How businesses operate and how people work has changed dramatically during the last decade, fuelled by exponential advances in modern technology and the COVID-19 pandemic which reshaped the potential for working from home and remote job roles.
Many businesses are no longer restrained by the need to find localized talent to support them, but can instead tap into a global work force, enabling them to seek out people with the right skills and experience to fulfil their specific needs. This gives businesses the opportunity to scale by taking advantage of a much wider talent pool in the form of a global workforce.
Global talent acquisition is essential for biometrics CRO’s, who require individuals with highly specialized skills and experience to fulfil their client’s’ requirements. This can include everything from study design data management to statistical analysis to submission preparation. And in many cases, the complex nature of clinical studies requires teams with experience in specific therapeutic areas, such as rare disease or oncology.
Such specific skills and experience are not often readily available in a specific location, and if they are, they can incur considerable cost. Access to a global workforce provides the opportunity to source the best talent while tapping into competitive labor markets.
What are the benefits of utilizing a global workforce?
There’s a variety of reasons why many companies, including those in the biotech and healthcare industries, are choosing to build teams from diverse locations around the globe.
- They benefit from access to diverse skills, experiences and talents from around the world. This helps to ensure that they offer their customers and clients the very highest levels of expertise from start to finish.
- With access to a global workforce comes the ability to scale operations up and down as required, quickly and flexibly. This avoids unnecessary expense, enabling them to pay for talent as and when they need it.
- In addition to ensuring that companies only pay for the talent they need when they need it, competitive labor markets can make it significantly less expensive to hire in some areas.
- Tapping into new markets provides enhanced business expansion opportunities in these new geographical locations.
- With a wider talent pool comes fresh ideas, increased innovation and creativity that can help organizations to move ahead of their competitors and take their products and services to the next level.
What are the challenges of a global workforce and how do we overcome them?
While there are plenty of benefits of choosing to use a global workforce, it’s not without its challenges. There are several key considerations that your company should make if you’re considering expanding into a geographically-diverse team.
Barriers to communication
A global workforce can be spread across many different countries and time zones, and while technology has made it easier to communicate with people around the world, it’s still important to take into account the different working hours of people within the team. This may mean you have to wait longer for a response or are unable to collaborate in real time. This highlights the importance of clear, focused language as any need for clarification could considerably extend the communication and delay the next steps in the process. Fortunately, there are plenty of cloud-based technologies and digital platforms that maximize the changes of successful collaboration on projects, whether that’s document sharing, virtual training sessions or task force meetings.
Language barriers are another common problem, and it’s important to be mindful that other people in your team may not have the same level of understanding as you do. Using clear, simple language and avoiding jargon can help to ensure that everyone on the team is on the same page.
Cultural differences
Companies should also be mindful of navigating cultural differences when utilizing a global workforce, where alternate work ethics, social norms and communication styles can lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations have the potential to arise. It’s important for businesses to promote cultural awareness, provide cross-cultural training where appropriate, and create an inclusive environment to be able to optimize leveraging diversity within their workforce. At Veramed we are a B-Corp accredited company which means we need to comply with the highest levels of social, environmental and cultural standards. Our ”Culture Club” B-hive helps us educate all our employees about what is going on across the organisation, cultural norms and celebrations. We have a number of branches of the culture club including wellbeing, DEI and neurodiversity. People from across Veramed come together to collaborate in safe spaces and to raise awareness of what is going on in their countries. We would say we have local cultures and a global community.
Regulatory complexities
Navigating the regulatory landscape of a global workforce can be particularly challenging for healthcare and biotech industry organizations, and this is largely due to the complexities of labor laws, immigration regulations and other stringent rules regarding employment in the country within which they wish to operate.
In addition to this, employing organizations must understand the rules and requirements when it comes to factors such as data privacy, intellectual property protection, working time laws, as well as ensuring compliance with any industry-specific regulations.
To overcome these challenges, it’s essential to have a team with the comprehensive legal understanding of these ever-evolving stipulations, along with experience in proactive risk management strategies and processes in place for effective communication and coordination across the global workforce. Our corporate support functions are spread across all the regions we operate in; UK, EU, APAC and North America. This is a fundamental foundation on how we operate legally and efficiently. We tailor our practices accordingly, for example with HR / People teams locally trained in local labor law and employment practices.
At Veramed, we understand the benefits of globalization of workforce, with teams in Ukraine and India, as well as onshore locations in North America and the UK, we have the ability to tap into a diverse talent pool and offer our clients the most skilled and experienced people for their projects, when they need them most.
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