By Sofia Ferndandez
Account Manager - Zype LatAm
When building a startup from the ground up the idea of going global comes around at various points during a company’s life cycle. It can happen when there’s financial growth, team expansion, or an increased level of product awareness. Usually when this idea come along it’s not easy to put into action.
At Zype we began the process of going global a few years back. It started with the intention of building a distributed workforce to gain access to unique and capable candidates from around the world. The goal was to find individuals who could bring in different perspectives and ideas based on their experiences, education, knowledge, and personalities.
It’s not an easy thing going global, at Zype we’ve been really careful to get it right. As we continue to understand the ways of international companies we’ve taken a few things into consideration to help us be successful.
Hiring for a Global Company
One of the benefits of going global is having access to a larger pool of candidates to choose from. Since your employees may be collaborating with colleagues and customers from a variety of global locations, it is important to look for a specific skill set from the people you hire. Candidates who are adaptable, emotionally intelligent, confident in their abilities, independent, driven, and know how to embrace multicultural environments are those who perform best in a global working environment. The more diverse your team is the better equipped they will be to handle problems when they arise as everyone can pitch in with creative solutions.
At Zype we now have Zypesters in a variety of different places including Argentina, Mexico, Russia, Japan, Italy, Brazil, and the United States. We take into consideration the skill sets above when hiring but also go one step further by searching for people who have our core values : courage, hard work, awesomeness, resourcefulness, and thoughtfulness. Our team is one-of-a-kind, and I can honestly say each person I work with has individual pieces of knowledge and experiences that help add value to our company as a whole.
Establishing a Global Culture
Once you’ve hired the right people it’s important that your company culture helps them thrive. When you have people working in various parts of the world it’s a little more difficult to accomplish this. First you need to ensure your team feels whole. This means making sure each person feels just as valued as anyone else in the team no matter their location by acknowledging both their individual and group achievements. You also need to ensure your employees stay connected. Thank goodness for technology! Lastly it is important your employees are open to learn, experience, and understand life outside of their own. You can do this by encouraging travel, education, reading, and other forms of stepping outside of their comfort zone.
At Zype we value individual and group achievements both during our Global Monday Meetings as well as via virtual high fives using Karma in our Slack chat rooms. We also encourage video communication with conference tools like Zoom, and even go one step further by visiting our remote Zypesters or encouraging them to come to our NYC headquarters every so often. On top of that we encourage our team members to ask their colleagues to turn their video on during meetings, to make things feel more personal and present. Although we have Zypesters in various parts of the world, it feels as if they are one office space over. Moreover, we know the importance of encouraging the people who make up our team to continue learning and exploring as we believe this helps create well rounded and accomplished individuals. We do this by offering unlimited vacation as well as a personal education budget that can be used to watch lectures from Udemy, to buy books about our roles and the industry, as well as to attend courses and achieve certifications that promote individual advancement.
The move towards a global company can be difficult but it’s also exciting. Understanding how grand our world is and the extensive amount of opportunities it brings really puts growing our business internationally into perspective. We have an awesome team full of members who are constantly being challenged which allows them to advance professionally. Their individual growth impacts Zype’s growth in more ways than one. We’re eager to see how our team continues to expand and the new people that will be brought in to help us move mountains. Will you be one of them? We are hiring!