Managing a team in-person is complicated enough, but it’s especially tricky when working with an offshore team. Although incorporating an offshore team can be largely beneficial because of favorable tax rates, it can be a missed opportunity when you don’t provide excellent job satisfaction. Unhappy workers may lead to decreased work performance, employee engagement, low productivity, and a high turnover.
If you’re wondering how to heighten job satisfaction among your offshore employees, here are some steps to help you.
Prioritize work-life balance
Odd hours and delays in correspondence may be common in offshore companies since they have to coordinate with branches from different countries. For this reason, employees may be more prone to physical and mental exhaustion. A survey from 15 countries finds that 61% of respondents wouldn’t accept a role that disrupted their work-life balance, while 34% reported they would leave their jobs because of toxic work environments. As such, global companies like audio and visual technologies manufacturer Dolby have put work-life balance at the center of their business. At Dolby, employees are given every other Friday off to unplug and re-energize.
When managing your offshore companies, ensure that you have firm boundaries for work hours. If it suits your business model, you may even provide flextime and remote work options. Lastly, ensure that employees are notified about urgent deadlines and compensated for extra hours. This allows them to balance their personal and professional lives, heightening job satisfaction.
Provide frequent feedback
Working offshore can be alienating since employees have fewer ways to gauge their performance in real-time. Although it may be standard practice to give performance reviews every few months, you may benefit from providing more frequent feedback to employees. By re-imagining performance reviews into performance coaching, you can facilitate meaningful ongoing conversations that give employees a sense of their strengths and areas for improvement. This practice is prevalent at Google, where managers consistently set goals and coach direct reports. This keeps workers from worrying about their year-end reviews while also enabling them to proactively improve their performance.
Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess how well employees are doing would be best. With this, your coaching conversations can be geared towards course correcting their actions continuously. This removes the apprehension from the formal performance reviews and reassures employees that the company values their improvement.
Encourage collaboration
Collaboration demands communication, coordination, and time management, which nurture workers’ soft skills and make them feel they have something valuable to contribute. This is a great way to cultivate a sense of community for offshore workers that may feel disconnected from headquarters. It also results in greater employee engagement, a fact recognized by companies like PepsiCo, where 40% of their employees’ annual bonus is based not on their individual KPIs but on how they have contributed to other employees’ upward progress. This incentivizes employees to focus on the team’s overall improvement instead of just their own and helps them strengthen relationships with coworkers.
You can address collaboration among offshore employees by investing in cloud collaboration tools, video conferencing software, and workflow technologies. This allows teams to coordinate smoothly. You can also set communication standards for expected response times. This helps reduce pressure when you coordinate with the team and allows everyone to collaborate effectively and healthily.
One of the best ways to guarantee an offshore company’s success is prioritizing job satisfaction. By elevating work-life balance, adopting a coaching mindset, and encouraging collaboration, you ensure that your employees find value in their work.
