How to make the most of global talent opportunities

This article was co-written by Chris Davis, Partner, Metis Strategy, and Kelley Dougherty, Associate, Metis Strategy

To succeed as a large, global company, there is no choice but to harness the power of technology talent around the world. There simply aren’t enough people with the right skills, and at the right cost within a single location, to support the innovation and operational demands of a modern organization.

Organizations have implemented a variety of workforce models over the last two decades or so, but each has eventually proved to leave them with more questions than answers. The global outsourcing trend of the 1990s and early 2000s addressed capacity restraints through low-cost labor markets, but the lack of ownership and the transaction-based working relationships meant organizations outsourced not just the work, but also the accountability. The early 2010’s practice of co-locating talent supercharged collaboration, but also limited organizations’ ability to scale with a workforce based in high-density, cost-prohibitive metros. By 2020, many technology leaders began revisiting the idea of building dedicated, employee-based teams in lower-cost global locations, but the remote workforce model experienced its own set of challenges  throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fast forward to today. Many global technology leaders continue to struggle to find a balance between cost efficiencies, team productivity, and the human aspects of employment. However, there were a few pioneers that preemptively and effectively prepared for a distributed remote workforce and therefore were able to flourish at a time when others scrambled to adjust to the new normal.

Adobe, Equinix, Lenovo, and G-P were strategically situated and equipped to achieve the ideal duality: leverage global talent to realize cost efficiencies and realize the effectiveness of an agile team, yet in a distributed operating model. The key design principle that they all share is this:

To make global, distributed teams successful, they established dedicated decision-making power in distributed locations with full-stack teams of business and technology employees that can autonomously deliver end-to-end value.

The technology and HR leaders at each of these organizations shared their insights into building successful global teams that can sustainably drive innovation at scale. They highlighted five themes that can make or break the development of a global operating model:

1. Leadership: Technology leaders need to display cross-functional thought leadership and superb emotional intelligence to ensure global teams are autonomously delivering value, culturally connected to the wider enterprise, and equipped with the tools and local management to drive strategic decision-making across locations.
2. Culture: Leaders will be responsible for driving enterprise culture from the top down by building connections between teams, embracing the customs and identities of different geographies and groups, and monitoring cultural efforts through open feedback loops and outcome-based metrics.
3. Team structure and decision-making: Technology leaders should define ways of working that leverage and maintain effective communication channels, drive standardization across operational processes, and follow a hierarchy of decision-making rights that enable teams to work asynchronously across the agile operating model.
4. Technology: Communication tools, collaboration platforms, and data-driven and automation-based technologies all need to be optimized to enable global teams to deliver the most value at scale.
5. Compliance and regulations: Technology leaders should familiarize themselves with both the human capital and data sovereignty-related regulatory environments of global locations to mitigate compliance concerns and security risks.

We will explore each of these below:

Leadership

Implementing operating structures that leverage distributed decision-making in the context of a coordinated strategy requires cross-functional credibility and finesse. The ability to drive strategy across several departments or teams with varying functions and skill sets is a rare talent, and leadership needs to build this muscle to ensure distributed teams are aligned for execution.

Art Hu and Jeanne Bauer-Hamlett, Chief Information Officer and Executive Director of Human Resources at Lenovo, emphasize the importance of equipping and empowering teams for success. Leaders need not only to identify the appropriate talent to manage and own decisions within global teams, but also to regularly engage with local managers to maintain strategic and process alignment. Middle management will ultimately be the make-or-break layer of the operating structure, so leaders need to ensure they are able to:

• Elevate issues and challenges
• Effectively communicate across efforts
• Reinforce organizational culture
• Drive strategic decision-making

Leading global teams also comes with the inherent challenge of limited in-person interactions and face-to-face communication. Technology leaders therefore need to be particularly adept at building trust between themselves and dispersed teams.

“You’ve got to be good with the data, but you better have the emotional intelligence to match it,” says Richa Gupta, CHRO at G-P. This includes displays of empathy, authenticity, and concerted efforts to build human connection, either in-person or virtually.

Leaders should veer on the side of over-communication to break down emotional barriers and establish a sense of transparency across locations and management layers. Adobe CIO Cindy Stoddard explains that she makes it a habit to foster connections, both virtual and in person, throughout Adobe’s IT teams.

Likewise, Milind Wagle, CIO at Equinix, notes that he makes deliberate efforts to visit each of the company’s global teams at least twice a year to alleviate “emotional” distance with his reports and ensure each location feels valued and connected to the organization.

Culture

The value of building full-stack global teams is largely driven by the knowledge retention and improved delivery resulting from a sense of organizational identity within teams and the long-term commitment to the organization. 

“Prioritizing culture among the leadership team is crucial, as a company’s culture starts at the top and is carried down to employees,” Hu said. Leaders should approach culture as an internal capability that needs to be actively maintained, measured, and nurtured from the top down.

For example, we worked with a retail company that built a nearshore development center in Mexico to maintain time zone alignment while taking advantage of 2-3x cost savings. While onboarding 50 new developers, U.S. team members flew to Queretaro for cross-location agile product operating model training. The team leader in Mexico took the time to educate employees on both Mexican and American business culture, and encouraged empathy and open dialogue between team members and segments of the IT organization. Doing so helped build cultural understanding and trust at the onset of the working relationship.

Indeed, organizations establishing globally distributed teams need to understand and navigate the business and cultural distances that may cause friction across teams and stakeholder groups. Rather than attempt to enforce a blanket uniformity across all offices, technology leaders should aim to strike a balance between promoting a common sense of organizational identity and celebrating the local cultures and customs of each team.

