The manner in which you manage remote teams or employees will have long-term impact for your business and its growth potential. On the off chance, if you do a terrible job, then your productivity and morale both will get hampered. Whereas, if you are successful, the remote employees can deliver loyalty and will boost engagement as well.

As a matter of fact, now the remote working culture is going to stay, so why not exercise it to the fullest and retain the best talent from all over the globe. Thus, it is the major responsibility of the management to manage remote teams appropriately to scoop out the best results and efforts from these remote employees.

Apart from that, the managers also need to consider that in remote working an employee is working individually and a lot of pressure could make him feel isolated among team members. Therefore, here are the following tips to manage remote teams effectively. But, before that learn about why remote working is actually important in 2021 and after that too.

The Importance of Remote Working

Remote working is a process in which employees don’t have to report or work in the actual office site. They actually work their ordinary hours, but it is from their respective homes. For quite a long time, many organizations opposed allowing their employees to work from home. Probably apprehensive that their employees would invest their energy in doing laundry, watching TV or dealing with household tasks. Entrepreneurs and managers also feared that collaboration would tumble to the wayside and productivity would decline.

Nonetheless, a significant number of those worries ended up being unwarranted. Evidently, it’s been more than a year since the huge shift to remote work produced by COVID-19 and still it’s going smoothly in remote working. Before the pandemic, only 1 of every 30 organizations had somewhat half of their staff working remotely, as per research from HR consulting firm Mercer. Whereas, in August 2020, it was 1 of every 3. Interestingly, 94% of businesses said productivity has continued as before or increased since employees started working remotely.

Tips To Manage Remote Teams Effectively

1. Set Targets Early And Often

Defining guidelines, setting limits and reviewing the basics are among the main steps to take when setting out on your project. Thus, be available and give clearness on priority, achievements, performance objectives and more. Outline each remote team member’s accessibility and guarantee you can contact them when required.

Furthermore, similarly as in the workplace, the managers should keep remote employees updated on policy and staffing changes, organizations success and tips for working at home. They also should show conduct around the hours representatives work, for example, setting up expectations and responding to any after-work work email or messages. 

This aides’ employees to keep a healthy work/life balance, and keeps them from wearing out. However, without the actual separation from home and the workplace, it can be more normal when working from home.

2. Emphasize Communication

It’s urgent that managers communicate with their remote staff, on the grounds that it keeps workers appraisals of deadlines, available assets, business related challenges and managers expectations, including work plans.

Likewise, consider which specialized instrument best fits the group’s way of life—email, messages, calls, video talks, an intranet channel—and track down that sensitive harmony between continually pinging workers with messages and email and radio quiet. The recurrence of correspondence might contrast among workers.

“The best technique is to ask remote employees how they need to be managed while working remotely. That way, managers can keep an eye on what every employee should be productive while working from home.

And keeping in mind that it’s significant that managers track metrics that are valuable for the organization and check in with employees.

3. Build Connection And Be Available For Your Team

Many workers feel separated and confused in this new work reality. That is the reason it is important to build associations with employees. Share positive feedback, open an interesting communication channel, or attempt to ‘get espresso’ together. Whatever keeps a feeling of normality/solidarity and reminds everybody they’re not an island working alone.

To manage remote teams, they exceed all expectations to keep an open-door policy for remote employees, making themselves available across numerous time-zones and through different means for technology. Thus, remote employees can generally rely on their manager to respond to squeezing concerns.

4. Identify And Provide Right Tools

A significant aspect to effectively manage remote teams is to make all important tools that are easily available as needed. To address that issue, leaders and teams might need to puzzle through what ought to be set up to facilitate and manage remote teams effectively.

To manage remote teams it requires similar access to things used by on location employees, which might incorporate:

• Strategy and Procedure Manuals 
• Template Presentations and Supplies
• Mail Supplies and Stationary Material 
• Software Programming Programs
• Corporate Credit Card

5. Remote Teams Doesn’t Mean Cheap

The budget planning plays a significant role when we are looking to hire and manage remote teams. Some business owners might accept that organizing remote working and cutting office space by half is equivalent to a half reduction in the cost of housing employees in a traditional office site.

However, this isn’t that straightforward. Indeed, your organization will presumably save on actual office space, yet those savings are probably going to be spent somewhere else, depending upon the remote teams and work that is required to be done.

