Tangerine's PoV

A year and a half ago I came back from my maternity leave and I was given a brand new project: to create and manage a new team in Chile in order to give support to our customers: answer the calls from Spain, e-mails, and integrate with our team from here.

It’s been one year and a half working 19 hours a day in order to make this work, doing my best to have time for my son, my family, my studies and for myself also, but now it finally works, and it works really good. I had a lot of positive and negative experiences during the process and I learned a lot from this project. It’s not easy to work with persons from another country, with different culture and different habits, it’s hard for us and hard for them. Here are some tips to make it easier to create and manage a team from a quite important distance.

1. Get familiar with the local labor legislation

You need to know the rights of the employees, the benefits you can offer to them (courses, etc), the sick leaves, the holidays, etc. You have to get full understanding of everything that regulates the rights and responsabilities of the employees in order not to create an environment of confusion and chaos.

2. Know the people and their culture

In most of the cases you have to travel to the country in order to interview at least one person that will bring the other members of the team, to rent a place where the office will be located, etc. Make the most of this trip in order to know the places and the culture of the country, because this way you will have more things in common with the team. Let them know your country also and talk from time to time about cultural differencies and similarities. It helps to bring people together and distroy virtual frontiers.

3. Get personal and keep personal

In order to overcome the difficulties caused by the distance you have to get closer at a personal level: try to know better the people, get closer to them when they need it, when they have a problem, give them a call when they are sick, call to congratulate them on their birthday, etc. You have to be very close and help them when they might need it, in order to keep a good contact and make them feel as part of the organization.

4. Integrate them into the whole

You have to help them know the members of the other teams although they don’t need to interact with them in their day-to-day activities. It is important for them to know the organization in which they work, otherwise they will not understand the mission and values of the company and they will not take it seriosly. In case it is possible invite one of them to visit the HQ periodically, so that they get a better idea of the company.

5. Plan the visits

It is important to have a plan of periodical visits to the new office in order to understand the needs and know the environment in which they work and make sure it is comfortable. These visits must be organized and planned in advance in order to let everybody get prepared for the visit. In order to get the most of it, everything should be prepared in advance; if the visit is a surprise and if it is a short visit (like most of them), people will get very nervous during the first days and you will not be able to understand the real situation.

6. Communicate and reward

Working from a distance is difficult because it is hard to get feedback, this is why it is so important for you to organize regular meetings with the team and also individual meetings in order to communicate the news, know the needs of the team and the individual needs and detect the problems that might appear. It is also important to reward the efforts that are made in order to improve the quality of their work, in order to motivate the staff. It is also convenient to add to the conferences local members in order to improve their integration into the whole.

7. Don’t take anything for granted

This is a rule which is present in all aspects of our life, but in this situation it has a special role. At the distance, when a team works without a local leader it is easy to have issues between the different employees because of different personalities, etc. In most of the cases there will be a few persons that will talk to you about internal problems, and others that won’t. You have to keep in mind that there are two ways to manage this: ignore it and let them solve it internally or get involved. If you want to get involved, first of all you have to give equal credit to every employee and listen to all of them in the same way. In the regular visits you should do some extra-work activities in order to better know the persons and find the way to better communicate with each of them.

Conclusions

In order to better manage a team from a distance you have to really do your best to know every member of the team, know the culture of their country and share with them the culture of your country. You have to make them feel integrated into the company, and you also have to visit the office regularly in order to spend time with the employees and get closer to them. You have to have lots of patience in the beginning but when things start to work fine and you get used to the new routine you will be thankful for being able to know the people and their culture, and it will be a pleasure to work together with them and achieve any objective that you wish together with you new and strong team.