Do you manage employees who are spread over time zones and national borders, and whom you seldom – or never – meet in person?

Then maybe you’ve experienced that as challenging as managing employees of various cultural backgrounds can be, it’s even more challenging when you are managing virtually.

Training in distance management is for people who work in top management, as managers, as team leaders, or as project managers in the global arena and want to strengthen their virtual management skills.

The training is tailored, so it’s designed just for you – whether distance management has been part of your workday for many years, or if it’s something entirely new for you.

The training will help you learn to:

• Adapt your management style, so you can effectively manage employees with various cultural backgrounds from a distance
• Be a more present and visible leader at a distance
• Become aware of the cultural differences that exist in the employee group you are managing, and understand how the differences affect your daily work
• Put in play differences in national culture, professional background, and organizational position, so you take full advantage of the possibilities for new thinking and growth these differences provide
• Choose the communication channels and virtual tools most likely to result in clear communication and productive collaboration
• Build up personal relationships and trust in your team or employee group – across cultures, locations, and organizational placement
• Motivate, engage, and involve your employees around the world
• Set clear rules, expectations and goals, so everyone is working in the same direction, even though you rarely or never meet in person
• Create the best possible framework to allow geographically spread-out employees to share their knowledge and create results together

We can tailor a short workshop or a longer training programme to a single manager group or a larger number of managers in your company. We can also focus on virtual leadership of employees from one or more specific countries, such as Denmark, India, China, Russia, Brazil, or the USA.

Together we’ll decide on the duration of the training, the learning goals, the content, as well as the time and place for the training, which can take place either face-to-face, virtually, or some combination of the two.

We have a lot of experience designing virtual learning programmes for both small and large groups, and this can be a cost-effective solution if your managers are spread across the globe.

One popular model is 2 x 2 hours online workshops scheduled a few weeks apart, so your managers have the opportunity to implement their new knowledge in practice between the two workshops.

Examples of what we can work with during the training:

• Cultural understanding and cultural self-understanding
• Practical cultural tools, for example the "4R Model" and the "Cultural Investigator"
• Myths and facts about virtual collaboration and management – what does the newest research say, and what does it mean for you as a distance manager?
• How can you make your virtual meetings productive and be certain that you get input from all the participants? Preparing for, holding, and following up on virtual meetings
• Input on the typical pitfalls and risks for distance management – and how you avoid them
• Which communication tools work best for the various types of assignments and messages? (For example e-mail, chat, telephone, video conferences, social media and online forums)
• As a manager, when should you communicate to your global employees as a group, and when is it better to have one-to-one conversations?
• Establishing effective workflows and rules in virtual collaboration. How do you make decisions? Give each other feedback? Share knowledge?
• How do you handle misunderstandings, disagreements and conflicts in global virtual collaboration?
• Specific cases and questions from your workday as a distance manager

• Contact us! We’ll have a chat about how we can meet your needs for training in distance management.
• Are you a distance manager who would like individual feedback or coaching? Check out our intercultural executive coaching or coaching of global team and project managers.

Check out our blog posts about virtual and hybrid collaboration

• 10 tips for effective global email communication
• Succeed in your global hybrid collaboration: 7 quick tips.
• 3 assumptions you should challenge if you want to be successful at virtual collaboration.
• 7 smart tools that can boost your virtual collaboration.
• Bring in the humaneness: 6 techniques for building online relationships.