The rise of the borderless team – and how to groom one for your company’s success

In an age where more businesses are exploring the value and potential of building borderless teams, the playing field for opportunities has leveled out considerably – and companies are increasingly promoting diversity and inclusivity to attract top talent from across the globe.

“Globalization is not dead. It’s actually been given a turbocharge,” says Charles Ferguson, general manager of Asia Pacific at Globalization Partners, an employer-of-record firm that helps businesses hire from anywhere without the need for costly international branch offices or subsidiaries. “In the past, companies would either look into their domestic market or import talent. Today, if you really want to access the best talent, you have to embrace the concept of a borderless team.”

The challenges of building remote teams

With the rise of telecommuting arrangements amid the pandemic – and with them, the emergence of the hybrid working model – businesses now face a fresh set of challenges as they seek growth.

Charles Ferguson, general manager of Asia Pacific at Globalization Partners. / Photo credit: Globalization Partners

“One of the biggest obstacles in Southeast Asia is the lack of face-to-face supervision,” Ferguson observes. “Hierarchy has always been particularly demonstrable in high-context cultures such as China, Thailand, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and even Singapore, which still boast fairly traditional and marginally conservative work environments in most companies.”

Meanwhile, offices – once a site for exchanging ideas, anecdotes, and knowledge, as well as problem-solving in real time – have given way to scheduled online interactions, creating engagements that are often more rigid than spontaneous.

And the implications of telecommuting are magnified when businesses attempt to groom and manage remote borderless talent, some of whom employers may never meet face-to-face. That’s because recruiting and retaining the right talent have become a whole new ball game: The estimated cost of making a bad hire amounts to 30% of an employee’s first-year earnings, a mistake that can be avoided through a better hiring process. For businesses, this requires looking inward first.

“It goes back to the company’s purpose and what they’re trying to achieve,” observes Ferguson. “If you want to find success in a new market, you need to have locals in that market working with you. Having someone who’s well-connected and who really understands the lay of the land in a local market is brilliant leverage to get into that marketplace. ”

To start on this path, Ferguson recommends that companies first recognize that the pandemic has changed the way information is shared and stored. Knowledge commons are just one example of this – but how are individuals making use of new information to craft new ideas and possibilities?

“In building a borderless team, the ideal employee should possess the innate ability to process information in new ways and have the curiosity to create new business models alongside the team,” Ferguson says.

Finding the right hires

Rather than rely solely on the traditional techniques of a competency-based hiring model to measure these capabilities, such as assessing a candidate based on their work experience and qualifications, the Globalization Partners exec suggests that companies elevate things by measuring a candidate’s cultural fit.

“This involves a person’s ability to bounce back from adversity, or the ability to use logic and emotional intelligence to deliver a certain message to the team,” he offers. “Using assessment tools could also help a business determine what the motivating factors are for each candidate. For companies, it shouldn’t be a case of capitalizing on low-cost labor but rather finding the best talent, regardless of where candidates reside.”

Bringing on the right talent is key, but what then follows is maintaining employee satisfaction.

Research from an October 2020 study by the Ohio State University revealed that employees are more likely to remain engaged if their managers have responded well to the pandemic by prioritizing their health, safety, and personal growth.

“Companies used to measure success using key performance indicators (KPIs), but it’s now shifted to objectives and key results (OKRs). This means focusing on outcomes that might not always be financial,” explains Ferguson. “And in order to achieve favorable outcomes, a huge focus area is now employee well-being.”

While this has been the case even before Covid-19, the pandemic only underscored the importance of this area of focus. With the advent of remote work and the impact of the pandemic, businesses are now reassessing traditional markers of success.

“If you have a remote worker and they’re alone in a foreign country with no one around them, you’re talking about double isolation. That’s something that requires new methodologies and policies to ensure their successful onboarding and engagement,” Ferguson points out.

In turn, having productive and engaged employees creates a trickle-down effect of positive client experiences, which then brings in revenue – thus creating a healthy cycle of satisfaction on both ends of the scale.

Changing up frameworks in the new normal

The onus, then, lies on HR teams to design policies that can adequately look after an employee, regardless of their location.

“How do we embrace a hybrid approach to staffing, and how do we embrace new ways of extending our recruitment capabilities in new markets?” Ferguson asks. “It’s about creating a competency framework around logic, safety, and agility. This might involve thinking about what a work-from-home policy looks like and maintaining collaborations that align with these policies.”

As borderless teams change the way that companies congregate and collaborate, a hybrid approach to staffing might additionally involve tailoring these policies for employees whose needs may be shaped by their location, available infrastructure, physical disabilities, and culture.

Rather than seeing these factors as hindrances to building a borderless team, Ferguson believes in quite the opposite.

“The more diversity of perspectives you put into your business, the more competitive and sustainable it can be in the short, medium, and long term,” he says.

Globalization Partners enables companies to hire anyone, anywhere, in a matter of days. Its AI-driven, fully compliant global employer-of-record platform is powered by its in-house worldwide HR experts, allowing companies to leave the complexities of global employment to a recognized industry leader that consistently attains 97% customer satisfaction ratings.

Find out how Globalization Partners can help in your global hiring needs by requesting for a complete cost breakdown.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.