over the world. Throughout history, several relatively straightforward management principles have proven to be effective in nearly every situation.

In a nutshell, here's how to manage a global team:

Early in the project's life cycle, establish explicit communication parameters.

These don't have to be strict guidelines; just attempt to figure out what form of communication is appropriate at different periods of the day, week, month, and year.

If you're working on an open-source project, this may require deciding when it's preferable to contact the project's maintainer rather than use chat forums. If you're working on a larger corporate project, you may need to decide whether it's okay to convene unplanned meetings rather than asking everyone to arrange time in advance.

While this does not completely eliminate the need for email communication, it does allow everyone on the team to better plan their schedules so that important topics are discussed at the appropriate time instead of having different teams waste hours waiting for each other during critical project phases.

As much as feasible, communicate asynchronously.

While email may not be the greatest choice for every sort of communication, it has its place and, if at all possible, should be used less than chat rooms or face-to-face interactions.

It's a decent rule of thumb to send an email if you've previously sent a note or a meeting invitation. This eliminates distractions for your team and allows information to flow through management channels at its own pace.

Make a method that everyone can use to collect feedback and comments from your team.

This should ideally be documented, but even if it isn't, attempt to schedule a regular meeting time when people may communicate their concerns and suggestions to you (and other managers on the team).

If you have the capability, using anonymous surveys to gather honest feedback from everyone can assist in guaranteeing that you're making decisions based on data from all sources, rather than just listening to the loudest voices in the room.

As far as feasible, maintain uniformity in expectations across teams and geographical borders (within reason).

This removes ambiguity for your teams and employees, allowing them to easily manage their workloads and tie everything together at the end of the project.

If two different programmers on two separate continents working on the same task have somewhat different ideas about what has to be done and when, the result will be confusion and irritation rather than efficiency and productivity.

Make reasonable expectations.

You will be disappointed if you expect too much or too little from your teammates. Before being requested to take on new responsibilities or projects, they must first determine how many hours per day/week they should work and what types of duties they should perform.

If, on the other hand, you begin to expect everyone to work 80+ hours per week because you believe it is "the norm" in the sector, you will most likely burn out your personnel and diminish overall productivity.

Before they start working for the company, make sure that new hires are well-prepared

This necessitates conducting in-depth interviews with them and allowing enough time for existing employees' schedules and tasks. If an employee is employed without a clear understanding of what they will be working on or when they will be expected to master important aspects of the business, everyone will be confused and frustrated.

Effective managers use a range of tactics to keep difficulties like employee turnover, schedule conflicts, and poor communication to a minimum within their global teams and departments. Adopt them into your global teams as soon as possible.