It takes bold leadership to do things differently. It’s often easier to stay on an existing path rather than embrace change. Which is why, despite the obvious setbacks, the global pandemic’s legacy was a force for good in some areas of the corporate world. It catalysed change in the way we work, catapulting us – globally, suddenly, at the same time – into the reality of remote working, which was previously a work pattern that applied to the corporate minority
Since then, millions of us have lived through a seismic global shift in how ‘work’ is delivered. And while the topic of remote working still stimulates lively discussion across different sectors, many global companies have discovered that remote and hybrid work patterns are not just fall-back options during a global pandemic. They can be models for business success as well as attracting and retaining top talent.
Many global enterprises, such as Spotify, have been quick to recognize that a distributed working model – where remote and hybrid teams work in unison while located across many locations – offers them access to a previously untapped global talent pool. During the height of the pandemic, Spotify – like many organisations – introduced a ‘work from anywhere’ policy, which continues to be a cornerstone of its recruitment strategy to this day. Its success is down to the fact that the move wasn’t just about delivering flexibility for team members. From a commercial perspective, it opened up global recruitment efforts, allowing Spotify to hire the best talent. Location became irrelevant. Since then, the company has appointed staff in countries where it doesn’t have a physical presence. This is a perfect example of how a borderless approach to talent acquisition has been embraced by a large-scale organisation.
Talent without borders
‘Borderless hiring’ refers to the practice of recruiting individuals from across the globe to work remotely. Many companies are no longer limiting themselves to only hiring candidates located within a commutable distance of their HQ. Instead, they view the world as a recruitment playground that allows companies to curate ‘borderless talent’.
Many international tech companies are advocates of this new borderless approach to hiring. It can be a game changer for tech companies in particular, where business success and competitive advantage rely on niche skills (i.e. specialist developers), deep knowledge of certain sectors and creative thinkers. After all, it’s unlikely that a full suite of ‘dream team’ members will all live within a commutable radius of an office centre point. And a model that enables employees to work from home is far less expensive and bureaucratic for companies than setting up office hubs in different geographies.
Workwize recently undertook a research study that surveyed more than 151 IT managers in companies with 200+ employees operating out of a minimum of two countries. The goal was to better understand how IT teams equip their global workforce. A poignant finding of the survey was that 77% of global teams struggle to find the right talent. It’s clear that borderless hiring is the answer. It holds many advantages, including:
- Access to a broader, more diverse range of skills across previously untapped markets.
- Enhanced innovation through diversity. Teams comprising employees from different cultural and professional backgrounds bring fresh perspective and ideas.
- Cost-effectiveness. Top talent can be recruited from regions with lower salary expectations than a company’s home market. Equally, expensive contracts for office rentals can be avoided, while teams are scaled up.
- Increased flexibility and agility, thanks to employees in different time zones. Businesses can effectively operate 24/7, enhancing productivity and responsiveness.
Overcoming barriers to borderless talent
Thanks to the significant benefits of hiring individuals across borders, this is a nascent trend. Many companies are set to benefit from distributed working practices in the coming decade. Yet managing dispersed teams is not without its challenges. While these are many, there is one in particular that is business critical and, if not managed well, can cause a long-lasting reputational, operational and financial headache: how do companies tackle the challenge of equipping a distributed workforce with the necessary IT equipment? IT set up is something that can be coordinated quite simply and formulaically when staff are located together in one office, but it quickly becomes complex in a distributed work model.
It has typically become the task of IT teams to ‘set up the tech’ that the success of borderless talent management relies on, however real problems can arise when the centralised IT resource of global enterprises become responsible for the procurement, distribution, maintenance and recovery of IT assets for individuals in different countries around the world. They already have enough business-critical tasks to deliver. This can add significant pressure to their workload.
In the previously mentioned Workwize research study, 48% of IT manager respondents identified ‘operational efficiency and automation’ as their top priority. This ranked ahead of: cybersecurity and data protection (28%); digital transformation and agility (18%); and UX and support excellence (4%). It’s a sobering thought that additional strains of managing the IT needs of borderless talent could actually be diverting critical IT resource away from tasks that safeguard business integrity and significantly accelerate growth and competitive advantage.
It’s worth mentioning here that some global companies pass the burden of ‘IT set up’ onto their new hires. Nearly a quarter of the respondents to the Workwize survey indicate that their company asks employees to either purchase their own devices and accessories or travel into an office to collect the equipment they need to do their job. Is this really the best use of onboarding time for valuable – and expensive – company resource? In addition to the (potentially profitable) time companies are losing getting them up to speed in delivering on their primary role, spending hours setting up their tech could be hugely demotivating for new hires. Plus, there are potential compromises to standardisation and security protocols that could result from employees choosing their own tech.
The normalisation of ‘borderless talent’ as a foundational recruitment strategy has created a need for a more efficient and optimised way of automating IT asset management. One which makes it less of an administrative drain on a company’s IT team. So what can companies do?
‘Zero touch’ deployment for globally distributed IT hardware
Many global businesses, including Embraer, EQT, Monday.com, Skillsoft and Snap (owner of Snapchat) have already found their answer. They outsource their IT hardware asset management for their international workforces to free up their internal IT teams for business-critical work.
Such ‘zero touch’ global IT hardware management services are relatively new, having been borne from the pandemic and the resulting need to streamline the onboarding, management and offboarding of remote workers with IT hardware. Yet those providing these services respond to a very real gap in the market and are already delivering significant value to the bottom line of early adopters. They allow companies to outsource the headache of procuring, deploying, managing, retrieving and disposing of IT hardware across their global teams.
At Workwize, we have seen that automated workflows which support full IT hardware lifecycle management have saved IT managers hundreds of hours per month on manual tasks. There are a host of other efficiency gains to be made, too. Localised procurement can minimise customs and shipping fees as well as carbon footprints. And regional warehousing provision can also offer time and cost efficiencies related to retrieving, storing and redistributing IT hardware.
As global work without borders continues to grow, so too will zero-touch IT hardware management as an enabling service. Evolution within the workplace has always inspired innovation and we are in the middle of a period of great change. The emergence of service providers like Workwize, capable of supporting global companies to scale efficiently and optimally by harnessing the best talent globally, will in turn deliver more innovation. They enable companies to reclaim capacity and resource to channel into customer service, efficient business operations and building competitive advantage.
Michiel Meyer
Michiel Meyer is CEO and co-founder of Workwize, a fast-growing “zero-touch” platform for the IT management of remote and globally distributed workforces.
