Time travel and the art of managing a remote team

Unless you manage a multinational team, you probably don’t know that at 1:30pm in London it is 7:00pm in Bangalore and 7:30am in Milwaukee. For a small, crucial window of time, this is the most convenient hour or so in which everyone can come together. Granted, there may be some members of the team video conferencing over breakfast while others are the last out of the office, but in heading a remote team there are laws of physics that no amount of budget or goodwill can undo. Balancing time zones and the needs of multinational companies remains an imperfect science, necessitating some inconvenience and the sharing out of the short straw to get the best result for the business.

It requires a two-fold approach: you must understand and work with the logistics, while managing the emotional temperature of your reports. It is about learning how to best cut through the technical difficulties of cross-border communication, while always being mindful of the abstract complexities of keeping a team feeling like a team, even when meeting in person is at best infrequent, and perhaps impossible.

What are the best strategies for dealing with a far-flung team? And what can GCs do to engender the right collegiate spirit? The benefits of a healthy team are manifold – and the bottom line is that the work is better. Acknowledged, valued, encouraged, trusted team members will benefit the company strategically. So how can a GC make sure their team is strong, successful and cohesive despite the distance?

Checking in

The starting point for effective remote management is good communication between all team members, through both scheduled and ad hoc ‘checking-in’. Sydney-based general counsel Yen Hui Tie from AMP Capital has fortnightly phone and video conferences with London, regular meetings and informal catchups with her team, as well as fortnightly conferences with her executive legal counsel in New Zealand. ‘Day to day, my team works with our London lawyer through email exchanges and phone calls. My team and I make it a priority to meet regularly with our colleagues based offshore when they are in Sydney. One of my Sydney-based lawyers is about to spend a month or two working in London. We invest in building relationships because strong, trusted relationships that bring a deep understanding of our business, our strategy and potential risks, are the main mitigator of legal and regulatory risks.’

Mark Weenink, New Zealand-based GC at Westpac, echoes this sentiment. In his experience of managing multiple offices, ‘you often don’t know the people in your team that well, because you cannot typically take the time to get to know them, and there are often massive variations in local interpretations of things, as well as local law issues.’ But he has a tip: ‘If you can, develop your offshore team internally, have them work in your jurisdiction, second them across and get them to really know your team because it makes things much easier.’

This is a nod to getting corporate culture right. Yen Hui Tie comments that: ‘Corporate culture is the start of everything: getting it consistent is key. AMP Capital invests quite a lot of time in that; our current lawyer in London is originally from our Wellington office in New Zealand. Before you even get to regulatory and legal compliance, it is about your team having the right culture and mindset and making sure they are culture carriers.’

Obviously, unavoidable logistics such as time zones do get in the way of working seamlessly, but flexible working arrangements can help. A London-based GC in the banking sector said that she speaks to her team members in New York late into the London evening, which works for her because she can shoehorn the school run in between the day’s work and the evening catchup. ‘There is only one point (at 2pm in London) when a call to my team members works for both America and Asia, so being in London is great for me. Frankly it is better to be based in Britain for global companies because you can’t really run an Asia-Pacific team from America, and vice versa, but you can do it from here,’ she says.

Only connect

Kerry Phillip, Vodafone Global Enterprise’s UK-based legal director, says that her approach to managing her global team (which is spread across eight countries and nine time zones) has been to organise it into regions, headed by strong regional legal heads. ‘There is no time for a team or a management meeting that is convenient for every time zone. I tried various different structures for management meetings. Now, every Wednesday at 1pm UK time I have a strict one-hour management team meeting for the regional heads of legal for Europe, Americas and Asia, and we make sure we walk away with agreed actions as to how we will solve issues as a global team, rather than region by region.’

Phillip has also come up with a way to share out being the central hub of communication. By rotating the hosting and timing of all-hands team meetings, she ensures that all team members feel included, whatever their location: ‘We have just started rotating the hosting of our monthly meetings, so that the team in Germany or Singapore or the USA will set the agenda and run the meeting with others video conferencing in from their location. If one of the regional teams is hosting the meeting we all get a different perspective. The regional team is, of course, fully engaged, and people in other locations will get an insight into their world and their challenges.’

