Hello and welcome to the Virtual Frontier the Podcast about Virtual Teams created by Virtual Team. Disclaimer: All of the interviews are conducted virtually. I'm Daniel your host and I'm part of the team here at the Virtual Frontier. Today's topic of our Q&A session is how to manage global Virtual Teams. We are going to find out what are the benefits of working with Virtual Teams what you need to get right in the first place. So working with distributed teams over the globe will turn out beneficial for everyone, and why a command and control management structure is doomed to fail, especially in the remote environment. If you like the show subscribe on YouTube, review it on Radio Public follow us on Spotify, Stitcher, Audible, Google Podcast or any other platform use to enjoy podcasts. You can also engage with our community on this, on all the links you can find below in the description. So without further ado, let's dive into the fifth season or Q&A session at the Virtual Frontier. Enjoy the conversation.

Hello Manuel and welcome to a new session here at Virtual Frontier. Our next Q&A session. Today I want to talk a little bit with you about the topic, how to manage Virtual Teams or teams in general and get some insights from you, how is your experience all of that over the last couple of years, what you have learned and probably what we can give for our community that is listening to us? So my first question for today, why should I work with global Virtual Teams in the first place? I have difficulties to manage my onsites teams and control them there.

That's a broad question, but that's a good one. So the other question is, why do you want to limit yourself with your own office to find talent just around one hundred kilometers around your office, right? That's what happens when you just focus on local work environment. So I think the big opportunities that when you work globally and virtually and digitally and remotely, that the whole world can become your Talent Pool, that is one of the biggest opportunities. You're not just limiting yourself with a radius of one hundred kilometers around your office.

And I mean, as the environment becomes more technology driven, more complex, change happens faster at increasing speed. I think businesses and organizations in general need more flexibility. More flexibility in access to skills, more flexibility in access to work capacity, more flexibility also in their cost structure, when like there is a lockdown, revenues go down by 30 to 60 percent. You need to act somehow. So this flexibility, I think, is a huge demand of our economy.

And most businesses like this flexibility. Now, Corona has shown us all that Remote work is possible, even as most businesses believe before the lockdown, that it's not possible. Or let me reframe it. They had a story telling themselves why it doesn't work for them. They see others. They work remotely at work, but they have a story where it doesn't work for them. Now they see the story was wrong and somehow it works. And I'm sure there are many other opportunities that you could take advantage of when you experience that things you always believe don't work, they work. You just have to do it. And accessing global talent, it's I mean, talent is the number one growth driver of organizations of growth. Now, if you have your entire world being the Talent Pool. I think that is that is the biggest opportunity of Remote work at all, and if you don't take advantage of this, others will do. If you go back to your office and still believe we have to be in office because work can only be done when we are constantly in communication and all at the same place. And we need the water cooler in order to solve difficult problems like magic accidentally. I think that your business is really at risk.

Gotcha. And OK, let's assume I have taken the first step and I'm thinking about getting maybe onboarding some kind of Virtual Teams that would work with me or Virtuell Talents. What we need to take care of in the first place, when when I think about this step.

I would say the most important difference between Virtual Teams or Remote Teams Remote leadership compared to working in a local environment in an office is that you need to.... So most people would say you need to have more trust in your teams, but I find that very abstract.

What does that mean? Should I just sit silent at my desk and like, pray and hope that everyone will do his or her work, which typically won't happen if people are used to getting work done only when they have a lot of other people around them where they can constantly ask questions, interrupt and disturb other people and depend on this constant communication and the environment that brings other people around them. So I would suggest to shifting your thoughts from leading by availability to leading by results.

And what that means is it's I mean, that's definitely not an easy shift. But we all started because when we started working remotely, we experienced that when our team is not around us, we feel a lack of control. And that's exactly because you are used to do Management by walking around. You feel that you have control when people are around you and you believe that you get the results when you have control over people. Now, when they are not around you anymore than you fear that things don't work anymore because you don't have control over people.

