The best ways to structure a remote team

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Since the war in Ukraine started the world has faced a prolonged period of economic uncertainty. Many thought leaders argued that this turmoil would reverse the hybrid and remote working models that became mainstream during the pandemic. The logic being that senior business leaders were generally unconvinced that remote workers were as engaged and productive as their in office counterparts. Similarly, pressure to protect their positions would compel more people to return to the office to show face and directly engage with their managers. 

As it happened, there was no great remote working reversal. There are simply too many benefits for employers and employees alike. It is now pretty clear that this new way of working is here to stay. However, the speed of the transition, and the belief in some quarters that it was only temporary, means that many organizations have failed to fully optimize their remote working structures. The start of a new year provides a great opportunity to fully explore all the options available and determine what strategy will generate the greatest commercial benefit and quality of working life for your team.

Hire global, think local

One of the greatest benefits of a hybrid or fully remote working model is that it enables you to recruit from an incredibly large pool of talent. A business is no longer constrained by the available expertise in its local area or even country. Thanks to the plethora of communication platforms, engagement and monitoring tools now available, any company – no matter its size – can easily manage team members across the world. This is especially important given the high demand and low availability of many technical skills in western nations. There are many countries in the subcontinent, Africa and South America that have a deep, cost-effective reserve of untapped talent.

Of course, many startups have for years have taken advantage of this dynamic by situating development or data teams in places such as eastern Europe. The key difference is that I am not talking about hiring a whole team in one country to act as a satellite office. Instead, it’s about hiring the best individuals from anywhere in the world right across your organization.

There are plenty of companies that can help to identify and, in some cases, support management of these team members on your behalf. Nevertheless, one of the most important lessons for building a global, remote workforce is to prioritize instilling your local company culture. Team members should be onboarded, engaged with, managed and treated exactly the same – no matter where they are.

Hybrid working – hybrid hiring

The pandemic didn’t just upended where people worked – it changed when and how much people work too. In times gone by, part-time workers were relatively rare, usually older employees and more often than not considered a real member of the team. Now, so many more people, of every age and experience are varying their working hours and the nature of their employment contracts. There has been a surge in freelance and self-employed – especially within the tech sector. This creates an excellent opportunity for businesses to consider a blended model for their workforce. A team can be structured between part-timers, consultants, and project-based freelancers – working in office, remotely or a mix of both.

Consider do you actually need any full-time directly employed team members? Sounds crazy, but there’s no hard and fast rule that you actually do. A blended team can be ultra-flexible, cost and time efficient to build and manage, and enable you to benefit from a much broader base of expertise. If you treat everyone equally and instil your company values and culture there is no reason why this type of team cannot have the loyalty, motivation and ethos of its traditional alternative.

Another benefit of having an open mind is that it can really help to diversify your team and give you access to a lot of high value talent for which a full-time gig is simply impractical – women with young families. It’s no secret that a major cause of the gender gap in tech is its failure to adequately accommodate this group.

More hubs less spokes

A lot of business owners I speak to that run hybrid working models tend to think about their organization in terms of a core, local – mostly full-time team – and branches of remote workers. Generally speaking, senior leadership is situated in the core and more junior members or specialist workers put the ‘hybrid’ in the business. While this has obvious advantages of enabling executives to closely collaborate and be accountable to one another – as well as giving a business its ‘home’ – there’s no real reason why this structure should also be subject to reexamination and disruption. After all, if your developers can work together across continents why can’t your senior managers?

Dispersing the top of your team has the benefit of creating multiple management focal points, across timezones from which your business can operate. As mentioned above, it also enables you to pull from a bigger pool of talent for less cost. It can be daunting for a CEO or founder to think that their right and left hand men and women are now hundreds of miles away but if you’re truly thinking about what will be a fully optimized model for your business, you need to consider every option.

Practical steps

Creating a fully optimized workforce strategy doesn’t mean throwing out everything and starting again. A safer, less disruptive approach is to create a plan with achievable, incremental steps that evolves your team into a structure and format that best suits your current and future needs. To do this, consider the following:

Audit your team’s expertise and management structure to determine potential cost-efficiencies, skill gaps, single points of failure and bottlenecks. Align this with your commercial strategy and client feedback.

Review your tech stack to identify whether you have the tools and processes that fully enable remote and hybrid working. Pay particular attention to employee onboarding, engagement, accountability and productivity.

Consult with your team – what is the optimum working model for each employee. Consider putting every option on the table – transitioning to consulting, part-time, fully remote etc..

Begin experimenting with new working practices. For example, a pilot project where administrative and other back office functions are executed by virtual workers can be a safe way to get started.

Talk to businesses that offer remote working recruitment support to get a better idea of the talent out there and how you could being hiring from different countries.

Review, analyze and optimize – keep track of the impact of your new structure as you make changes and don’t be afraid to change course if the results don’t meet your expectations. Constant monitoring can identify weak points such as an incomplete onboarding process or the need to enhance management practices.

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