How do you ensure the cohesion of international teams?
When companies grow, it becomes almost inevitable to open offices with teams away from the head office, or even abroad. According to recent studies, 63% of American companies now have teleworking employees, who are almost never physically present in the office. Although this trend is less widespread in France, the figure is growing all the time and already concerns 29% of French employees (source: L'Express, 2019).
This trend towards dispersed teams, both nationally and internationally, means that today it is more important than ever to ensure the cohesion of team members within a company, to align them with the corporate culture and to direct them towards the same goals.
Companies must therefore seek to create a transparent environment in which information is accessible to all employees, regardless of where they are physically located. This way of working stimulates motivation and productivity, and guarantees a common language and vision for all teams worldwide.
How can you achieve this? Discover the 5 advantages of project management software for dispersed teams!
Centralise your tasks in project management software
The number of software applications used to manage and organise our work is multiplying every year. The more a company grows, the more software it uses. Today, the average SME uses 20 SaaS applications. Companies with between 251 and 1,000 employees use 124 on average. Each team or site uses the tool of its choice, creating a new reality at work: working in silos.
If international teams are to work together seamlessly, it makes sense to adopt a single tool for the whole company. Task management software is an excellent solution for centralising information and erasing physical boundaries. Suppose an employee needs a specific piece of information, instead of waiting for someone in another time zone to wake up and provide it, they can find it directly in this type of software.
Encourage flexibility and teamwork
The flexibility of these tools makes it possible to manage both high-level business processes, such as planning your roadmap, defining company policies and training new employees, and teamwork efficiently and visually from a single location.
monday.com is an example of such software. Thanks to the modules provided, you can create tables to manage each process, and even connect several tables to create complete workflows. You can think of a table as a smarter, more visual version of a spreadsheet.
There are an infinite number of ways to create spreadsheets to track any process, project or task. From content calendar planning to bug tracking, from property management to creative requests, every team's work can be managed on a single platform!
As the forums are visible by default to every user wherever they are, they can keep up to date with the current status of each project or task, see who is responsible for it and the discussions around it.
This centralised, fluid approach to information sharing is the first step towards a transparent working environment.
Communicate fluidly and in context
More and more teams are abandoning email as their main means of internal communication. With all the problems they attract (limiting who can see conversations, problems with searching and sharing files, to name but a few), teams are now looking for new ways to communicate.
Using a collaborative platform to communicate both within your team and with the rest of the company allows you to have centralised communication. With monday.com, when you click on each item in a table, the software brings up the updates section for communication. When you @mention people, teams, or any user on the account, messages are sent in real time. Conversations take shape around a topic, which means they can be easily found later.
What's more, it's more practical to use a single tool for internal company communication, whether it's to provide an update on changes to a product, to provide weekly updates from each department or your site, or to discuss specific topics with all users. By creating tables, every user will be on the same wavelength, no matter where they work!
Communicating with a team about every little change can be time-consuming and take up limited hours of your day. With the help of a collaborative platform, you can automate communication within your company and save a huge amount of time.
Imagine changing the due date of a project or task - you don't need to remind every member of staff, whether or not they're in the office with you, because an automated tool does it for you. This way of communicating with team members is the future of productive working and ensures that people working internationally are always well informed.
Create a workspace connected to all your tools
Using project management software is unlikely to replace all the other software used by your company's teams - and that's normal.
Integrating the tools used by each team with your project management software centralises the data from all the other software. This is the best way of maintaining the link between several teams and avoiding conflicts at work.
This data can then be consulted and used by everyone in the company. This allows knowledge to be shared and helps your team members understand how their work fits into the bigger picture.
The data can then be analysed and reported on, using multiple views.
Create customised reports to track your activity precisely
Giving everyone in your company, especially managers, the ability to visually track the progress of tasks and projects at a glance is essential to an international strategy.
It's likely that your task management tool is filled with so much information that managers will often only want to see the end result, without the details. By collating all the data and obtaining relevant information, everyone can focus on the objectives and ensure that they are always achieved.
Such reports can be produced easily, thanks to customisable dashboards built from multiple widgets such as graphs, figures, progress tracking and workload distribution to show important information in real time. They offer a simple, highly visual way of analysing complex data and understanding the business situation at a glance.
Work smarter, work better
In conclusion, using collaborative task management software helps companies with international teams to work smarter. It means there's one reliable source of information for an entire organisation, so no matter what department you work in or where you are, you can always be on top of what's going on.
Decisions are made more quickly and teams can move faster because misunderstandings are avoided. Communication takes place in one place and notifications about changes and status updates can even be automated, so that the people involved are always informed. These five tips are an excellent starting point for any company wishing to work successfully with international teams.
Sponsored article. The expert contributors are authors who are independent of the appvizer editorial team. Their comments and positions are their own.
Article translated from French
Julia Fagelman is a Customer Marketing Lead at monday.com. She manages the communication with existing monday.com users including managing the online community, webinar program and advocacy club.