Maintaining team culture, community and connection across four time zones
What I’ve learned leading a global team of customer support professionals
It’s a joke in my house that I’m the person who knows everything about everyone. When we travel, I’m the person who will learn about my fellow passengers’ families and what wedding they’re going to. I’ll get to know all the staff at the hotel. So maybe it’s just in my nature to be in places and roles where I can engage with people.
My role at Xero is no exception. I’m the General Manager of Customer Experience. Our team supports three million subscribers from seven offices across the globe.
I grew up in Wellington and did the typical Kiwi ‘big OE’, arriving in the UK during the absolute peak of the Global Financial Crisis. I found work at the financial ombudsman service — one of the few booming industries at the time — and I quickly found myself in a leadership position.
The organisation needed to set up a new contact centre and I was asked to be one of the leaders. I said, “I don’t know anything about contact centres! I’ve never worked in one, never even set foot in one.” But my manager at the time said, “Well that hasn’t stopped you from doing anything else”. And I guess that was true.
I fell in love with the pace. When you’re working in customer support you can’t turn off phones, emails, or chat while you work out what to do next or how to respond to an issue. You’re constantly solving problems and making decisions on the go.
When it was time to return to New Zealand (after one ‘transition’ year in Melbourne that turned into five), I knew I wanted to work for an organisation with a purpose — something that gets you out of bed in the morning.
I wanted to work for an organisation where everyone is customer focused — not just the support teams. Like many Kiwis, I knew the Xero story and that’s what brought me in.
Xero is my first role leading a global team — and this is everything I’ve learned over the last four years about maintaining team culture, community and connection across four time zones.
Culture
That role in London is where I truly learned that in the customer support world, culture is everything. Having incredible people in your team is the only way you can deliver an incredible experience to customers.
In a customer support role, you’re speaking to a lot of customers — all day, every day. And sometimes, that can be tough! Your team is best when they love what they do and when they have skin in the game for the organisation. When they care for the team, the people you work with and have respect for the part that they play — that’s fundamental to your success.
At Xero, who we hire plays a key role in achieving that. We don’t just look at aptitude and technical skills, but also at value alignment. And I think that makes a big difference.
One of our Xero values is #human and the way we live that is making it a focus before we jump into anything else. Our slack channels are filled with photos and personal updates and stories, and when we catch up on video calls one-to-one or as a wider team, we always start with checking in — “how are you, what’s going on?”.
I’ve met our team’s pets, children, flatmates and partners on video calls. A few years back I visited a team member in another region and met their spouse in person for the first time. I felt like I already knew them because they’d been in the background of our video calls so often!
As a team, we always make sure we have good laughs along the way. We’re high-trust, highly connected, and high-functioning and that’s down to having a great culture and really, genuinely caring about each other.
Tip: Building a great culture in your team always starts with your values. Define your team’s values and collectively agree on how you’ll live them. Make living those values part of everything you do: how you treat each other, how you work together and how you communicate with customers. When you’re recruiting new staff, look first to how they’ll align with and live by your values — and incorporate learning about values in their onboarding process.
Connection
If you’re a global team, it’s critical that you believe in a global connection. We really sweat each other’s challenges, we support each other and we celebrate successes across all regions.
Our follow-the-sun support model means that we hand over to another region at the end of each shift. I think of it like a relay race — you’re passing the baton to the next runner. If something happens in New Zealand, it’s our friends in the UK that we need to connect with. We can help them understand what to expect for their day, so there are no surprises.
With a team across multiple time zones, I don’t work ‘standard’ hours. But the flexibility that Xero offers allows me to both better connect with team members in other regions, and still carve out time for my family.
I have a two-year-old son, who really keeps me on my toes. After catching up with the Wellington team in the office, I can pop home for a couple of video calls in the afternoon. Then I’ll give myself a little break, pick up my son and our family can have dinner together. Once he’s gone to bed, I can jump on a call with our UK team during their morning hours. I find little pockets of flexibility throughout the day to make all of that happen.
As a customer support leadership team we’ve implemented a non-negotiable 1.5 hour slot each week where we all get together. And you have to be so respectful of that time — because it can be 6am in Australia, 8am in New Zealand, 2pm in Denver and 9pm in the UK, so team members from two regions are using their early morning or evening to make this happen. I’ll never take it lightly that sometimes our team is speaking to us before they even get the chance to speak to their family in the morning, or they’re speaking to us before they go to bed at night.
Tip: If your team works across different time zones, you may need to make a conscious effort to make time for connection. Schedule a meeting each week to check in on the team is going — both personally and at work. I recommend rotating the times of the meetings if you can too, so you don’t have the same team members always having the meeting scheduled in their early morning or evening. For teams using a follow the sun support model, a briefing handover between shifts can also be really effective. In this handover, teams inform the next shift on any issues they need to be prepared for. This regular communication helps build relationships between team members who might not otherwise get a chance to regularly chat.
Community
Every morning I check what the weather’s like in the city of each one of our offices and I’m more in tune with the time zones than I ever have been before. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
People often assume that a team with hundreds of people means high stress and no time for fun. But honestly, there’s a real beauty in being part of something big. We’ve fostered such an amazing community despite the physical distance between us.
Something I learned really quickly was the power of small conversations. Catching up with your team doesn’t have to be a meeting. We use slack to keep a constant dialogue, to quickly check in with each other: “I knew you were having a big day today, how did that go for you?”. It’s just like using Messenger for a group chat with my friends.
And our real community shines on Slack — where people celebrate and support each other so well. We really love emojis — there’s never a post without dozens of flashing emojis to accompany it.
The proof of our incredible community are the friendships that have been formed across the globe. It’s really common for people to visit a Xero office while they’re in that area on holiday to meet their colleagues in person. We’ve had people travel to another country and stay on the couch of a teammate from that region. And people from two different countries sometimes meet up and travel somewhere new together. When international travel wasn’t possible during the pandemic, these friendships were formed and kept through social media — even if the people had never met ‘in real life’.
Tip: To help create a sense of community when you can’t connect in real life, let your digital tools help you! And while video calls (cameras on!) are a great way to check in, so is chat — not everything has to be a 15 or 30 minute meeting. You could also establish digital community spaces — groups where the team can share common interests, hobbies, movements in the business, or celebrate their success.
I’m so grateful for our team and the culture, community and connection we’ve built together. I can sign off at the end of every day knowing that our teams in every region are well equipped to achieve everything that needs to be done in that time. I know that with our teams, our customers will be well-supported and taken care of.
