5 Strategies To Manage Remote Team

Hiring a remote team of developers means, you bring resources on board for your development projects without allocating physical space  in your office. The idea is cost saving as well as professional these days. A helpscout survey says “Approximately 69 percent of the employees surveyed cited higher productivity when working remote“

Read More: Hiring Remote Developers? Remember These Tips

However, it can be a daunting task to manage remote teams sitting miles away from you. You might face numerous challenges as you do not have an option for face to face interaction. Apart from that, the other challenges are:

1) Coordinating across different time zones

2) Building rapport with team members of different mindsets

3) Collaborating among different cultures

4) Keeping communication clear among the members

Virtual team management seems tough but not unsolvable.  Let’s discuss about some strategies to help bridge the distance gaps between local and remote teams, and ideas to help mitigate other potential issues as well.

Minimizing Time Zone Difficulties:

 If your office is in New York or London and you are teaming up with Indian developers, then they might be sleeping when you are catching their bugs. Hence, it’s really hard to communicate the normal way.

However, you can schedule a meeting time everyday when both are available to discuss their daily plans. This will help you avoid communication gaps. A study from helpscout says that a daily meeting increases the response time vastly as shown below:

Rapport Building:

   “In teamwork, silence isn’t golden, it’s deadly” – Mark Sanborn

It’s important in any program, especially for agile remote teams/dedicated remote development teams,  to have solid rapport among each other. Personal connection builds trust, eases self-organization, minimizes missed expectations, and boosts morale.

Give some time to your teams to make things normal. Take help of video calling to bridge the gaps. Face to face video conferencing somewhat gives you the feeling of working in the same office. Other than that don’t limit conversations only related to work. Talk freely and give enough space to build a healthy relationship.

Everybody On The Same Page:

Decision makings are always crucial for every project. That’s why everyone should be aware when a decision is made. For a remote team, its harder to keep them informed. Its always easy to forget these little things that make a big difference.

Hence, when you are working with a remote team, its better to build a transparent culture all across.  whenever a decision is made, it should be documented and delivered to all. This will make sure your team is on the same page where you are.

Utilizing the ‘Golden Hours’:

For a photographer, the golden hours of a day is the morning and the evening time to click the perfect portrait. Similarly, for your local and remote teams the golden hours are the time when both are present in office. Be it only 2-3 hours a day, that’s your time.

In your golden hours, you need to execute all the important tasks that require both side’s attention. You can keep the daily meetings, make important decisions, fix the bugs, review the work as well as update project status in this time span everyday.

Utilizing right tools for remote team communication:

Video calling is an excellent way of remote communication. However, you don’t want to do that for fixing minor issues or documenting things. Selecting the right tools for the right communication purpose is important.

Therefore, the daily or weekly meetings can be done with video calling. Whether, you can use emails for documentation and phone calls for fixing minor issues. An internal social networking platform can be chosen for regular chats and announcements.  Differentiating tools for different purposes will not only save cost but also your productivity.

Read More: 10 Tips For Managing Remote Teams

It’s always hard to manage remote team. However, if you follow the above discussed strategies, it can be much less difficult for you to successfully execute projects. Besides, it is also very important to hire Agile software teams from a leading IT outsourcing company.

ValueCoders is a leading Indian IT outsourcing company for Web & Mobile development projects. We provide agile software teams who are well versed with modern technologies. Our services include the following benefits: