Tips to help you build a strong relationship with your team
Remote communication isn’t always easy! Actually, finding devoted remote employees and getting them on board it’s quite challenging. And that’s because, at first, you need to figure out the secret to having everyone on the team truly interested and involved in the project.
Some questions are inevitable:
How do you ensure they understand their obligations effectively and are really working on what’s assigned to them, rather than investing their energy somewhere else?
How can you motivate them to improve their work and be engaged? To communicate often and get to know each other?
Don’t worry! We recommend you a few tested tips that will help you find all the answers to every one of these questions and get better at managing a team from anywhere on the planet:
Promote transparency
As a manager, you need to lead by example and you need to show others how it’s done! Don’t expect your remote team to get to know you and each other or discuss projects and share their opinion if you don’t do that yourself!
You should get involved in all aspects of the business, share with them the vision and objectives of your organization and let them resonate with that. Then, set clear expectations. It’s also very important to share with your team a few things about yourself and let them talk about something other than work, too.
Trust, turns out, represents the most challenging factor especially when we’re talking remote teams. Therefore, if you’re demanding transparency from your remote employees, you have to be just as transparent in return. Plus, you want your remote team to be open with you, right?
Hold regular meetings
This one can be a bit challenging, as long as everyone’s in a different time zone, but you can do it!
Try, as much as you can, to understand what kind of people you have on your team. A proper way to do this is to organize a meeting at least once a week in a friendly environment where everyone can talk about anything. Let’s call it “a virtual coffee”!
Definitely, over time you’ll connect with each other and will feel more like a team.
Organize your work
It’s pretty hard to manage people across the globe without knowing what everyone’s working on, because, over time, having a lot of projects on your hands can easily turn work into chaos.
That’s the reason you have to make strategies, implement project management systems and set some rules for everyone on the team.
We advise you to start wisely and don’t rush on anything: organize all the data, categorize it and make it available to all team members. Set clear deadlines and ensure everyone knows the next steps of the project.
Very helpful: there are quite a few collaboration tools out there that will help you see what others are working on and what’s left to be done.
Collaboration tools
Generally, we recommend you to opt for a collaboration tool that updates in real time and will allow you to:
- Set objectives
- Post projects
- Create groups
- Assign a hierarchy of responsibilities
- Follow up on tasks posted
- Monitor progress on tasks
- Establish deadlines
- Securely store and manage files and documents
Also, a time-tracking tool can be useful. This one represents an efficient way to keep your employees on track and review their performance. Make sure you make your team understand that this kind of tool will help them manage their time better, too. Win-win situation, right?
Plus, keep in mind that a time-tracking tool will remove the pain of accurate payroll calculation, because you’ll never overpay or underpay anyone, as long as you have the exact data of their work time expenses.
Here are some tools that will help you in the process of working with a remote team:
- Trello – task management
- Jira – task management for more complex, long-term projects with a bigger team involved
- Slack – communication tool
- Skype – also a communication tool
With the simple click of a button, you can use these tools to ensure your employees are active, engaged participants.
Main advantages
Last, but not least, here are some of the main advantages of working with remote teams::
- A great way to lower your production costs (and in case you’re a startup you will want to lower your costs whenever possible!)
- Working with a remote team can represent a door opener to new markets, because who better to know a foreign market than the people living there?
- In the majority of cases, remote employees can be more productive. This happens because they are less distracted and working remotely will offer them more freedom and flexibility, helping them achieve a better work-life balance.
- You access a wider talent pool. When you hire your employees from a set location, you limit your talent pool. Instead, remote work will let you access the very best talent across the globe.
To conclude
Keep in mind that managing a remote development team will be much easier if you lead those people by inspiring them. Be sure you are there to answer their questions, be open about the strengths and weaknesses of the project and be clear about your expectations. Be like and open book, yet additionally give your remote team space to come up with great ideas and solutions!
Just follow the rules mentioned above and you will definitely have a team of loyal, hard working and productive employees that will help you reach the company vision sooner.
Collaborate with professionals only and choose the best software engineering team to work with!