She adds that introducing clocks on the intranet site depicting the times in Vodafone’s global offices has encouraged greater understandnig about what it means to be working at a distance from the company headquarters in the UK. ‘I always try to be sensitive to the time zone challenges – the US head of legal will often start at 6am and the Singapore head of legal will stay up until 11pm so that we can connect. I make sure that I acknowledge the difficult timing for them and that the meeting is relevant and focused. If the timing is hugely inconvenient, I will apologise and say “I don’t expect you to join,” or “just join for the first part”. It is important that we are one connected legal team and that we work consistently across the globe, despite challenges of geography.’

 

 

When team dynamics depend so heavily on seamless, frequent and clear communication, what happens when communication goes awry? Rosie Nicholls, GC of Cielo Talent, recalls a previous role where an otherwise successful regional head had difficulty adjusting his communication style to remote management. ‘He had a massive personality, people bought into him hugely and where he physically sat he commanded a lot of loyalty. But none of this translated well over email, which came across strangely. His remote team didn’t buy into it; he couldn’t motivate them and it was a total disconnect. Eventually he had to be placed in a role where he only managed the office where he was based.’

When time and distance mean there is no watercooler to gather around, and there are limited opportunities for people to share the more human aspects of themselves, technological tools play a very big part in bridging the softer, social gaps. Social intranet platforms such as Yammer are popular, allowing team members to chat informally and get to know one another virtually. Nicholls’s team uses Yammer for promoting internal conversation. ‘It is a big challenge to get your guy in Russia feeling part of the company. Through our intranet systems there will be instant messaging and shout-outs, and all of this draws the individuals into the wider family,’ she explains.

Taking the time

Ultimately though, there is nothing quite so bonding for a team than getting together in real life, although the practicalities and costs are beyond the resources of many. Mark Weenink finds that although it is an achievable yearly goal for Westpac within Australia and New Zealand, ‘it is incredibly easy for people who are in small teams in different jurisdictions to feel unloved, unwanted and starved of attention.’ His solution? ‘You have to show them far more attention and enhance your communication with them to bring them into the fold. This requires resources and time. If you haven’t got the balance sheet to do that then you are better not to have them: better to just use externals in those jurisdictions.’

Lawyers, Nicholls adds, are collegiate by nature, which doesn’t always suit a solitary role. ‘We like to bounce ideas off each other. If you go back to when you were a junior lawyer in a firm, you all sit together and share ideas around. You have to have open lines of communication with your lawyers otherwise they can feel isolated, particularly in the legal risk function.’ She argues that this can have practical, as well as psychological, consequences: ‘If I say to my Australian lawyer to push back to the business, if he/she is perceived by them as a road block and doesn’t have a wider team around for support, they could find themselves in a difficult position. You need to do a lot of morale boosting, and sometimes an old-fashioned face to face.’

Kerry Phillip at Vodafone agrees. Last year, her team spent a day at a farm in Berkshire, outside London. ‘We flew in people who live in urban Singapore or Bangalore and we spent the day surrounded by cows, while we launched a team-wide 12 month transformation programme. Everyone flew economy to keep the costs down and it meant they could meet people they had only ever emailed or phoned before. The buzz and excitement was absolutely incredible and the strength of relationships formed through this relatively inexpensive event has had a massive impact on team morale, engagement and on how well we work together,’ she says.

Managing a department well despite global complexities seems to be about making sure each member feels included and valued. AMP Capital’s Yen Hui Tie says that what motivates her team is feeling that they contribute to the best of their abilities ‘and that they are part of building something. They know that the business respects and values them highly and can’t get enough of the contribution they make. That means we are not seen as a service provider, but a critical part of the team without whom execution of our strategy couldn’t be possible. There is nothing more powerful and fulfilling than creating a legacy and being part of that.’