So the first step to leading by results. Yeah, that might sound so simple, but I had I had a workshop with a big corporation two weeks ago with one hundred and twenty managers, and they had one simple exercise which was they should complete the sentence, which is the business needs my team so that and then they should complete the sentence. My team needs me so that and then they should discuss it about how if they agree from the outside perspective and it was so hard for them to complete the sentence and it got even harder, they should complete the sentence.

To measure if my results are good and if I'm on track, I measure this and that KPI's. They had no idea. They had no idea what the results of their work and the results of their teams are and how the results of individuals contribute to the results of the team and how the team contributes to the results of the business. In other words, the entire alignment was missing in the thought process. People knew they have to do some work, but they don't know why.

And this why. It doesn't mean it doesn't need to be something very abstract and world changing. If you don't know. I mean, if you don't know the purpose of the business, it's hard to find the purpose of the team. It's hard to find the purpose of an individual. But you don't need to find it. You don't need to spend workshops, hours, days, years in workshops to find your way or your purpose. The purpose of a business is simply to solve problems for clients.

So what that means is now you need to understand the problems of your clients, of course, but once you've found them, then you can align everything in your organization so that these problems get solved efficiently and effectively. And once that is clear, the entire organization should lead conversations and build a leadership system only around bringing this value to clients. And then the purpose becomes a lot more clear for people. And when the only thing that matters is results and people not managing people, I mean supporting people so they can grow and deliver the results.

Then the whole thing changes, then you don't need to control people what they do when they do it, you don't need micromanagement, you just monitor the results and support people. Then you can work without presence.

So I have noted clarity, clear roles and alignments like like some basic factors that you need to take into account. When I have those different aspects more clearly and I reach out right now or I start looking for for talent what is important while I'm looking for talent or how to look for new talents or teams maybe in general that work with me in virtual environment.

So, when we start again from the perspective of alignment, I would recommend to first create a blueprint of your team, meaning define your roles. And once you have your roles defined, start with a purpose. Why do we need this role? OK, completing the sentence. The team needs this role in order to or so that. Once you found the purpose of the team and the purpose of individuals, then defined the skills that this person needs to bring and KPI's so that the person itself can see how well they are doing.

For example, you Daniel you have the KPI's of how many downloads for the Podcast did we get per episode. And that over the month and over the year, that is one important KPI next important KPI's. How many leads did you get with this Podcast, right. And we have the same kind of KPI's across the organization for other people. So that people don't depend on managers telling them if they are doing a good job or not, but they can see it.

And then of course I expect people that they ask for help and support in case they see they stuck or another line with a progress they should have. I found that is very important, that you have this definition of what means success, what does success mean for a person working in the role? Once you have these roles defined, that becomes your team blueprint you can hire people that fit into this role. I would say offer this role to as many people as possible and see it's like marketing, right?

It's like winning clients that see a value in your offer and that's why they give you money. If you have great talent, they have so many job opportunities, give them a reason why they should work with you. And that all starts with clarity. High performer want to know when are they successful in the business. They will ask you the questions, what do you expect from me and how should that look like. They want to know how they can use their skills in the best possible way.

If you are able to answer this question, you become attractive for people that want to deliver performance. And when you see that people apply to this job and they ask you questions, you see they really want it, OK, because if you just have people that don't ask you questions but ask, OK, what do you want me to do? They are just there and do something, when you tell them what they should do, that means they depend on you.

And the more of these people you have the higher the workload will be because without you, nothing gets done. So you want to have these self drivers. And I see that when a person asks questions, that is one first step to person that really wants to take accountability for results.That's how.

We are already getting into the phase of of maybe the onboarding process, and I would like to ask a little bit more about that. How can I make sure this onboarding process that is really crucial is a great experience for the talent and also for for the company and what you might need on the on the way to get there.

Yeah, we changed a lot with that in the recent days or months. And so I would say the purpose of onboarding is to get this person productive, act fast and help the person understand the rules of the organization, help the person understand how he or she should contribute to the results of the team, with whom they work together, how they work, what what is the behavior I want from this person. One example is example behavior is Do what you say.

That is so easy. But a lot of people struggle with that. They say to one thing, do another thing, OK, when I mean do what you say. You commit to something and then you do it, and if you can't do it, you ask for support or inform somebody that you can't do it and offer an alternative. That is one very important rule to develop trust and reliability in teams. So to make this part of the onboarding, what we started to do is to create video onboarding, because it took a lot of time and availability of people like helping you other people come into the organization.

And very often it was not really effective because it was just meetings and people were talking about something, but nobody had a structured way of onboarding people. Now, if you have I mean, we all work virtual and digital right now. So we have like online courses for onboarding. These are video trainings with small tests and assessments. A person goes through this onboarding and there is a person that is the mentor of this onboarding person that he or she can always ask questions to.

But the video training provides the structure, the Roadmap, the outline, the steps the person needs to reach in order to get all the information and maybe also the competencies during the onboarding to work successfully in the organization. Now, that only works when you have the clarity which role you want, what are the results and what does this person need to know to get onboarded? Most organizations don't onboarding like, OK, you have a mentor, you shadow another person for three months.

And then you might learn the right things if this mentor does things that you should do, but typically that's just like onboarding per accident. It might work. It might not work. It might take a month. It might take three months. Yeah, that's not reliable, but having a structured onboarding with video content and a that answers questions and helps. That's from my experience, a very effective and efficient onboarding, and that provides a great experience for people that want to join the organization because they can do it when they want.

So leading by results empowers people to be free and independent. And having an onboarding that works exactly like this, where you can walk yourself along this onboarding ladder or Roadmap you can do it when you want independently from others. And you always have a person that supports you in case you need support. And then as an organization, you also see those people that simply don't want the success because they might watch the videos, but or not, but they might watch until the end, but still don't get it and they don't even ask for results. At the end of a video onboarding should always be a presentation of the person that got onboarded to the mentor so that the mentor can give feedback and double check if those skills were acquired during the onboarding and if those information became real knowledge for the onboarded person that is required to do the job well.

And these people that really pass this final test and presented well and asked on the during the onboarding they are self drivers, they really want it. And these are the kind of people I want to work with and where results with leadership is a great fit.

Now, in some cases, there are hybrid teams where you might have an onsite office team and the company thinks about to expand their global talent and work with Virtual Teams. How can I make sure as a company and then maybe also on a team level that those teams are working well together and are integrated fully in and there are no differences and you can really focus on the work that has to be done and have to have any insights or experience that?

Yeah, the biggest risk that I saw in the past is that you develop a culture, a hybrid culture, which is we and they had the biggest problem that you see, which becomes a real risk, is when you listen to conversation and it's about we and them. Because then you have two different people, two different classes of employees or team members. And you know what happens when there is a problem. It's always they from both sides and the problem won't get solved because it's just people pointing on each other and nobody cares about solving the problem.

So that is one important thing with hybrid cultures. I'm totally OK to have some people in the office and other people remotely, but they should all commit to the same rules and apply the same behavior. It cannot be that what we had in the past, for example, our Remote team members, they had to use our Tools. They had to do time tracking. They had to, at tasks, leave comments, update the tasks. They had to communicate in a structured way and regularly. While those people in the office didn't do this as they were in constant communication with each other so they didn't see why they should do it. And that leads to a problem, because then you develop two types of teams that don't really work together as as good, as connected as they should. Now, how can you foster this as an organization? Don't tolerate it. Don't tolerate language we and they. Don't tolerate that one group works according to a specific standard and another group doesn't. Really make sure you have an aligned culture that all have the same habits and don't tolerate other behavior. I think that is that's the only way to go.

