In the age of remote work, hiring is the first step to success, and managing remote software developers is the second and most crucial step. You must arm yourself with the appropriate skills to take advantage of remote work possibilities. Here is a list of how to manage a remote development team.
How to Manage Remote Developers on Your Team?
Meetings and Communications are Vital
You must keep in touch with the team to maintain efficiency in remote work situations. However, arranging meetings and collaborating with employees from various time zones is quite challenging. Since everyone on the team needs to be accessible at a specific time for daily or weekly meetings to keep everyone on the same page, regular stand-up meetings and planned communication are essential. Discuss your objectives and any gaps that could impact output or business expansion. Make sure that everyone from the staff attends these corporate gatherings.
You Must Avoid Micromanaging your Team
Instead of wanting to be a manager, you should try to lead by example. Given this, it is essential to avoid micromanaging remote engineers when you hire them and instead have faith in their ability to bring your vision to life. A decline in the trust may result from persistently interfering with others’ work. Due to discontent, this will ultimately lead to staff turnover. Because of this, you must give your remote team the autonomy they require. So that they can be properly motivated to give you an ideal job.
Establish Clear Guidelines
If you’ve been considering managing remote development teams, you should establish work expectations. Determine and establish expectations for the output and performance that your remote developers should provide in their jobs. But make sure the deadlines and deliverables are reasonable and doable. Because doing so would keep the remote developer team focused and on an achievable timeline, which would significantly improve the team’s productivity and morale. Setting an impossible objective only to give your employees a temporary boost of effort in the beginning can lead to failure, tiredness, and bad morale.
It would Help if you Exuded Patience and Empathy
Being patient, encouraging, and empathic are essential for any leader managing a remote development team, which is what it needs. Establishing a work environment where employees feel free to explore original ideas and viewpoints in search of answers or proposals without worrying about negative feedback is vital. Therefore, you must be sure to foster an environment where your remote developers feel comfortable sharing pertinent difficulties or problems that they may be having and which are detracting from their productivity.
Adopt the Agile Approach
Living in an agile culture is the secret to successful dispersed teams and remote offices. To sustain a strong team culture and remain efficient and productive, agile software teams thrive on collaboration, dynamic interaction, and feedback loops. The agile approach enables you to produce and make modifications depending on market input by allowing remote developers to generate products and get constant feedback.
Tools You Need to Manage a Remote Development Team Successfully
Shared Calendar
Project planning and meeting scheduling are made simple using a shared calendar. It is the ideal approach to view your team members’ calendars, holidays, and vacation periods to arrange forthcoming meetings, deadlines, and milestones effectively. By doing so, you may quickly and considerably save the time and effort required to organize such jobs. Additionally, it is advantageous for managers since it enables them to correctly allocate jobs and new projects and make them aware of their staff members’ responsibilities.
Chat Apps
You can easily interact with your team members anywhere in the world using chat programs. It is a fantastic way to receive immediate feedback. Encrypted chat allows for to-and-from conversation without noise or interference from any third party, thanks to bespoke message capabilities, cloud storage, data encryption, security, and backup.
Video Conferencing Tool
You can easily arrange, start, and manage meetings for your remote developer teams using video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Google Meet. It is an essential tool for maintaining communication and teamwork.
Project Management Platforms
Remote development team members can take responsibility for their work using project management platforms like Jira, Trello, or Asana. At the same time, it allows supervisors to transparently monitor workers’ duties without having to interject to inquire about progress. This creates a clear line of accountability and gives projects leadership and direction.
Hey Guys! My name is Richard Andrew. I am a contributor to the Strategy Watch. I have finished my graduation with a major in Economics. My interest areas are Economics, Financial Analysis, Stock Analysis, and Business Strategy.