The global economy has never seemed more unstable. Every day, the worldwide business community feels the ripple effect of pandemics, wars, inflation, struggling supply chains — the list goes on.
While some businesses are struggling just to get by, others are thriving in the chaos. Even when success is on the docket, though, growing and running a business globally can be exceptionally challenging in turbulent times.
To navigate these complexities, it’s important to adopt a dynamic approach that provides the flexibility and scalability needed for sustained growth. Here are some insightful strategies and practical guidance to help growing companies continue to foster resilience and thrive in the face of ongoing turbulence.
1. Streamline Staffing With a PEO
Staffing is an overwhelming task even when a company is hiring from a local workforce. Expand that talent pool to an international level, and things can become downright overwhelming. Businesses must consider currencies, competitive salaries, benefits, local and international taxes and regulations, onboarding, and training.
This is where working with a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) can be a lifesaver. Global employment platform Oyster highlights the advantages of using a PEO to condense the entire talent lifecycle into a single dashboard.
Using a PEO allows you to streamline global payments, comply with international hiring requirements, and eliminate the countless other barriers that come with global hiring. In other words, a quality global employment platform gives you unfettered access to a much larger talent pool.
2. Clarify Communications With a Centralized Dashboard
Communication is essential to business success. This is true whether employees are working in neighboring cubicles or half a world away.
In the former case, quality communication simply comes from a willingness to interact and stay in touch. With the latter scenario, there must be a proactive investment in maintaining healthy lines of communication.
Often, leaders resort to age-old communication options like email to solve the problem. However, if you want a dynamic, capable, and efficient communication solution, you have to look past lengthy email threads.
Use a communication tool that truly keeps your team connected. The centralized nature of a solution like this makes it more effective than email. It brings multiple internal communication channels together, providing a unique degree of collaboration, transparency, and security.
3. Invite Other Opinions
For growth to be sustainable, your entire team must buy into what you’re doing. This can be difficult to do when your team hails from different cultures, backgrounds, and even time zones.
One way to bring everyone together is by embracing DEI. Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the workplace are a great way to encourage a dynamic and diverse workforce to stay engaged and invested in a global employer’s mission.
Business Leadership Today shares that DEI positively impacts things like innovation, collaboration, engagement, and even employee and customer satisfaction. It is a dynamic way to ensure that you empower everyone on your team to share their minds and contribute in their own unique ways.
4. Keep Your Workflow in the Cloud
Communication isn’t the only key to ongoing business growth and success. You also want to ensure that your workflow remains steady.
According to Interupptions.net, disrupted workflow can lead to more than just delays in getting a task done. It can also create more tasks.
In addition, at times, your team members cannot afford to leave tasks unfinished. When a disrupted or disjointed workflow interrupts efficient execution, it can often leave workers laboring far longer than is ideal. This diminishes quality and saps job satisfaction in the process.
To solve this problem with a global workforce, it’s important to establish online workflow spaces that everyone can access and collaborate together on. According to the workflow platform Trello, it’s important to invest in workflow documentation — i.e., codifying responsibilities into essential tasks that team leaders and coworkers can then pass off to others independently. This optimizes workflow, ensures accountability and helps businesses scale operations efficiently, even when everyone is operating online.
5. Embrace an Asynchronous Work Model
Finally, remember that an international workforce will spend most of their time working “together apart.” This isn’t by design but by necessity. The change in time zones often means one worker is waking up while another is clocking out for the day.
The best way to manage this disruptive workflow is to embrace an asynchronous work model. Productivity app Friday describes this as work that takes place at times that are convenient for individuals rather than for an entire team.
With an asynchronous approach, the goal isn’t about working together or putting in a certain amount of hours. It’s about results.
Limit meetings. Empower workers to operate independently as much as possible. Then, assess them based on individual output. This is a powerful way to keep a global workforce firing on all cylinders, even when they aren’t acting in synchronized unison.
Keeping Your Company Moving in the Right Direction
It’s difficult to scale a company in peaceful times. If you’re managing to spark growth in the midst of economic chaos and uncertainty, it’s important to take steps to keep things moving in the right direction.
Use the tips above to create a dynamic approach to global business growth. That way, you can remain flexible and efficient as you keep your company moving in the right direction, even in a world that continues to wander through an unending cycle of economic uncertainty.