How to Improve Your Remote Development Team’s Productivity?
The pace at which technology is evolving has led to a significant change in how modern businesses operate. Today, many companies are looking to hire remote development teams to either build new software or upgrade an existing one.
Hiring remote teams helps businesses save time and money while completing projects faster. But to reap the maximum benefits of working with a remote team, you need to learn how to improve your remote team’s productivity.
Here, we will discuss the key strategies that will help you boost the productivity of a remote development team.
Why Hire a Remote Development Team?
There are significant advantages to collaborating with a remote team instead of hiring in-house specialists. Let us look at some benefits of hiring a remote team here.
1. Access to Global Talent
Hiring remote developers or a development team lets you choose IT talent from anywhere in the world without worrying about geographical barriers. You can look for experts from across the globe who are the best fit for your software development project.
2. Cost-Effective
As you hire a dedicated development team, you save a decent amount of money off your budget. Since the whole team is located in a faraway place, you don’t have to stress about operational costs. Remote hiring lets you save money on infrastructure, hardware & software, employee benefits, etc.
3. Reduced Hiring Time
The traditional approach to hiring developers is time-consuming and demands a major effort on your side. On the other hand, hiring a remote development team requires minimal effort and time. You simply have to contact a trustworthy outstaffing company and hire an entire software development team.
7 Strategies to Improve Your Remote Team’s Productivity
Working with a remote development team is highly rewarding for modern businesses. However, to make your collaboration with a remote team successful, you need to make sure that your dedicated development team is productive.
Improving your remote team productivity lets you improve the quality of deliverables and bring efficiency to the development process. Below are the best strategies to enhance your remote team’s productivity.
1. Set Clear Goals For Your Development Team
When you work with a remote team, you must set clear goals and objectives from the start. It allows everybody to understand their job precisely, which helps them be productive with their work. So, as soon as you hire a remote team, conduct a kickoff meeting to highlight the job responsibilities of each member and the project goals that they need to achieve.
The idea of the kickoff meeting is to ensure everyone is on the same page regarding the project’s guidelines, deliverables, etc. Clarity of goals allows your remote developers to perform their tasks efficiently.
2. Streamline Communication With the Remote Team
Whether you work with an in-house or a remote team, effective communication is the key to improving your remote team’s productivity. Moreover, when it comes to remote collaboration, communication becomes even more vital. So, if you want your remote team to be productive, you first need to streamline communication with them.
By doing so, you eliminate any communication barriers between you and your development team. This further ensures that every piece of information, whether it is project info or feedback, is being received and perceived clearly. So, streamlined communication means fewer conflicts and better planning, which are important to boost a team’s productivity.
3. Promote Individual Autonomy
In a traditional workplace, managers are always around to check on their team, address queries, and resolve issues right away. But these dynamics don’t work when you collaborate with a remote team. This is why many supervisors resort to micromanagement. They start messaging or calling remote employees repeatedly to ask about their progress.
If you want your remote development team to be productive, you should refrain from this practice. Constant poking causes employees to lose their focus, which negatively impacts their productivity. So, for your remote development team to be productive, you must avoid micromanagement.
4. Prioritize Performance Over Presence
Building on the point above, along with constant poking, continuously monitoring the remote team’s presence also affects their productivity. Managers are often checking whether the remote employees are sitting in front of their system and working or not. But smart managers don’t do this. They put the team’s performance over presence which benefits the business more.
You should show your team that you trust them by not binding them to things such as being online for a specific number of hours. Instead, you should give them the space to work on their own and let their work speak for their dedication. Fostering a relationship based on trust will motivate your remote employees to push themselves and be more productive.
5. Invest in a Remote Collaboration Tool
A significant number of remote collaboration tools are available in the market. These tools are the perfect resource to maintain seamless collaboration among your remote employees. Additionally, they come in handy for improving your remote team’s productivity.
Remote collaboration tools like Zoom and Google Meet let you conduct video conferences with your team. You can use these tools to conduct training sessions or explain complex projects as they have a screen share feature. Further, tools like Trello help you assign and manage tasks, and track a remote developer’s productivity over time, and find areas of improvement.
6. Establish a Feedback Loop
Don’t expect your newly hired remote team to be highly productive from day one. Give them time to know your business, understand the project, and get used to working with you. Once the team members are settled into the work, ask them for feedback and share yours as well. Establishing a feedback loop will help the members of your remote team to identify their strengths and weaknesses.
By telling remote employees about the areas that they are lagging in, you present them with an opportunity to improve their skills. With regular feedback, you ensure constant improvement in your remote team’s productivity and work quality. Similarly, be considerate of the remote team’s feedback to you which might help boost your business’s productivity in the long run.
7. Don’t Overburden Your Team
It’s easier to detect whether an employee or a team is overburdened in a traditional workplace. You see the team skip lunches, come in early, or sit till late hours frequently. But in a remote work environment, you might not have such signs to determine that the team has a lot going on. This is why you must be extra careful while assigning tasks to a remote development team.
Overloading your remote employees with too many tasks can have a drastic impact on their productivity. With so much on their plate, they will find it difficult to focus on one task at a time. Remember that no matter how skilled and experienced your remote team is, they can only work as much as their potential. So, you must assign them tasks according to what they can realistically accomplish.
To Sum It Up
Improving the productivity of a remote team can be a little challenging task for modern business leaders. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be done. You just have to be aware of the potential productivity bottlenecks and avoid them.
For example, not setting clear goals and ineffective communication are two major reasons for your remote team’s low productivity. Similarly, if you micromanage the team members or overburden them, you might hamper their productivity. Therefore, you need to follow the strategies discussed above to make your remote team more productive.
Improving a remote development team’s productivity becomes easy if you hire a dedicated software development team. At Teqnovos, we help you build the best development team for your business. We have some of the most skilled and talented developers for you to choose from. Get in touch with us today.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is a remote development team?
A remote development team is a group of IT specialists hired by a company for its software development projects. This team is generally located in a different country from where their employer is. A remote development team consists of experienced professionals with expertise in different fields of software development.
2. Why hire a remote development team?
There are many reasons why businesses hire remote development teams today. For starters, working with a remote team lets you hire top talent from across the globe and complete your project faster. Additionally, you save a good amount of money on operational costs and employee benefits.
3. How to enhance your remote team’s productivity?
If you want to enhance the productivity of your remote software development team, make sure you keep the following tips in mind:
- Don’t Micromanage: Once you have delegated the task, keep your interference to a minimum and let the remote team work on their own.
- Communicate Clearly: Make sure you communicate clearly with your remote team and address their issues frequently.
- Give Feedback: Give regular feedback to your remote team so that they can constantly improve their processes and enhance their productivity.
4. Why is remote team productivity important?
A highly productive remote team helps a business meet its short-term and long-term goals quickly. Greater productivity leads to reduced time-to-market, quality results, and hence increased profit. By working with a high-performance remote team, companies can thrive in today’s competitive market.
