Hiring a remote team has great benefits for businesses. You get the tasks completed by a qualified team of developers. You know where to start with a new team and how the finish line looks like. What’s in between? What do people do? How do they organize their workflow? How can you check the work of the team?
There are two major issues that determine the efficiency and productivity of a remote team. One of them is using special tools for tracking the work of each team element. Another one is organizing the process of cooperation the right way, so you don’t have to check how they are doing every ten minutes.
Why should you care?
What are the key ingredients of a successful project? You may have a few of them but you will always have a team to be the core one. What makes a small or big team of people dedicated to their work? What can make them feel indifferent about any new achievements? If you don’t care about a team, they will not be able to fully concentrate on their work.
If you don’t fix the situation anyhow, the problem will become worse and worse. The more you dismiss the team management process the harder it will be to come back to a habitual workflow. Another thing here is that team players can decide to leave your project if they feel uncomfortable.
How to manage a team?
You can have your best employees around the globe and they may even never see each other. How can you make them unite into a real team? Start cooperating with new people on your team with defining clear goals. Here we mean that you should describe how you see the future of the project or the whole company and how this very team can help you reach the goals.
Goals and roles. Defining the goals will be the starting point for creating a real team. When people see a clear picture of what they should come to, it’s time to determine the role of each team player. What are they responsible for and how much time should devote to work? Do you think that spending a fixed amount of time working is efficient?
Schedule. One thing that bothers is regulating the number of hours that a worker spends over the project. If we take a look around, we’ll see that most of the workers are online all the time. They want to be available at any time of the day and night. Let your employees go offline and be unavailable for as much time as required. You will demonstrate the fact that you trust the team.
Communication. How will you manage your team if you don’t know how they communicate one with another? When we have an in-house team, people can easily solve any problems by a short talk. They can organize various events to make team elements cohesive. Build remote team communication traditions. For example, you can make a coffee call once a week or meet once in a quarter.
How to manage a team effectively?
How do you calculate the efficiency? You have clear goals and you know the paths that will lead to the end results. What if someone has lost their way or is moving very slowly. Is it a lack of qualification or the problem of motivating people to work harder? Let’s consider having only experienced developers in a team and take a look at the ways to increase their efficiency.
You know the essentials and it’s time to start managing the team. It’s time to increase their efficiency. The whole team should become a single unit even if its members are in different parts of the world. Here are the key things to do to increase the team efficiency.
Give support
Every person faces some personal problems or the ones regarding their work. This may lead to decreasing the efficiency of work. If a person addresses you with the description of a problem, a question or a direct request for help, show that you care. Those employees that don’t feel support, they don’t feel themselves a part of a team.
Give feedback
This is a super important aspect of managing remote workers. How do people find out if they do something really good or the worst way possible? People have different reactions to the feedback, so watch their reaction to know how to deal with each person. You can provide feedback in a form of chats, calls or emails.
Give freedom
What do you get if you control every second of the employees’ lives? Managing people remotely doesn’t mean knowing what they are doing at the moment. If you care about the result, let your team plan their work. They can have a nap after a lunch or go to the gym in the morning. If they want to do this, it’s good to let them organize their working days on their own.
Regular meetings
If you make people get engaged in something that is not related to work, you give them an idea that “we are a team”. You can organize hangouts, playing games, doing sports or traveling to a new country each time. If you have such events regularly, teammates will gain mutual interests besides completing the project goals. You show that you care about the interests of every team participant and motivate them to express all their best sides.
It’s time to deal with the routine: tools for remote teams
It’s good to keep the team motivated, give support and make their life joyful. But on the other hand, we should somehow deal with the processes and routine. You can trust every single worker in a remote team but you should know where you are and if you keep the right pace. You can do it yourself or you can use special tools.
Time tracking for remote workers
You can use any available tool or the one that is easy to use. Even if we don’t push anyone to spend all the time working, it’s important to track how much time people spend on your project. You will measure their efficiency and define if you need to motivate them more or you have everything just perfect. Here are some of them:
- TimeDoctor
- Slack
- Timely
- HiveDesk
A roadmap to success
You can use this Roadmap to track time and productivity of a team. TickSpot is a good tool for watching how the project is developed in real time. You don’t even have to get in touch with the worker as you can see the current stage of the development. These tools and similar ones will help you evaluate the pace of work and if you need to increase the productivity anyhow.
Track achievements
It’s good to know what your employees are busy with but it’s time to let them track their achievements and not only time. iDoneThis is a tool that lets your workers indicate what they have completed or reached. Using such a tool will positively influence the overall mood of a team. It doesn’t give people a feeling that somebody’s constantly watching them.
Google services
They are easy to deal with and plan work. You can use forms or any other type of the document that will let you simplify communication between you and your team in real time. You can use them to plan the budget, calls, meetings and so on. All the data is secured, so you will not lose it.
You can build your own apps for the time tracking if you plan a long cooperation. You can take the existing ones and create the one that will fully satisfy you and the team. If you have regular meetings and you keep in touch with every person, it will be easy to assess the tools for tracking productivity.
One more thing here is testing various tools. If you only start your cooperation or you are not fully satisfied with the way you track people’s work, it’s time to try something new. Ask employees what they used in the past. Google all possible tools and their feedbacks. Try using the tools and evaluate them.
How to manage a new team from Ukraine?
What we have here at Codemotion is a super great motivation to perform the tasks in an efficient way. As an experienced team of remote developers, we take care of keeping a warm climate. What do we do for that? We take care of every single person that comes to us. We value personal life and we don’t interfere with it.
Codemotion developers are team players and they are ready to support each other. The whole team acts out as a single unit that can be additionally controlled by a remote process manager. If you need a mediator between you and the team, you will have this person. Codemotion is a team of developers that came here to build and create innovative projects remotely.