So. And I could see a since I started to work with Flash Hub and also in Bright Solutions that we really did a great job in the first couple of months, I felt still this was like a they and we and really dissolved it over the last couple of years. And now we can take full advantage of that because there's no such separation anymore. And this is really helpful.

That's what I that's why I said that, because I realized that in the very beginning we had exactly these problems. Now we don't have an office anymore. So maybe that led to this this issue. But it's also that everyone in the team is aware of the fact that we are a team and it's not the internals and externals or wordings like we outsource to freelancers. Nobody says that in our organization because that's not our understanding. We are a team. It doesn't matter about the contract. If you are an employee or a freelancer, you work with us. You have to reach your goals. You are part of the team. You get support. It doesn't matter which contract you have.

Yeah, when we talk about managing teams and particularly Virtual Teams, what what leadership style is favored to form like a really high performance team and that will bring value to my project or my company.

What I said, I think it's leading by leading by results and a culture of clarity, a culture of facts versus opinions, a culture where we're output and results and outcomes matter, not just opinions that are based on subjective beliefs, et cetera, right. That's what typically happens when you have a manager judging employees about their performance and I mean, there are so often just abstract words that nobody can really use to implement actional behaviors for improvement. For example, we had that, I mean, I also see that when I work with our team, sometimes when people give each other feedback, which is like Daniel, you need to be more committed. What do you do with that? You feel blamed, you have no idea what I want from you. You think I am committed? What do you want from me, right? Maybe you said yes. And I think OK Daniel says yes. Now he has to be more committed.

But you won't change your behavior because you have no idea what I want from you. So really going down from thirty thousand feet perspective to the ground and make feedback actionable so that other people can really understand what you want from them, how you want the person to change the behavior in order to get the result, because the results are just produced by behavior. If we just sit there, don't do anything, no results are produced. If we are just busy doing something that might not be that we create results, we need to do the right things right, and that's driven by behavior. And I think that a big part of a culture that fosters high performance is giving effective feedback, providing clarity and not just clarity about results, but also clarity about feedback. What I want from you, how I want you to change when I, for example, say Daniel, I want you to be more committed. That's not actionable. But when I say Daniel, I want whenever you commit to something, I want you to deliver this, how you committed it and if you don't do, please inform your day ahead and provide me with an alternative. Do you now know what I want from you. Much, much more clear, right, you know what I want from you. Yeah. So, yeah, that's what I think makes a culture of high performance.

Taking the culture to intercultural. I would like to ask you something else. When working with global teams you have like this intercultural aspects come into play? What could go possibly wrong when you take this step and how you can possibly avoid that when you work in an international setting with people from around the globe?

There are there there's a lot I mean, there's a lot that can go wrong with misunderstandings, but there is also a lot you can get right and improve, which you can't when you just limit yourself with a local local Talent Pool. Most common thing that everyone might know is that the different cultures, people don't say don't say no. They always say yes because they feel otherwise they hurt somebody's personality feelings or whatever. And of course, that leads to unmet expectations, because if we have a culture where we want people to stick to what they said yes to and to do what they said and somebody says yes to everything because he or she is afraid of saying no. That's a mismatch, this won't work, the interface is broken, communication doesn't work.

Now, you have two choices, either you are wondering yourself why that happens, you blame the person, tell the person you are not good "abstract feedback", or you tell the person that it's really part of our culture to say no when you feel you can't do this, please do that. And it's only fair if you see that like three times in a row, you don't get that changed behavior, then stop working together. I mean, you still need to make a cut on a human level telling them that it's not about them, that you just feel that this cultural fit is not given and that prevents us from being successful with each other. So the Opportunities that this person can find another culture or another company with a culture that is a better fit and we can also find another person. Now, when you have alternatives to find people fast because you made the entire world your Talent Pool, then it's not a big deal if somebody leaves because both people have alternatives.

When you're just limited by one hundred kilometers around the office and somebody leaves and it takes you like three to six months to find a replacement, of course that's a bad thing because it takes so much time. You feel left alone. You have no idea how to compensate for this lack of skills and even worse, in most businesses that I used to work locally. When people leave, the knowledge leaves, because nothing is persistent digitally in the leadership system. But if you're working digitally, everything is persistent, like in processes, in videos, in Workflows, then you can onboard people fast and the knowledge stays in the organization when somebody leaves.

I think that is a big, big opportunity and you need to find people when it comes down to the culture that value this. There might be people when they should create a video where they put their knowledge on a video, they might say no because they fear that they get replaced. That's typically what happens when I talk to corporations and I recommend to making knowledge persistent. They see a resistance from their team because they feel that when they give all their knowledge into the system, they are not needed anymore.

But that's not true. We need people for not for their knowledge. Knowledge is everywhere. We need knowledge. I go to Google, enter a requestion, get the result. It's not about knowledge. It's about applying skills based on knowledge to make intelligent decisions for complex problems. Solving problems is the skill we are looking for not just bringing knowledge to an organization. And that's why I think contributing knowledge that is then position in organization is no risk for everyone.

Right, this brings me already to my next question. Why is the command and control structure in any team setting, but especially within, like Virtual Teams and Remote work and teams doomed to fail?

Because it's too complex. I mean, if you really believe that you can decide for other people in a complex environment, that changes very fast you're just playing God. And I mean, then you make you make it look, if you if you have people on the front line working with technology, with teams, with clients, and you see a Problem from the outside and you make a recommendation how they should fix it. I mean, you can't you can't honestly think that you have all the information your team has, and still if you make a decision, you make uninformed decision.

So it's simply not possible in a complex environment where people where we need intelligence, not labor, right? If we need intelligence to solve problems and work towards outcomes, towards results, then it's those people that have all the information and the intelligence to make decisions, not me as a manager, because I don't know all these things. That might have worked when we had like organizations where you employ people for labor that doing the same things repetitive with their body, like in a factory.

OK, you can simply see, is this person productive or not? Because it's always the same movement this person has to do, like put the hammer on a nail. One hundred fifty times an hour you can see, OK, it's working. But today when we are working all digitally, you can look into the head of people and you don't have all the information to make an informed decision. That's why I think this command and follow or this this hierarchical organization, it's it's not possible anymore. And it will really get worse in the future because things become more complex. Change happens at ever increasing speed.

As the borders between and we talk about it when we started the conversation with this hybrid team settings, but as borders between like formal employee employment, project workers and gig jobs are getting more and more blurred, how can we as a company be more attractive for new talents, and what does it take to retain those talents that are already working with me in my organization?

Hmm. I would say it's all about aligned interests. So if you, I mean, that's the whole idea of new work that people have jobs they really like to do in most cases that is not true, because if people go to an organization, especially in their employer contract, what is written is you give me eight hours and I give you that amount of salary. So they spend or they give the time and get money. So you pay your lifetime for some money and.

I think that. That when that's the fundamental basis for how we define work time for money. I think, it's a toxic culture because employees currently good employees with high skills and good experience, they have so many other opportunities to get jobs. Now, the question is why they should be with you. And I think what they value more and that's why there is such an increasing trend for the gig economy and freelance or economy is people because people, they want to be free.

People want to be free and independent. They want to do something meaningful, not just spend eight hours on a computer doing what the boss tells them. And if you manage to provide an organization with a culture where people know their why, that's the exercise we did in the beginning so they know why they are required and needed in the team. They can see how well they are doing, not just depend on the on the subjective opinion of a boss or a manager if they can work where they want, with whom they want, where they want and at which time they want.

I think that's the interest of many people. And this interest increased when they experience Remote work. If an organization can align with these interests, then you become attractive for great talent. That's what I think in the future, organizations need to become more like platforms, platforms where they have offers that satisfy the need and solve problems for clients. That's why they buy from you and on the other side you have offers for talent, which are the job roles, so they spend their time with you and not with somebody else.

