Project Objective

What Are The Challenges That A Manger Face While Handling The Global Team?

How Those Challenges Should Be Handled?

Why It Is Important To Go Global For Organizations In Today’s Time?

In last few years, organization have rapidly transformed into number of virtual teams since it has become a popular way to connect as well as engage with the world and dispersed workforce. This reduces the cost of the international association and assuring high level of speed and right adaptability.  The report will study in detail about organizations that are using global based international teams or considering adopting this concept (Nkukwana et al., 2017). The discussion will focus on the leadership of virtual teams, cost based benefit analysis of virtual based interaction as well as face to face communication. The report will also focus on other challenges like work life based issues, building teams from another country, supervision and evaluation of virtual workforce and development of a mindset which works with virtual team globally.

The objective of the report is evaluating the challenges faced by the management while managing a global team (Masuda et al., 2016). The report will focus on understanding different challenges and collecting as well as codify the best practices as well as global challenges.

In an ideal situation worldwide, HR based policies for international IT or other virtual teams must be consistent, fair as well as responsive enough to deal with any kind of emergency. It is also expected that the designations as well as reporting structure must be equalized. It is also important to understand that consistency on global level should permit and be aligned with domestic laws as well as cultural level norms. This is a challenging practice since the variation of current work culture and company’s structure or standards in every country (Stanley et al., 2017). Moreover, the standard of living and overall cost also varies from region to region. Therefore, from HR point of view, the policy of one size fits all models is redundant concept. Also, there is struggle for consistencies as well, where management is expected to find different ways for remotest teams to successfully have association with direct management (Soderhjelm et al., 2016).

Get local expertise in HR practices: organization should have a local HR people in every country to address and understand the local laws. It is also important to have local level of expertise in HR practices as well as knowledge. The practices like recruitment and training challenges are some of the important actions that needs to be managed and is done differently in every location. The company just needs to get in touch with local experts on the processes and laws (Tang et al., 2017).

Project Scope

Creation of job grade consistency with the help of a model: a company like Euroclear is now slowly moving in the direction of adopting job evaluation models from consulting any HR based organization like Hay Group. Adoption of models helps in organizing varied job kind into vertical forms like management of people, development of product, supporting the business and project level management. This further helps in providing a goal based for comparison and management of roles and people across diverse locations. For example, a manager of hundred odd people may look much more significant to a company than single level contributor (Cross, 2016). However, a single level of contributor at horizontal grade is very high since there is specialized level of expertise where men or women is equally important. Also, the grade level cannot be treated equally as a title and people tile are more subjected to local level conventions.

Management of dispersed staff in the form of portfolio teams: a company called ON Semiconductor has an IT based team that helps in supporting sales in Slovakia. In addition, the company also has a factory in Hong Kong where the main sales office is established. The customer service centre is in Shenzhen and in Kuala Lumpur is a domestic development unit (Greiver et al., 2016). This organization can overcome the potential to completely disconnect between varied locations by having a single point for sales in IT portfolio and headquarter is Phoenix which is based in Arizona. Headquarter sets the goals as well as distributes the work among the member of that portfolio team despite their location. Similar methods can help with IT based staff working with manufacturing unit, HR department, finance and other international corporate activities.

Different cultures: human relationships and the way the public can handle the common cases in team of software development can collapse in a minute. The cultural diversity and its basic understanding are becoming crucial for companies to handle virtual teams, since a normal conversation in one culture may be offensive in another (Cohen et al., 2017). The fact, staff in headquarter don’t speak the native language of the country may make things even more sensitive. The way to overcome the issue is handling the situation with clarity in motives and polite attitude. It is important for the manager to keep the tone polite, calm as well as confident about the certain message needed to be communicated and with proper clarity.

Detailed Discussion of Challenges in Managing Global Teams

Lacking face to face interaction: one of the biggest issues while managing global teams, specifically in the beginning was the reason that there was no kind of direct communication along with any face to face meetings. So, the challenge is how to manage the team like this and the solution lies in virtual meetings. Therefore, what is required here is right kind of software and a good internet connection (Alhaqbani et al., 2016). In case of daily meetings that help in catching up with present function and deletion of possible restrictions, weekly meeting based on planning as well as shows internal level of development and one meeting each month to show the overall status of various stakeholders, with product owners.

Time zones: another major challenge while managing global team is varied time zones. In addition, in IT industry, the developers have other jobs as well which results in reducing the probability of their presence to certain hours. So, in case many managed needs to setup daily or weekly meetings, it becomes a challenge to coordinate a time for it as per the time zone of every country (Daood et al., 2017).

Evaluation of performance: human being by nature loses focus easily and the situation also gets worse when they work from home instead of typical workplace culture. To avoid such cases and ensure that every member of team is productive while working, it is important to set important goals. It can be any kind of goals, like team goals, or weekly or quarterly goals. It is also important that goals are clear to each person. However, the most critical way is that goals can be objectified or quantifiable. The way it can be measured must be shared with all the team members. Accordingly, every team member will be ranked and evaluated (Cawsey et al., 2016).

The qualitative research is a collection as well as analysis of many non-numerical based functions consisting of words, pictures and activities and it doesn’t mean that one can apply a structure based approach for all research related efforts. The report will form some focused questions to ask from the organizations that managed global team. It is also important to get various inputs from multiple users to get better insight about things (Newton, 2017). The sample size for this research will be limited to thirty global companies.

Various variables will be evaluated that in this case will vary and can be measured, manipulated as well as controlled in the study. The overall design is decided carefully, in a systematic manner and come with a controlled plan that finds varied answers to the question of the study. This will help in providing a specific road map for all the angles to the study. The questionnaire will be formed to ask certain well-structured questions specifically designed to analyze the internal conflicts and challenges people face while working in a global team. The sample size while conducting quantitative research will be 50 organizations.

Qualitative Research

The research is prepared keeping all the important points in mind, there are still some limitations. First, the research is conducted in two-time periods which lasted for four weeks. The time is not enough for the researcher to be able to observe minutely all the performances of the team and overall challenges organizations face in their day to day operations (Gregory et al, 2016). Secondly, the population taken for qualitative research is small and only thirty organizations might not be able to show the lakhs of global companies dealing with the challenges on daily basis. Thirdly, the questionnaire is designed to understand the issues organizations are facing while handling the virtual team (Lohikoski et al., 2016). However, it may not be able to provide enough proofs to evaluate the issues properly.  

Work	Start Date	End Date
Project Scope	1st September	5th September
Literature Review	6th September	13th September
Research Methodology	14th September	17th September
Limitations	18th September	20th September
Final Submission	20th September	22nd September

Conclusion

In the end, it can be said easily that there is no clear way to handle a situation while dealing with virtual team however understanding of the roles as well as competencies of the virtual leaders are crucial for the team effectiveness. The characteristics of leadership also show that the simple leadership role in a normal setting requires different skills than managing a team in virtual setting. A leader who can interact in an effective manner in a more personal setting may not be able to do it properly in virtual culture. A leader who can establish trust in local setting may not be able to do it in virtual setting (Costa et al., 2017).  Leader should understand the issue face by varied virtual teams and must also invest more efforts to make sure that teams are using the resources to achieve the team goals.

Reference

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