An Interview with Bob Howard, CEO of OverDrive Services on how should a company’s long-term strategy incorporate global remote work and what operational changes should be considered to support this rapid shift in the coming years
Andrew: Hi Bob, what an excellent opportunity to catch up! I'm excited to team with you to expand what I recently wrote in a LinkedIn piece called the “Future of Work”. You have been working in this field, providing and managing remote teams for 25 years and are seeing some exciting new developments so it’s great to team again.
OverDrive was really quite early in this wheelhouse and there are some very important things to consider as one ventures into the world of building and managing remote and hybrid teams.
Today, I'd like to dive deeper into that conversation with you. One of the main points we're discussing is how remote and hybrid work models are set to continue expanding over the next decade. These models will offer greater flexibility but also challenge traditional work structures.
In a recent survey by Gartner, 127 company leaders across different sectors indicated a significant trend that 80% of company leaders either currently allow or have plans to enable remote work for their employees, at least on a part-time basis. Additionally, about 47% of these leaders plan to let employees work remotely full-time. While COVID-19 accelerated these changes, the shift towards remote and hybrid work is expected to transform the nature of work even more over the next ten years.
With that in mind, I have four major questions for you. Let's start with the first one today and continue our conversation over the next few days. So, the first question is: how should a company’s long-term strategy incorporate global remote work and what operational changes should be considered to support this rapid shift in the coming years?
Bob Howard: Yes, Andrew. When CEOs seek to act on this trend and implement remote or hybrid work, there are essential steps that require careful planning. So as one considers transitioning to a blended local and remote workforce, as we’ve discussed and practiced for many years, a well-defined strategy has been essential.
One element of that strategy is how to identify high-performing talent pools with the required skills and experience to achieve superior performance or what we call “Operational Mastery” in critical workstreams. This strategy should go beyond assigning isolated tasks to remote staff. Instead, it should focus on helping them achieve high performance across entire workstreams or multiple integrated workstreams such as finance, project administration, client experience, etc.
First, cultural and operational adjustments are necessary to ensure effective communication and collaboration between in-house teams and remote staff. Integrating teams and workstreams seamlessly across departments is crucial. Determining the right tools and methods for optimization is a topic for another discussion. However, having an executive leadership team or a steering committee working with a firm like ours is essential in designing, developing and managing remote teams. Additionally, an in-country manager or a fully managed BPO like OverDrive is crucial, whether that individual is part of your team or your BPO’s team.
Secondly, you’ll want to develop performance metrics tailored to the roles and expected outcomes of each individual within the aggregated team so as to ensure the measurement and reward of productivity and quality contributions, as you do now with your in-country team. The most stable, best-in-class remote teams, I believe, are those that receive recognition, affirmation and praise where possible. Sometimes praise and recognition are as important as the compensation that remote team members receive.
Thirdly, I’d say culture. Fostering a remote-friendly culture involves promoting your values, ensuring trust, flexibility and accountability alongside regular virtual team-building activities. Sourcing globally diverse talent pools with varying skill sets requires structured onboarding and continuous education. Robust support systems ensure that your teams have the necessary resources to make that happen.
Likewise, the superior leadership you demonstrate day to day here or in your local market which is characterized by strong communication, empathy, and transparency - those sorts of things - incorporating them and making cultural adjustments to mimic your corporate culture will energize your remote staff and create a teaming environment that will be tremendously helpful. The good news is that while these steps require thoughtful planning, they are manageable to implement.
Andrew: Bob, what a fantastic conversation! I could just tell that this is something that you didn’t just start doing last week or when COVID happened. I know you’ve been pressing into Operational Mastery and working with global remote teams over the past twenty years. In our next session, I want to discuss “the integration of culture” with remote operational teams.
We'll post this conversation on LinkedIn as part of this The Future of Work is Now series. Anyone interested in learning more about Remote and Global Operation teams should reach out to you at OverDrive Services.
Thanks for the conversation and I look forward to our next conversation on this topic.
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