5 Strategies To Manage a 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 of hiring a remote team has become even more practical owing to the impact of COVID-19, which has rendered a lot of businesses incapable of working as usual.

In the wake of this pandemic, businesses are expected to realize the benefits of remote working soon enough. A helpscout survey says;

Approximately 69% of the employees surveyed cited higher productivity when working remotely.

COMMON CHALLENGES FRONTED IN MANAGING REMOTE TEAM

Read More: Hiring Remote Developers? Remember These Tips

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. Hiring accurate resources
5. Lacking accountability program
6. Unmanageable employee tracking
7. Lack of conversation within the team

Virtual team management seems onerous but not unsolvable. So Let’s discuss some strategies to help bridge the distance gaps between local and remote teams. I will also provide other ideas to help mitigate other potential issues as well.

TOP 5 Strategies To Manage a Remote Team

If remote working is beneficial, then at the same point, it also has some drawbacks such as it requires flawless management, and for this, you have to stay connected with the remote team.

If you want to manage the remote team in an ethical manner especially in COVID-19 Pandemic, you have to first do a proper module for managing the team. Here I have discussed a few strategies that will surely help you in managing the remote team.

1. 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 every day when both are available to discuss their daily plans. This will help you avoid communication gaps. You can use Skype, Google Meet to conduct an online meeting. 

58 more hours spent on core work while working from home and 256 fewer hours wasted on communication. 

A study from helpscout says that a daily meeting increases the response time vastly as shown below:

For a photographer, the golden hours of a day are the morning and evening to click the perfect portrait. Similarly, for you and your remote teams, the golden hours are when both are simultaneously working (remotely). If the remote teams are in the same time zone, then there’s nothing to worry about. But in case of a different time-zone. You can take 2-3 hours of the day when both parties can work together.

In these golden hours, you need to execute all the essential 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 every day.

2. 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 a solid rapport with 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 the 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 provide enough space to build a healthy relationship.

It has been predicted that 73% of all teams will have remote operators by 2028.

Don’t bring communication gap; if you are having any sort of query or misunderstanding, then clear the same by making a voice or video call. In remote working, the major challenge is to handle the remote team, and one can do so by understating the employee’s need. 

3. Everybody On The Same Page: Share Decision and Achievements

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

Hence, when you are working with a remote team, it’s 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.

American Express employees who worked from home were 43% more prolific.

When the employee works in the office environment, then they get self-motivated by viewing the work and achievement of other employees, and then they make mind to achieve the others task in an efficient way, somewhere this help businesses in growing.

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But while working from home, employees miss such things, and finally, this affects the employee work. But this can be managed by sharing the organization and employee achievements, and by doing so, you can motivate a remote team and also spread equality among each employee.

4. Utilize Right Tools and Softwares at Right Time

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, 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 costs but also increase the business your productivity.

For making video or voice calls, you can use Skype, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, Slack, and Google Hangouts. These applications are easy to use and manage. If you don’t want to use these applications, you can also develop the business custom software for conferring and video calling. But for that, you have to choose the best outsourcing software development to India to hire developers in India.

87% of employees feel more connected to their companions when a video is accessible.

To manage the remote team efficiently, you should use employee activity tracking tools. Such tools help in monitoring employee work hours and activity. Nowadays, several organizations are using Timecamp, Time Doctor, Toggl, and Hubstaff software to track the employee’s efficiency.

Read More: 10 Tips For Managing Remote Teams

5. Focus on Employees Task Not On Work Activities

During COVID 19 pandemic, its time to change the state of mind as by doing this, you will be able to view the positive side of the work. Well, during this time, most of the employees are facing difficulty in managing the work and considering this factor, you should only focus on employee work.

SOURCE: Google

If an employee is submitting its task on time and working efficiently, you should not focus on its activities. We all are staying at home, and we have to manage our home and office work at the same time, so it may be possible that employee activity percentage may get lesser, but you should not consider the same if an employee on a given timeframe completes the task assigned by you.

90% of employees say offering work and schedule flexibility can increase employee morale and busniess productivity. 

In order to manage the remote team in a good manner, you should offer flexibility to your team. This will not only support employees, but it will also enhance business productivity up to much extent. You can also use CRM software to manage the team and client interaction. To develop the leading CRM software, always select one of the best IT outsourcing companies to hire dedicated software developers.

Read More: 7 WAYS TO MANAGE A REMOTE TEAM

Wrapping Up

It’s always hard to manage a remote team. Besides, knowing how to handle a remote team is especially crucial for businesses that are only getting used to it now. However, if you follow the above-discussed strategies, it can be much less complicated for you to execute projects successfully. 

And if you’re looking for an expert software development firm providing remote teams for projects, then here are reasons why you should contact ValueCoders!

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

• Zero billing guarantee
• Pro-level Teams
• Guaranteed SLAs
• Flexible Hiring Models
• 3+ years of Average developer experience

If you are looking for excellent solutions to fullfill your business demand hire programmers from India. They will help you build software to manage the remote team and provide you multiple leading ideas for creating top-notch software.