One of the most common, and fastest growing, ways for people to do business around the world is through the exchange of services. Hiring experts such as international IT professionals, database developers, marketing and PR agencies, designers, administrative assistants, and financial and accounting services for both short-term and long-term engagements is becoming commonplace for businesses everywhere. Some of these partnerships are very complex and deeply integrated into your business and others are not.
Effectively working with and managing these relationships can present unique challenges. This article will provide tips on effectively working with long-term business partners abroad and making those relationships more effective, reducing miscommunications, and increasing the positive outcome and satisfaction of your partnerships.
Hiring For Cultural Fit:
While it is advantageous to have a diverse team that can provide different perspectives, it is important to hire people who fit within your company culture. Think about your company values, ethics, and expectations. Does your company place an importance on directness or low-conflict harmony? Is there a hierarchy to maintain or are you a flat organization where people at every level can communicate with each other? Do you value corroboration, independence, group consensus, or a single decision maker?
As a leader, you’ll want to learn how your partners approach feedback, handle disagreements, communicate and deal with mistakes, handle praise and critiques, and value the strict meeting of deadlines. It is also important to understand how remote team members learn and share personal information, and what everyone’s expectations are for holidays and time away from work. Having these conversations with both your in-house and remote teams and agreeing on how to handle each situation can help set the stage for success.
Hiring For Skills:
Before you hire an expert to provide services to support your team and business remotely, it’s helpful to do your homework. We suggest you test the expertise of prospective partners in advance by giving them a small project to complete. Get extensive references for projects similar in complexity to yours. If you can negotiate a trial period before a full-time agreement kicks in, that may also be beneficial. To remove any uncertainty in the event of disagreements, it’s helpful if the remote company you’re working with also has a business entity in your home country so you’re both operating under the same set of laws.
Communication Matters:
Generally, the make it or break it aspect of working remote is communication. Speak to everyone you’ll be working with to confirm they all have strong language and communication skills before you make a hire. Your primary contact at the partner company and your in-house team leader both need to be strong and organized communicators.
Strong Communication: Other tips for good communication include setting the strategy together and having clearly articulated weekly, monthly, and quarterly team project goals, with both long term and short term objectives identified. Ideally, each person on the team will have clear deliverables and deadlines. It is also very helpful to have all team members work off the same files.
Frequent Communication: It is important to remember that frequent communication is vital to the success of a team. This is why many virtual teams have daily or weekly team meetings or standups. These meeting are meant to be short check-ins where team members can report the status of their work and help each other with any roadblocks that come up. We suggest you have at least a couple of hours of daytime overlap for live conversations.
Develop Processes:
Along with creating clearly articulated projects and goals, have thoughtfully developed processes in place. This includes good project management software and consistent use of the software so everyone is included. Using team communication and chat software like Slack is also helpful. It’s easy to miss things on office chat channels, so have a process for using email, project management, and office communication software appropriately.
Relationship Building:
Some of the ways to enhance relationships include daily or weekly meetings and visiting your remote partners in person if possible. Other tips to facilitate the building of stronger work relationships include the sharing of information such as new technology articles, new ideas for the team, and building a common foundation of non-culturally sensitive interests such as sports, travel, and food to build common interests.
We hope these tips are helpful to you in making your remote partnerships more effective, reducing miscommunications, and increasing the satisfaction and positive outcomes of your global relationships.
Related Content and Articles You Might Like:
Podcast: Employee Wonderlust – Can My Team Work Remote Around The World?
Globig Marketplace: With Globig’s matching service, we will match you to the best vetted service providers around the world. It’s free! Or, you can search the Globig Marketplace by country and service category.
Top Reasons To Create A Global Mobility Program For Your Company