Establishing and maintaining effective employee feedback loops is an essential aspect of promoting a positive workplace culture. Art and Jean explain how they have made intentional efforts at Lenovo to ensure feedback loops to regularly measure employee experience and identify pain points. They note the importance of using outcomes, rather than outputs or behaviors for those measurements. For example, employees at Lenovo are evaluated based on the specific value or outcomes they deliver rather than the amount of time spent online or at a desk.

The same logic can be applied to measuring company cultural efforts. Rather than analyzing the number of diversity workshops or social events scheduled in a given period, leaders should instead assess outcome-based metrics such as:

• Employee satisfaction scores
• Employee health and wellness data
• Employee engagement
• Retention
• Reported sense of inclusion
• Innovation and productivity rates

Team structure and decision-making

Initial launches of a global operating model are typically designed with “decision makers” (Product Managers, Business System Analysts, senior Tech leads, and Business Stakeholders) based in the U.S., with Scrum Masters and engineering teams in the alternative location. While this can work, leading organizations tap global talent to build truly global solutions.

For example, one organization stood up a full data platform team, including product management, Scrum Masters, and engineering in India. This was not a subservient team that took orders from the U.S.; they were fully empowered to build the global product for all users.

Another organization built out a business-unit-aligned supply chain team in Brazil to best serve South America. A third built out a team in Singapore to support finance operations and then structured their business product management in the same location to align time zones. In each case, the big shift was allowing these teams to define the strategy, develop the product, launch, and operate it no differently than a team in the U.S.

The appropriate tactical model for each organization will be dependent on the specific needs and responsibilities of teams. For example, Hu notes that “a ‘follow-the-sun’ model can and does work for teams who have well-defined tasks, boundaries, and hand-off protocols.” In contrast, a team that has heavy dependencies and requires more centralized oversight and direction will be better suited to a setup that allows for more time-zone crossover with other teams, or fully accountable teams staffed within the same time zone.

Wagle of Equinix notes the importance of communication within a global operating model, but also emphasizes that cross-team communication does not necessarily need to be more frequent or within a specific forum. Communication should instead be optimized to provide the most time value for teams. Equinix moved away from daily scrum meetings in favor of weekly meetings with daily asynchronous check-ins to reduce meeting exhaustion and allow more time to work on key objectives. Technology leaders should ensure the proper cadences are established for strategic decision-makers and cross-functional teams to discuss key topics such as:

• Initiative/project updates
• Cross-team dependencies
• Delivery obstacles or delays
• Capacity/resource constraints
• Strategy roadmaps definition/evaluation

A technology operating model built on agile practices and consistent delivery processes enables teams to reduce operational redundancies, cross-team friction, and internal costs. Stoddard at Adobe describes improving business workflows as “a strategic investment” and notes that her organization focused on establishing systems that “create positive employee and customer experiences in the hybrid world, drive efficiency and productivity, and enable standardization, optimization and consolidation.”

With standard ways of working in place, technology leaders need to define where and how decision-making rights are delegated. The digital-first, hyper-connected nature of the modern workplace means people no longer need to be in a company headquarters to have influence, but organizations need to be intentional about which decisions are delegated to local teams. Technology leaders should have a defined architecture of decision-making rights that enable teams to work asynchronously and deliver autonomous value while ensuring those teams are working harmoniously toward enterprise-level strategic objectives.

Technology

“Technology is no longer just about enabling work, it’s the workplace itself,” said G-P’s Richa.  Leaders establishing a digital operating model built on distributed teams need to ensure the appropriate tools and systems are in place to support it.

The most fundamental technologies are those enabling a unified and streamlined employee experience, giving teams the day-to-day resources and support they need to do their job. Delivery and project management tools that can be shared across locations will enable teams to have visibility across efforts, monitor risks, and identify dependencies without daily facetime. Milind provides the example of Equinix’s rollout of ‘Operation Collaboration’ that is geared toward maturing the organization’s workplace technologies and meeting experience platform to enable teams to work asynchronously.

Each of these companies above has also invested in technologies to streamline internal processes and reduce the operational risks of distributed teams. Cindy at Adobe advises that by investing in digitization, technology leaders “can help their organizations make the most of data analytics and insights, unlock new business and revenue opportunities, and significantly reduce costs.” These organizations also made strategic pushes to leverage AI and automation to minimize repetitive tasks, reduce time costs, optimize resource utilization, and allow teams to access services and support regardless of location or time zone. Lenovo in particular launched its Premier Support Plus, which “combines AI and human interaction for proactive, predictive, seamless and direct IT support, designed specifically for today’s hybrid workforce.”

Compliance and regulations

The regulatory environment in each team location is the final, and potentially consequential, consideration of a workforce strategy. Among the standard regulatory concerns are those regarding the local labor and employment laws in a given location. Richa at G-P says that establishing a foreign entity and managing local administrative tasks is both costly and time-consuming, and advises that technology leaders work with internal or outsourced HR and legal experts to ascertain the compliance requirements around legal entities, taxes, compensation, benefits, workers rights, and the ability to hire and fire, among others.

The second facet of compliance is more closely aligned to a technology leader’s purview and pertains to the local data, privacy, and intellectual property regulations. Some regions could differ in their approach to data sovereignty and IP protection, so organizations may weigh privacy concerns when determining where and how to store sensitive information. Art at Lenovo advises that leaders have “full awareness of the laws and regulations, and make sure global teams have the tools and processes to adapt to the rapidly changing landscape.”

Final big decision

For organizations contemplating building a global technology operating model, the final big decision is whether your company is willing to truly change its mindset. There is a big difference between a “U.S.-based company that operates internationally” and a “global company that happens to be headquartered in the U.S.”

Not all companies will be ready for it. But, in our view, there is no other option to realize both efficiency and effectiveness in your operating model. Whether proactively or reactively, global companies will have to retool the way they work across these five dimensions to sustainably leverage global talent at scale.