For example, your travel expenses might increase if the remote employees are in different states and need to head out to the onsite office once a quarter or more. Or, you might have to spend more on new resources or software upgradation or extra hardware/equipment, like headsets, to appropriately furnish your remote employees.

Manage Remote teams accurately and they can be just as productive, if not more than in-office employees. You simply need to lay out the groundwork for them.

6. Trust That Your Remote Team Is On The Task

You will not be able to have a complete watch over your remote employees, as you could in case they were in the workplace. Yet that doesn’t mean they aren’t taking care of business or not doing their tasks with responsibility. In the event that you can’t trust them, wonder why you employed them in any case for sure or what happened that made you lose trust in them.

You must trench trust issues. Assuming you don’t, you begin to turn into a remote insecure boss or will fail to manage remote teams effectively.

7. Be Sensitive To Overworking And Overloading

This is about both i.e., good administration and good self-administration. 

As a manager, you ought to be careful so as not to allocate a lot of work or to force too close deadlines. Be open for conversation with your remote teams. On the off chance that they feel like they’re under an excessive amount of pressure then, be ready to change work to make things (somewhat) simpler for them. 

For remote team management, there are a few things you can do: 

• Put forth a time limit on how long you work without a break. Hence, it will encourage your association to proactively block times on their schedules, and consider themselves responsible.
• Keep away from obscuring your work-life limits. Have a reasonable partition of work and “play”. Therefore, apply a people first approach—before we are like robots, because at the end we all are humans.
• Take regular exercise. This could be just about as simple as taking the dog for a walk twice a day (if no canine, then why not go on walk with friends or neighbors, or try to make friends on your way/park).

In No Time, You’ll Be A Pro To Manage Remote Teams Effectively

You might be stressed over moving to manage remote teams. But, there truly isn’t any need to be.

With such countless extraordinary apps and tools like Slack, DeskTime, Google Suite, etc. are out there to make remote work simpler. You’ll see that management and communication just became simpler, like your team is in the workplace with you. From sharing work related documents to simply having some good times as face-to-face communications and normal phone calls. It is feasible to hold many of the best parts of the in-office activities as a remote team or workers.

Regardless of whether you’ve to manage remote teams of 10 or a whole organization moving to remote or hybrid work. There’s a method to make your home office less isolated or lonely—while ensuring it’s just as productive as it was in the office premises.

So, if you are also looking to build a remote team or learning to manage remote teams, then you can reach out to us. EngineerBabu is a team of expert and qualified remote workers who deliver their work with sheer precision while maintaining the quality too.

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We at EngineerBabu, are committed to helping enterprises of every scale hire remote engineering teams and manage them seamlessly and at an affordable cost. Over the years, we have gathered some really useful tips under our sleeves that can make hiring remote engineering teams and managing them easy. In this article, we will share some of the most important tips on the subject, read on.

Why Hire a Remote Engineering Team?

While remote working has become the new normal, the cost of hiring, managing, and maintaining an in-house remote team has gone up. According to a Forbes article, the cloud costs for enterprises rose by 30% in 2020 compared to last year. Apart from the cost factor, there is a major time factor involved. Hiring a full-time engineer can take anything in between 3-6 months. Extrapolate this to hiring an entire engineering team, the effort and time will be immense. Additionally, the cost of maintaining and training the team – to keep up with the evolving technologies, can make the entire process time and cost-intensive. At EngineerBabu, our mission is to help enterprises hire remote engineering teams at affordable costs across domains and technologies. 

Over the years we have worked with 5000+ founders, 484+ clients, and delivered almost 1000 projects. Working with remote engineering teams can be different from having a full-time in-house team. Especially for enterprises that haven’t done this before. In the subsequent section of this article, we will share the best practices of hiring and managing remote engineering teams.

Best Practices to Hire Remote Engineering Teams

1. Plan Ahead

The world of software engineering is going Agile and iterative. But the same principles may not help while hiring a remote engineering team. If you are building a team from scratch for product development, you must plan ahead. Making a note of the below pointers, before you embark on the journey of hiring a remote engineering team can be helpful.

• Plan the major milestones you would want to achieve and create a roadmap.
• Plan for the technical skills that you would need in the team to achieve your product goal. Not just in the current scenario, but in the future too.
• The number of team members you would need – and the seniority.
• Plan for the skills gap – in case you are augmenting your current team – see the skills gaps that you have in the existing team and then plan to hire a remote engineering team accordingly.