Of course you pay them, but that's not the limitation that they get paid. They get paid and countless organizations. The question is, how can you pay them and they want to stay with you. And the magic key is to align their interests. Now, if you have an organization where you you have three interests, interests of your clients, interests of the organizations and the organization itself and shareholders and interests of talent, when the organization is able to align all these interests to contribute towards one specific way, which is solving problems for clients effectively and providing talent, the freedom and independence they want. I think that is the future of an organization

Right, Manuel to round this session up for today and make it for our listeners a little bit more tangible what what we have experienced over the last couple of years, I was asking you up front if you might have a little success story or recent experience in working with one of your Virtual Teams you actually are in and what make this situation or experience something special.

So I can tell from an experience I have with one of the clients of Flash Hub. They are an organization with around 40 employees and people were just doing things they were asked to do, either clients asked them to do things or the managers asked them to do things. And the Management saw that there is an increase of workload and stress for the management, but also for the frontline employees. And they saw that the efficiency in the organization went down, especially during the lockdown when they had to work remotely.

Now, what I asked them to do is to really what I said in the beginning, to write down their their roles, to write down their main results. They should create basically their output. And it was so hard for them that started a process where everyone really thought about, OK, why are we here, what we are doing? What are we doing for our clients? Why do our clients need us? And what do we need to deliver to do so that clients get the results they want?

And what can our managers do to support these people that bring the value to clients instead of directing people to do what the managers want? Now, that was a complete mind shift, especially when it comes to OK, the purpose of the organization is to solve problems for clients. And not to make money. Money is the result. It's the result of how often you solve these problems and how you efficient you do that. Now, once they continued with this thought pattern and with this process, they realized that all of a sudden the managers didn't tell their people what to do because the team came up with solutions for improvements once they understood why the business needs to exist, what it does for the clients, and how every team and how every employee or team member contributes to that result.

So they came up with the solution and that released the entire stress and the high workload and often frustrations and disappointment because they got alignment. They understood why they are here. And they had great people that were really intelligent and still they had managers telling them what to do. So now they turned that around. And that led to a relief off of many people to hire performance to better team culture, to more independence, a meaningful working, I would say.

That was that was great to see, I mean, I still work with these guys, but, yeah, it's really great to see how that really changes the culture of of an organization in just it's not even six months. It's in February, three month.

Upgrade and I assume specially for the people working on there's such a difference, right, if you come in the morning in the office or you log in when starting working on your desk, when you have this different attitude and alignment in the teams.

Sure some will leave. You know, whenever you change the culture, some people leave. That was always the case. That will always be the case because if the culture change those people that said yes to the culture when they join the organization will now find a different culture and the different organization.

Right. And that's not what they signed up for. So also, when we made this transformation from top down Management, yes, from top down Management to a self driven and self managing teams, some people left because they want to get told what they should do and not just want to see the goal and know the why and then find out what they should do in order to reach these results. They they want the manager that tells them what to do, because then they can always say I was told. So it's not my fault. So, yeah, you need to know that.

Great, Manuel thank you very much for your time today. I think we covered some interesting perspectives on how to lead Virtual Teams and teams in general in a remote environment and I would say we see each other next week again for our next session.

Looking forward. Thank you, Daniel. Take care.

This was a very interesting conversation that also covered some questions about how the future of work could look like and how we can prepare for it, working with talents around the globe in a virtual environment can be really liberating and a boost for any organization when the setting is done in a structured and thoughtful way. If you want to learn more about how to scale, if your business at any time working with global top talents and make work better visit Flash Hub dot io slash start to get free access to the virtual business builder training. Learn in this free training how you can build, grow and scale your business with Virtual Teams and global freelancers. You can subscribe to the Virtual Frontier on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Sitcher, Spotify YouTube of wherever Podcast can be found. And while you're there, you can give us a review. On behalf of the team here to Virtual Frontier I want to thank you for listening. So until next episode, keep exploring new frontiers.