Team together when miles apart

How can project leaders create a ‘team together’ approach when working miles apart? Emma Avery shares her expertise.

It’s an age-old question: ‘Would you be able to continue to provide the same great service, but do it for less cost?’ 

For some firms, the answer to this is to save costs by transferring activities to a cheaper labour market. It’s not a new concept; we’ve all been using nearshoring software support for years, so it’s not surprising that international centres of excellence are emerging for all manner of back-office processes, such as HR and day-to-day finance transactions. 

However, with the integral operational processes involved, it is not just a matter of writing a statement of work and hoping for the best. How can you ensure that service quality is not impacted? 

Here is how we took a successful – but expensive – back-office service and worked with stakeholder groups across six different countries to transition the service to nearshore operation centres that are set to become centres of excellence in their subject matters.

First off, what is it that we needed to achieve? The desired outcomes of our project in this real-life case study were to maintain the existing high quality of service; decrease the operational costs year on year; and create a template that other companies could follow. 

We already knew what it was that enabled us to enjoy a great level of service at that time, and it was mainly down to the teamwork and camaraderie that existed between those people carrying out the tasks. 

Our challenge was how to replicate that when those tasks would be distributed across several countries, rather than all being carried out within the same building. 

Early on, we recognised that we could not simply write a set of key performance indicators (KPIs), service level agreements (SLAs) and work instructions – we needed to engage hearts and minds and bridge the cultural gaps, too.

First steps

The usual first step of an international conference call was abandoned. Instead, we organised a series of tele-presence video calls. We were able to see in real time how the team interacted at the other end of the video link and could better judge the level of understanding for what we were asking. 

We discussed the tasks that were going to be required and were able to put together an outline plan, plus decipher the key ‘undercurrent’ elements to be addressed in a one-off, face-to-face workshop.  

The service was to be split across several topic-specific centres, so a workshop was held for each. For these, the team leader and important team members from each centre were invited to a spend a few days at our headquarters. 

Through these face-to-face meetings, we were able to show how the service was currently run, and could examine in detail the processes and hand-off points, as well as make the documented KPIs and SLAs come alive. 

But, perhaps most importantly, we all went out together. We laughed and joked, and discussed family life and workplace legends – in short, we started to build a team of humans and to see each other as more than just clauses on a contracted statement of work. From that point on, we were able to offer mutual support and guidance, and to actually have it accepted.

Was it really that easy?

Of course not. There were systems-development problems. There were politics and changes in scope but, as soon as we started to act as one team together, it was so much easier to address the issues and get them resolved. 

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not all sunshine and flowers. We still have work instructions that must be followed and contracts with penalties attached. We have standard procedures that must be followed and still need to have difficult conversations to make sure that the quality is achieved at every opportunity. 

The difference is that the teams delivering the day-to-day service know who they are delivering to, and we know who we are talking to when we have any issues to sort out together.

Cultural difficulties

There were a number of cultural lessons that we learnt and adapted to as we went along. 

For instance, in one centre, we realised that we hardly ever got any response when we asked, ‘What issues or concerns do you have at the moment?’ The culture in that particular centre was to only address concerns via the team leader, and for the team leader to sort them out in the background. 

We needed them to be more open so that we felt comfortable that we were getting the full picture, so we changed our question to, ‘What are your top three concerns this week?’, thereby requiring answers. Suddenly, we were able to generate an open conversation.

Conference calls can often be a dry affair and messages can easily get lost in translation. We always ensured that an interactive screen share was available so that meeting attendees could see and hear the messages. 

We also injected some fun, with random photos of team members, and sometimes a bit of tongue-in-cheek music appropriate to the mood of the day, while we waited for everyone to join. Again, for us, it was about people achieving results, not paperwork driving tasks.

As a mostly female UK project team, it was interesting to see the difference in unconscious gender bias across some of the centres, and to adapt our stance and language to ensure that we remained in control and to recognise and counter any preconceptions that existed.
It was important to us that the overseas teams were able to fit in culturally with the existing UK teams and internal customer base, so we insisted on being part of the interview process for new team members.  

In some instances, this meant a UK manager visiting the centre in person and running interviews for the whole day; in other instances, we were able to arrange tele-presence interviews with the candidates. 

This was all conducted in support of the in-country team leaders. We were able to not only test professional/technical expertise, but also cultural understanding.

What about letting it fly?

When it was time to go live, we decided that continuing with the ethos that we had adopted the whole way through would be the best approach. We would act as one team, rather than as a customer.

We arranged for subject matter experts and managers from the UK to attend and walk the floor at key points in the process. They took a large tin of Quality Street and were prepared to roll up their sleeves and give practical support as needed.

Did we achieve our outcomes? Yes; we have maintained the level of service and are projected to achieve a cost saving of one third over the first three years. We have also changed the way in which the nearshore centres of excellence will recommend approaching future projects. 

This will ultimately benefit us. More customers for them means more expert knowledge is available to us, and the economies of scale will result in more savings further down the line. 

Business is business and culture is culture, but, at the end of the day, we are all people with mortgages and families. Recognising this was the key to bridging the diversity in our global teams. 

Emma Avery is strategic projects manager at T-Systems.