2. Choose the Right Outsourcing Partner

Hiring remote engineering teams is becoming the new normal and so is the proliferation of outsourcing partners. Here are some things to consider while choosing an outsourcing partner:

a. Long-term Partnership

Once you hire a remote engineering team, they will work with you for months and maybe years altogether. It will be important to choose a service provider who can provide long-term product support, helps you plan, and is ready for contingencies. Precisely why, it will be important to look for a partner and not just a provider. Your service provider’s job doesn’t end at building a remote engineering team for your enterprise but seeing the project through.

b. Expertise

While hiring a remote engineering team, it will be important to partner with a service provider that isn’t a one-stop shop for all kinds of remote workers, rather has expertise in helping enterprises hire remote engineering teams across domains and technologies.

c. Compatibility

It will be critical to answer this question – does your outsourcing partner understand your goals and objectives and is passionate about delivering them? It is important that your outsourcing partner is aligned with your enterprise’s objectives, for them to help you hire an engineering remote team. At EngineerBabu, our skilled engineers believe in aligning with your company’s goals to provide expertise for a perfect synergy.

d. Accountability

Other important factors to assess will be – How do they vet the teams, what is their selection process, how do they plan to keep up should you want to augment the team with evolving technology skills, etc.? At EngineerBabu, our engineers are carefully handpicked after a rigorous selection process. Every engineer that we have in our team has two attributes in common. These are, passion for engineering and dedication to deliver on time.

e. Time, Cost, and Effort Required

The choice of the outsourcing partner to hire a remote engineering team will also depend on how soon you want to get started. That will also mean choosing a partner who is fast but does not compromise with quality. For instance, our team has engineers who are Crème de la crème engineers, and our swift process can help you hire a remote engineering team and get started with your project within a week. Another important factor will be to consider the cost of hiring an outsourcing partner. Needless to say, it makes sense partner with an affordable service provider for your enterprise in the long run.

Managing a Remote Engineering Team

Hiring a remote engineering team is just half the battle won, for the success of your project it will be important to manage them efficiently as well. One of the most important aspects to remember while managing a remote engineering team is that a remote engineering team is an extension of your in-house team, whether they are or aren’t on your payroll. Hence, the way you work with a remote engineering team should be similar to how you work with in-house team. It will help build team spirit and strengthen their dedication. Some tips to consider to successfully manage remote engineering are –

1. Communicate

Treating and communicating with your remote engineering team as you would do with a full-time team is important. More often, project managers end up under-communicating with remote teams. It can lead to the team not feeling a part of the bigger goal. Therefore, keeping the remote engineering teams involved in the bigger picture by sharing with them the product roadmap, important milestones that you want to achieve, and most importantly the bigger mission of your product or enterprise will make a great deal of difference. Use a channel like Slack to continuously be in touch.

2. Scrums and Daily Stand-ups

Like any engineering project, scrums and daily stand-ups are important to track the progress of projects, discuss challenges and further steps. Usually, PMs tend to delegate a portion of the project to the remote engineering teams and take weekly updates. It can be counterproductive since any issues or delays will come up only during the weekly updates. Additionally, since the remote engineering team will work hand-in-hand with your full-time team, a daily scrum/stand-up will help them collaborate better.

3. Make the Best Use of Project Management Tools

Use project management tools like JIRA or Hive to plan, manage and track projects. Project management tools can go a long way in planning and to prepare for contingencies as well.

4. Be Agile

Be flexible and Agile enough to tackle any unexpected issues coming your way. The tech world is evolving, so are your product ideas. From idea to implementation, the product will improve as your plan changes. Thus, it will be crucial to consider when you hire a remote engineering team to ensure that team gets communicated with any required modification. Likewise, choosing the right outsourcing partner will become crucial. They will help you adapt to evolving needs by augmenting the team with engineers. Along with the required skill-sets or quickly increasing the team size when needed.

Wrapping Up

Remote work has become the new normal. Many companies plan to shift to a remote working model even post-pandemic. Team augmentation by hiring remote engineers was already being adopted by the IT industry and tech startups. The need and benefits of hiring a remote engineering team have become even more evident in a post-pandemic world. Hiring a remote engineering team can mean – higher productivity with huge time and cost savings. We hope this article will help you in hiring and managing a remote engineering team. However, at EngineerBabu, we partner with enterprises across domains and scale. We help them to build best-in-class engineering teams for crafting a successful product. If you are looking to hire a remote engineering team and want to know more about our services – connect with us.

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