For over a year now, many software companies have been working on projects from the comfort of their own homes. To ensure the safety of employees, many have also established their own remote working models with many having implemented these even years back.
While some are more traditional in preferring for teams to work under one roof, it is now a standard to be able to manage remote and distributed teams as part of a software company’s growth tactics.
Working remotely gives companies the freedom to hire the best talent all over the world with location not being not an issue anymore. With the availability of online communication tools, mobile and cloud technologies, productivity of distributed teams are also guaranteed.
Let’s do a rundown of smart ways to more a effective management of distributed teams and see how you can improve your current management with these tips.
1. Regularly communicate and engage with your team
Under (or ineffective) communication can cause huge issues whereas over communication can only be beneficial. Anytime you are working with a remote team it is easy for them to be left in the dark about a lot of things. Don’t just talk to them once a week or once a day during scrum stand-up meetings. Be sure to engage with them on a continual basis to really make sure they are getting enough help to get work done, especially during the early days of your engagement. A good way to do it would be through a tech communication channel where team members can share their updates or issues for others to get help from.
2. Instill collaboration among team members
Remote workers benefit from having a ‘richer’ technology options, such as video conferencing, that gives participants many of the visual cues that they would have if they were face-to-face. Video is also particularly useful for complex or sensitive conversations, as it feels more personal than written or audio-only communication. There are other circumstances when quick collaboration is more important than visual detail. For these situations, provide mobile-enabled individual messaging functionality (like Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc.) which can be used for simpler, less formal conversations, as well as time-sensitive communication.
3. Focus on productivity and output quality
Having to prove efficiency and productivity is among the challenges of having remote teams. Companies that are for hiring remote teams do it primarily because of the freedom to hire competent talents from anywhere. But, how can they make sure that teams are actually working on their project during their declared working hours?
Without being too invasive of employees' privacy,, the best way to ensure everyone’s doing their job is to set goals, itemize clear expectations for each role and have regular check-ins to gauge progress.
Establishing a shared goal
Defining and sharing the project’s overarching goal and explicitly outlining how that goal would be achieved so that everyone in the team is privy to the strategic objectives and the macro-level goals of the project. It is important that your team has a shared goal and a common understanding of how progress will be measured.
These goals will likely be dictated by broader business goals and would provide a great opportunity to get inputs from the team as well on some of the aspects of the larger plan. Once everyone is aligned to the larger objective, it becomes easy to set expectations individually with a particular team-member.
4. Foster diversity
With globalization, teams with members from different cultures are becoming a common thing. Though this brings in ideas from different points of view to the table, managing multicultural teams can be a challenge especially because of differences in professional and social cultures.
Many are getting the hang of working with colleagues from different countries and management are becoming more adept in handling differences such as encouraging their teams to provide ideas, suggestions, and contribute to initiatives that they’re interested in.
A diversified work environment, even virtually workplaces, help employees to acquire great global citizenship, honing their professional rapport with colleagues and personalities to be one with the world. If diverse software development team are united and managed in the right way, they can give their company an edge over other organizations.
5. Find opportunities to socially interact
One of the most essential steps a manager can take is to structure ways for software developers is to interact socially (that is, have informal conversations about non-work topics) while working remotely. This is true for all remote workers, but particularly so for workers who have been abruptly transitioned out of the office.
BlastAsia – Helping you ace projects with top notch, remote talent
A very important aspect of getting the desired results in an outsourced project is the ability to manage technical teams well. Numerous challenges from managing time-zones, ensuring trust, communication and productivity and mitigating cultural issues could well derail the progress of your project. While following the best practices listed in the article above would ensure that your take the necessary precaution while managing remote teams, however a lot would depend on the context of a particular situation and how proactively your team manages (or averts) any new challenge that potentially arises.
BlastAsia with its 20+ years of experience with remote dedicated software teams virtually is proud to work with clients all over the world helping them with DevOps consulting and implementation. With an adept understanding of cultural and workplace alignment training which is critical for success, BlastAsia has become the preferred partner for companies looking for outsourcing services.
To know more, log on to our website https://www.blastasia.com/ or connect with one of our customer success managers HERE to set-up a consultation.