Hiring a remote development team that fulfills the skill requirements of your project is the first challenge you need to deal with. Even bigger is the challenge of managing a remote developers team. Since you cannot see them working in the next cubicle, it doesn’t mean you cannot track their productivity and output.
There are many challenges to managing a remote developers team. First, we would like to look at these challenges closely, followed by some effective tips.
Lack of Bonding with the Inhouse Team
It is common for the in-house developers to bond with other team members working on the same premise. When hiring remote developers for your app development project, keep this crucial difference in mind. This bonding is essential to ensure better collaboration and consistent workflow. In the case of remote teams, many companies face this challenge.
You can address this challenge by facilitating frequent conversations over Zoom or Google Meet with the remote team. Create some engaging events where remote and in-house team members participate and have fun.
1. Lack of Feedback
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Do you give your remote employees frequent feedback on their work? There are high chances that you don’t. Most companies consider it unnecessary. But for remote teams sending feedback can be a great factor to boost their productivity and morale. Make it a point to give regular feedback for their work.
2. Time Zone Difference
This is one of the most common challenges for any outsourcing project. Because of time zone differences, the in-house team cannot be able to meet the remote team regularly and discuss in real-time.
This challenge can be mediated by facilitating weekly or fortnightly meetings alternatively in favorable timings for in-house and remote teams. In this way, all members have to stretch a little in a week and fortnight for the sake of meeting everyone in real time.
3. Preventing Distractions
Remote employees can spend some time on Netflix or Twitter, and such distractions can undermine productivity to a great extent. There are remote tracking tools and real-time collaboration platforms with access to remote screens to solve this issue. But more than anything, you need to ensure strong work ethics in candidates when hiring for remote work.
Useful Tips for Maintaining the Productivity of Remote Employees
Now that we have explained some key challenges and anecdotes to managing remote employees, let’s directly provide some valuable tips to ensure the optimum productivity of remote teams.
4. Don’t spy on them
In a digital world where there is no dearth of apps developers and tools to remotely monitor and track what people are busy with on their device screens, simple mutual trust still works better to garner more productivity. When you spy on your employee, and they somehow get an air of it, you cannot regain their trust ever.
5. Help them to improve, don’t punish
All the data you get corresponding to the productivity of your remote staff can be used to boost their productivity and output. Instead of coming with negative performance feedback and some penalties, show them the mirror and lend your advice to improve.
6. Don’t go into micromanagement
Remember, when you have hired a remote team, you need to give responsibilities simply by relying on trust factors. Performance evaluation from time to time is perfectly okay as long as you don’t go into micromanagement and ask for their output every hour. Allow them some breathing space and schedule evaluation on a weekly basis instead of hour-to-hour tracking.
7. Come up with scheduled communication
In any development project, communication takes up a considerable time. Every app project passes through a series of communication covering different aspects of the development. Particularly in-app projects involving remote developers, communication is doubly important to keep both teams aligned with the project objective.
For remote work allocation, communication should be facilitated in proper schedules and through convenient channels. The communication should also consider the time zone differences. For offshore teams, you may need to stretch the regular working time a little at times to facilitate real-time communication. You should also ensure prompt feedback and address issues quickly to boost productivity.
Delayed feedbacks problem redressal weaken your development phase. Therefore, you must keep continuous communication with a remote team comprising an android or iPhone developer for better results.
8. Use remote management tools
App development projects these days rely heavily on different tools. For remote outsourcing projects, many tools can be effective in facilitating communication, collaboration, and efficient project management.
For remote team management, consider using Skype and Google Meet for communication, Trello and Slack for project management, TeamViewer for real-time screen access, Basecamp or Jira for real-time collaboration, and many more. Ensure the remote team is well versed with the chosen tool and there are no licensing issues for that tool in the country of remote developers.
9. Use remote work data constructively
After putting a heavy load of effort into tracking the productivity of remote employees, many companies gather a lot of data that they don’t know what to do with. Often the project managers just don’t find time to go deeper into this data and analyze them.
Managers often fail to understand that the piles of screenshots of the remote developers’ screens do amount to anything if they don’t use the data to enhance productivity. Analyzing this vast volume of remote development data and their work can deliver compelling insights for better task allotment and project management.
Read more: 10 Tips to Create an Amazing Shopify Store in 2021
Summing It Up
Ensuring productivity for the software development team working in a remote development place thousands of miles away can be challenging if you don’t go deeper into the above-mentioned challenges and anecdotes.
The productivity of remote developers can be tracked more efficiently when you have recruited a remote team with higher work ethics, career aspirations, and will to excel. Managing a remote team can be much easier when you have recruited the right developers.
