Working in a decentralized culture brings about amazing opportunities. It gives employees a bigger sense of freedom and independence, reduces expensive company overhead, and can make your company global from day one. While working in a decentralized culture has its perks, it doesn’t come without its challenges.

Here are our seven recommendations on how to make decentralization work for you.

H1 – 7 Recommendations to make decentralized work for you

• Show your work: Not every aspect of our work is “visible” and too often the most productive work that we do is given little credit. In a decentralized workspace, it’s important to well document your work to help others appreciate the value of your time.
• The Art of Slack: Slack can be a distracting tool. Overuse may consume your attention and kill productively, underuse may cause frustration for your team. Where is our events manager? Why hasn’t my director responded? Is this conversation professional or personal? Balance your attention well and you shall be rewarded.
• Solid onboarding: When are weekly meetings scheduled? How are the company’s documents organized? These types of questions are important for the new team members but a waste of time for the organization if they are continuously repeated. A proper onboarding guide can be tedious to go through but will save time in the future.
• Internal Archiving: Onboarding is helpful for the new recruits but continuous documentation of best practices goes a lot further. Properly organized and kept up to date, this internal wiki becomes indispensable.
• Recurring & Productive meetings: Company meetings help the organization stay focused and let its employees show their work and ask questions. Having a recurring meeting for your team gives an indispensable amount of oversight for the organization and adds structure to the team.
• Encourage teams to meet: Gitlab, a company born from decentralization, pays all travel expenses when a team members visit one another, anywhere in the world. Obviously, not all companies can afford to do this, but all can find some ways to encourage team building.
• Encourage honesty and transparency… without embracing mistakes. Mistakes are part of the work. You cannot succeed without failing sometimes. It’s important for employees to feel like they can tell the truth without fear. Encouraging honesty will give employees ownership of their work and help managers understand what’s working and what’s not.

H1 – The liberty is worth it!

Building decentralized processes will take time and effort to maintain. If done properly, the sense of freedom this will give to employees may be the best decision your company can make. In an increasingly digitized and globalized world, decentralized working environments are becoming more common, and are in greater demand from the millennial generation.

Have a decentralized work story? Send it to our team and we can feature it in the decentralized work series.