Setting up Teams

Well! I've been part of setting up of a completely new team this year. 

 

The team members are going to be spread across atleast 3 countries and time zones. Most of them are new to company. There will be little overlap in working hours of this regional team and parent organization (in India). 

 

We have managed to get the first set of employees onboard.  Upcoming challenge is to build a team from a set of employees spread out geographically.  So what should be next steps?

 

We obviously need common goal/s- something to which people can relate and rally around. We do have common goals. We need to ensure that employees understands and acts on those goals.

 

We need enough team members to connect regularly with each other.  So necessity to set up regular team meetings. Given that it is a high context culture, face to face presence might be more beneficial. Possibly technology- webex, etc - can play a role here. We also need to have an agreement on frequency at which this team gets together.

 

We have a manager, new to company. We need to hand hold manager  for atleast one annual cycle. We also need to involve other managers in organization in setting him up for success.

 

We need to be able to integrate this team in existing regional offices where their members are based out of. Ensuring alignment of policies to regional practices is minimum requirement. We already have ensured this. Ensuring connects with key stakeholders is another requirement. We have initiated this. But what more?

 

We also need to be able to integrate team into parent organization (based out of India). Visits of team members to parent organization, sync with key stakeholders, and including them in key conversations in parent organizations are first steps we have taken. But what more?

 

These are some of the things that we need to work on in next few months as we go about trying to build a team from geographically spread out and remote team members.

 

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Sourav