3 Signs You Need to Save Your Communications

Communication is the most important aspects to maintain if you want to achieve success in your outsourcing. Equally, a breakdown in communications can result in major difficulties for your business. While you and your remote team may have started off brilliantly, and you have all the skills and knowledge in place, it is easy to feel complacent and let the communication slip between you and your remote staff. Worse still, you may not realise the problem until it is too late to save your communications.

Here are three red flags to watch out for in your communications with your remote staff.

1. Over-reliance on email

When you started remote staffing, you and your offshore employees had regular Skype conversations, and routinely sent instant messages. As your employee grew into the role, you let those Skype catch-ups slide, until they were no longer a regular occurrence – or even being skipped entirely. You’re still in communication, but everything is done via email.
This is a big warning sign that your communications are starting to break down. Particularly if either party (or both) is taking an overly-long time to reply to those emails. Eventually you or your employee will run into an issue which can’t be solved via email – however, having become reliant upon it, it takes too long to work that out and the issue becomes a full-blown emergency.
Solution: Prioritise catching up with your remote team via Skype or voice chat regularly. Email doesn’t allow for the back-and-forth which can offer solutions to potential problems or allow for the speed that can be offered by having a call discussing all the issues in one go. By keeping that Skype meeting time, you are more likely to stay on top of any difficulties.

2. Lack of pro-active communication

As above, when you started remote staffing you were catching up with your offshore employees regularly, whether things were going badly or not. However, that has slipped when you’re busy and they know their job requirements better, now the only time you get in contact is when there are fires to put out. Equally, your remote employee is only messaging you when there are urgent problems. You don’t know where things are day-to-day, because you only hear when things are going wrong.
Solution: Make sure you and your remote team regularly update each other on things, whether it’s a major crisis or not. It can even be nice to hear when things are going well and your employees are happy. Ask for updates often, and even when you are under the pump, make sure you are in touch .

3. Your employees don’t know who they’re working with

You’ve been outsourcing for a while now, and things are going well. Your company is growing and you’re hiring new staff both locally and offshore. That’s all positive, but familiarity can breed complacency. Where you once made a lot of effort to ensure your local and offshore employees knew and interacted with one another, that has slipped off your radar. Now you have new employees locally who don’t know much about their offshore colleagues, and your remote team has members who do not communicate with your local staff terribly often.
This becomes a problem when, in a pressure situation, your employees either don’t know who to communicate with to get the job done, or who don’t know how to communicate effectively between countries.
Solution: Keep going the way you started. Make sure to integrate new local and remote employees, encourage and facilitate them getting to know one another, and make sure any new employee knows who is responsible for what along with where they are based.

Outsourcing with Deployed, we can help you get your communications set up so that you and your remote team can communicate effectively. We make sure you have all the knowledge you need to maintain good communication and make your outsourcing a success.