Hire For Empathy
If your team consists of people who are only data-oriented and focused on getting stuff done (e.g. writing code) and not on fostering and understanding relationships, you might face a lot of miscommunication. Your team will not feel like a single unit, but rather a collection of individuals scattered around the globe. To counter this, it helps to hire some people with high emotional intelligence, particularly when it comes to empathy. Paying attention to gender balance can be a way to impact this.
In my experience, leadership must stimulate empathy on several levels as shown in this graph:
1. Country
By organizing trainings that address culture in group discussions, leadership stimulates understanding within the team. Given the chance to empathize with the other culture, people will naturally understand each other’s behavior better. People will better understand why I behave x and you behave y. Based on that understanding, we can organize around the perceived differences as a team. We can discuss them and find ways to deal with them. This eventually leads to effective, well balanced teams.
2. Company
Especially if the setup is: headquarters in country X and then remote team members in country Y (and others), it’s important that leadership stimulates understanding about the company itself. In headquarters, people will automatically feel closer to the company’s mission and value system. They’ll discuss it over coffee, they meet the leadership team regularly, they have more company parties, etc. But the remote team members need to be engaged here too. A specific program to spread the culture needs to be designed, planned, and executed.
3. Product
People far away don’t (often) talk to users of the product they’re building. They don’t have the coffee chat with the product owners. They may even lack the context of the product (if we’re developing an insurance product, my country might have a completely different insurance system). It’s crucial to stimulate the remote team members in wanting to understand everything about the product. This may include meetings with the users of the product, trips to the headquarters, videos to transfer knowledge, and more.
4. Team
Finally, leadership can stimulate the team to form bonds within their teams. Give a budget for trainings or trips. Allow them time off work to do exercises together, to discuss off-work topics. Our webinar participants recommended quarterly gatherings would be the optimal rate at which to bring everyone together to the same location.