It’s fascinating how much the world of employment has changed over the last 30 years. We’ve seen an incredible increase in the way companies hire and manage workers across borders. Being able to work remotely has undoubtedly been a crucial factor in this.
Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the number of people working from home in Q1 2024 was over 34 million. This was an additional 5 million people compared to the previous year. Essentially, remote work is still growing and isn’t just a pandemic fad.
Sure, people will tell you that ‘telecommuting’ was a thing even in the 1970s, but let’s be real. The kind of work that gets done now by remote employees was unimaginable even 30 years ago. Unsurprisingly, the new work style opens up a number of complications for management. Today, let’s find out what kind of skills managers need to equip themselves with to stay effective.
1 Asynchronous Communication
One of the biggest challenges that managers of cross-border, remote teams deal with is communication. If your experience has been limited to in-person office management, it’s a whole different ball game with a cross-border team.
As Remote, a global HR and payroll platform, points out, the key lies in asynchronous communication. You will frustrate and exhaust yourself and your team in a few days if you insist on instant, real-time communication.
You will want to use all the tools at your disposal to ensure that async communication goes smoothly and with minimal stress. Most importantly, the last thing you want to be doing in a remote context is micromanaging.
According to research by Eurofound, micromanagement and bullying share the same element of an imbalance of power. Their findings revealed that even when micromanagement doesn’t escalate to bullying, it is still detrimental to employees and the organization in a remote work context.
2. Logistical Expertise
With remote worker management, there end up being multiple layers across multiple time zones to factor in. If work is being managed across multiple teams in different countries, you will need to oversee its smooth execution. This is already tricky in traditional office settings and becomes more challenging in a remote setting.
You also cannot neglect the interactions with the people you report to. Not only do you manage the remote team, but you also have to manage the expectations of those above you. Oftentimes, they won’t have the patience to understand the ground reality of the remote work environment.
They’ll expect reports according to their schedule. If it pertains to tasks that are being handled across the globe, you might not get an update on it for another eight hours. You’ll need to prepare for such situations well in advance. Likewise, there are also aspects like wages and finances, which can be a handful to deal with. For some reason, many businesses forget that payroll solutions are a thing.
As Remote explains, these services automate the entire process into one system. This makes sense if the company is lean in the HR and finance departments. Without such services, the burden will likely fall on your shoulders and require you to be meticulous. Even minor errors can end up becoming long, drawn-out affairs. The last thing you want is to have employees take a day off to visit their banks and sort out transactional issues.
3. Cultural Sensitivity
With traditional management, employees are more or less on the same wavelength. However, when you’re managing employees from different countries and cultures, this is no longer the case.
While employees should be striving to match the host culture of the company, it still helps to be culturally sensitive. For instance, 33% of Americans who take time off feel guilty about it compared to just 18% of Europeans. Likewise, 60% of Americans have never taken vacations longer than two weeks.
These are factors that will come up either in spoken or unspoken expectations and cause friction. This is why it helps to recognize that not every country follows the strict corporate culture that America is notorious for. Ironically, recognizing and respecting differing approaches to work-life balance ends up doing more to improve productivity than anything else.
At the end of the day, managing a remote team is not exactly the easiest job. While we’ve looked at three skills in this article, there are many more that we haven’t touched on. Most remote managers find themselves preoccupied with work even after hours.
There’s simply so much to factor in that unless you’re super organized, the work can be overwhelming. Thus, you really have to ensure you’re using every tool and service at your disposal.
