Strategic Alignment for Remote Teams

Are you struggling to sustain strategic clarity and execution in a remote or hybrid workforce?

Remote and hybrid work are now the norm. Traditional strategy planning (annual retreats, siloed documents, infrequent updates) simply can’t keep up. This article shows you how to build a remote work strategy that’s continuous, collaborative, and effective — whether your team is distributed across one office or ten time zones.

Even before COVID, globalisation and the growth of multinational firms had meant that more and more workers were remote from each other. Even if they didn't work from home, they often worked in distributed offices. Post-COVID, hybrid and remote work, as well as flexible hours, are the new normal.

Key challenges in remote work

January 2025 research by SSRN shows that key challenges from remote work include:

• Communication
• Productivity and
• Team Cohesion.

To address these challenges, it goes on to emphasise the need to:

• Articulate and communicate clear goals.
• Track performance to show visible progress.
• Provide tools and platforms that support remote work.

StratNav ticks all of these boxes.

• It helps organisations articulate and communicate clear goals. And it also explicitly links them to
  • the strategic insights that underpin them, and
  • the actions employees are taking to deliver them.
• It includes a strategy scorecard showing clear progress against all strategic goals.
• It provides all of this in a single collaborative platform. It provides a single, integrated and consistent source of truth. And it keeps everyone up-to-date and on the same page.

The Annual Strategy Retreat

Strategy remains one of those holdouts for in-person work. The annual strategy retreat remains one of the shrinking number of occasions when it is worth the time and cost involved in getting everyone to a single location.

However, that is not enough.

1. The strategy off-site agenda is increasingly co-opted for other activities which people want to do in-person but can't justify on their own merits. That, plus the inevitable team-building exercises, is eroding the time available for actually doing strategy at such off-sites.
2. Strategy is not an annual (or even quarterly or monthly) event. It is a continuous process. A way of thinking and acting.

StratNav is ideally placed to address this challenge.

We're not saying that you shouldn't do in-person strategy events, not that you shouldn't supplement these were other remote events (online workshops etc.).

But:

1. StratNav can help you to be better prepared for such events. This means that you can make the best use of the limited time you may have in-person and at other events.
2. StratNav can keep your strategy development and execution process alive and vital between your events.

It does this by providing:

1. A single source of truth about what your strategy is, why it is that, and how well it's working. Our repository-based system ensures your strategy always remains internally consistent, no matter how much circumstances or your strategy change.
2. An online, real-time, collaborative environment. This is available anytime and from anywhere. People can engage with that content in a transparent way, keeping everyone on the same page and aligned. Say goodbye to side conversations which get lost in personal inboxes.
3. A solution which works with your existing environment by hotlinks, integrations and APIs.
4. An international solution which caters seamlessly to collaboration across
   1. time zones and
   2. internationalisation standards (like date and number formats).
5. Contextual help and AI to improve everyone's effectiveness and deliver more consistent results.

The result: always-on, consistent and high-quality strategy development and execution, no matter how you work, leading to greater alignment and better performance. Peace of mind in an increasingly VUCA world.

Remote strategy challenges

Developing and executing strategy carries additional risks such as:

• Knowledge loss in side conversations. Strategic insight gets lost in side conversations, email archives, and disjointed out-of-date documents.
• Slower decision loops: Working across sites and time zones can lead to slower decision loops. But as the world speeds up, strategy development and execution speed up with it. Email, PowerPoint and Word are not responsive enough to meet this challenge.

Remote Strategy Framework

StratNav provides and end-to-end process and framework for remote strategy development and execution:

1. Gather strategic insight asynchronously.
   1. Collate insights in StratNav's collaborative frameworks, like SWOT, PESTEL, McKinsey 7-S, Porter's Five Forces, competitor analysis, etc.
   2. Allow StratNav to work behind the scenes to integrate it all and update the whole team when things change.
   3. Assign and track tasks for insight gathering work, all in one place.
2. Collaborate synchronously to make decisions and set direction:
   1. Using tools like Zoom and Teams to meet virtually. You can have one team member share their StratNav screen to focus discussions, while other team members can contribute from their own computers in real time.
   2. Don't let your meetings become "talking shops" without clear agendas or outcomes. Plan your meetings and agendas with StratNav's calendar and meeting tools.
   3. Let Read.ai and StratNav record and analyse your conversations to write minutes and extract key insights and actions.
   4. Use the Strategy Triad and Strategy Alternative Matrix to structure and record decision-making processes.
   5. Use StratNav's in-built AI as an extra brainstorming partner. It uses the full context of everything it knows about your organisation and strategy to come up with more specific answers than you'll get anywhere else.
3. Execute plans asynchronously:
   1. Once the decisions are made, individuals or smaller groups can work on execution.
   2. StratNav tracks strategic initiatives and actions, with full transparency and stakeholder management built in.
4. Review progress synchronously:
   1. StratNav's inbuilt Initiative Status Report and Strategy Scorecard mean everyone is already always up-to-date with progress and outcomes.
   2. But getting together to review it over Zoom or Teams will increase coherence and alignment. Have one team member share the Status Report and Scorecard, whilst our AI analyses the conversation and other team members add their input in real-time.

Try StratNav now

If you've not tried it yet, now is the time. Sign up here.

See also:

• 12 tips for how to do business strategy when you're remote
• How do you solve a problem like remote working?
• Who're you looking at?