In theory, business agility and distributed teams are a match made in heaven.
After all, business agility is all about working faster and smarter, and enterprises with remote workers should be able to tick both of those boxes. After all, what’s nimbler than being able to turn anywhere into a workspace, at any time?
Yet for some enterprises, business agility and distributed teams aren’t pairing nicely. And in some cases, enterprises are so dismayed by a lack of efficiency and performance that they’re calling in their remote workers. Unfortunately, this usually doesn’t solve anything. On the contrary, it often makes things worse on every level: work is slower, there are more errors, employees are miserable, customers are frustrated, and both improvement and innovation grind to a halt.
In truth, business agility and remote working do indeed belong together. But the mistake that some enterprises make is believing that the gap they need to overcome is found in WHERE people work, instead of HOW they work. In other words, they’ve set up distributed teams to under-achieve at best — and outright fail at worst — because they didn’t equip them with tools that drive the three elements of business agility: adaptability, collaboration and efficiency.
- Tools that drive adaptability keep remote workers updated in real-time, so they always know what’s important and what matters as goals deadlines and priorities change.
- Tools that drive collaboration drive effective two-way communication between remote workers and their office-based colleagues, and automatically place information — such as emails and chat messages — in the proper business context.
- Tools that drive efficiency provide remote workers with easy on-demand access to files, documents and resources, and enable management teams to monitor and allocate tasks and resources.
The Bottom Line
Business agility and distributed teams can and should work together. But sparking a love connection won’t happen just by moving employees from a desk at head office, to a desk in their home office. To succeed and thrive, remote workers need tools that allow them to drive adaptability, collaboration and efficiency. When that happens, business agility stops being an expectation for the future, and becomes a fact right now.
Feel the Love
Clarizen’s award-winning collaborative work management (CWM) is trusted by leading enterprises across the world to unleash a new level of adaptability, collaboration and efficiency — and spark a lasting love connection between business agility and distributed teams. Feel the love in your enterprise and across your distributed teams locally, nationally and internationally with free fully-fledged 30-day trial.
