This tests an organisation's planning but offers an opportunity to revolutionise the way that your business runs, reducing overheads, saving time, and improving efficiency. For an employee, this, if done badly, can result in much frustration, a lack of productivity, and the desire to look elsewhere. Here is a quick guide on how you can make working with geographically segregated teams a less daunting prospect.
As a team member, it’s important to map out how your specific duties could impact, or be impacted by, other members of your international team. If you’re in communications, you may have more involvement with marketing over the accounting or HR departments, for example. Then, you should make a note of who, in this circle of impact, is not co-located with you.
The next step is to reach out to these people individually. Ideally, you want to build a rapport or relationship with them that comes as close to the one you share with the people in your office, as you need to foster not only the desire to support each other’s work, but actually care about each other’s successes and failures. All too often it’s easy to disregard people we don’t often physically see, and so maintaining a personal relationship will hopefully translate in your work as well as theirs.
In this initial email or phone call, you should introduce yourself, describe the work you’ll be doing and suggest that you link up on a more regular basis to avoid duplicating work or effort, making sure you’re on the same wavelength. This will benefit them as well, as no-one likes duplicating work.
The next step is to build a network of these individual links, fostering multi-channel collaboration and instilling this community feel among all of the relevant stakeholders across all of the relevant sites. Do this by communicating using in-work social media channels or collaboration services such as Slack. That’s all well and good for individual team members, but how can a manager really harness the opportunity for international collaboration without it costing the earth?
Think of your HR and payroll system like a photocopier. It needs to be there, and all employees need access to it at some point, but not all the time. You wouldn’t, therefore, buy each employee their own, would you? You would obviously buy one for the whole office that was of a high quality and suitable for constant use if needed.
The same can be said of your HR and payroll systems. Why do you need payroll providers and HR departments in each country when you can centralise them? Outsourcing these important services to industry experts will save you time and money while making life easier for everyone in your team, wherever they are.
We are the leading European HR and payroll specialist, offering you the chance to outsource your international HR and payroll needs to our experts, leaving it in their very capable hands. This frees you up to focus on what you’re good at: running your business.
SD Worx offers the flexible, high quality and reliable payroll and HR services your business needs to continue to grow, allowing your company to expand into new markets and areas.