Why is Good Communication Vital for Working with Offshore Teams?
Hiring an offshore team to take over a software development project is quite popular today. It is an effective way for companies to bring in the right experts as per their project requirements. If you are planning to hire an offshore team, make sure you first understand the importance of good communication with offshore teams. The success of your collaboration with an offshore team depends on how well you communicate with them.
In this blog, we will shed light on the importance of good communication while working with an offshore team. Further, we will discuss some common challenges of communicating with an offshore team, along with tips on how to overcome them.
Importance of Maintaining Good Communication With Your Offshore Team
Effective communication allows businesses to make their teams productive and build stronger customer relationships. And when it comes to managing an offshore team, the role of communication becomes even more important.
Let us find out why effective communication is important while joining forces with offshore development teams.
1. Foster a Trusting Relationship
Trust and communication are closely connected. It is only through good communication that you lay the foundation of trust while working with an offshore team. Therefore, you must focus on strengthening your communication to build a more trustful alliance with remote developers.
Do not limit your conversations to work. Be open to communicating with the offshore developers on a more casual level at times. When you talk openly with your team, you allow them to see you as more than just an employer. This helps build trust and eliminate any existing communication gaps quickly.
2. Promote Seamless Collaboration
Effective communication with your remote team promotes cohesion and collaboration. When you allow offshore developers to communicate openly, you encourage them to come ahead and share their ideas and suggestions, which is important for seamless collaboration.
After you start working with an offshore team, it’s important to conduct regular meetings, especially during the initial phase. This way, you have a better chance of understanding the concerns of the remote developers and fixing them right away to ensure there are no roadblocks to productive collaboration.
3. Enhance Business Productivity
Improved communication with your remote team boosts overall business productivity. You communicate clearly with your offshore developers to help them comprehend their roles better and complete assigned tasks quickly and efficiently.
Additionally, effective communication with offshore teams prevents misunderstandings and streamlines work. You can have meetings with the offshore team at regular intervals to track progress and get insights on completed tasks.
Factors Affecting Communication with Offshore Teams
Various factors could cause ineffective communication between you and your offshore team. Let us take a look at these factors below.
1. Language and Cultural Barriers
Language and cultural differences are two major challenges of hiring an offshore team. As the remote developers are situated in a distant country, ensuring smooth communication from day one is difficult. Moreover, the language difference could lead to misunderstandings that significantly affect the workflow.
You need to ensure that your in-house team and offshore team are on the same page. This can be done by enabling seamless communication among teams and setting clear expectations from the start so that everybody moves towards the same goal.
2. Time Zone Differences
When you decide to hire an offshore team, the time zone difference is something that might concern you. This difference leads to many challenges, in addition to being a communication barrier.
Delayed communication with offshore teams due to time zone differences is the prime reason for interrupted workflow, failure to match deadlines, and poor coordination. Thus, before you hire an offshore team, you need to find a way to cope with the time zone difference.
3. Inadequate Communication Medium
Poor connectivity while communicating with an offshore team can hinder the discussion. Thus, you need the best communication mediums to ensure the messages are sent across fluently and clearly.
Additionally, when hiring a remote team, you should consider the quality of the communication medium. Many times, technical difficulties on either end lead to miscommunication that eventually gives rise to deluded work expectations.
Tips to Improve Communication With an Offshore Team
If you want to improve communication with your offshore team, these five tips will come in handy.
1. Find Time for Regular Team Meetings
You must find common hours, either daily or weekly when both the in-house and remote teams are available. It’s crucial to have this little window so that you can hold meetings with all teams during this time.
Discuss the suggested date and time for the meeting with both teams before finalizing to ensure that it’s convenient for them. Once the meeting time is finalized, your team members will know when they have to be ready with their doubts, suggestions, etc.
2. Conduct Face-to-Face Sessions
While working with an offshore team, make sure you don’t stick to voice calls and messages all the time. Conduct video meetings from time to time to build better bonds and improve communication.
Besides, video meetings are far more similar to in-person meetings than voice calls or text messages. Additionally, in video calls, team members are more attentive to the conversations.
3. Communicate Your Business Goals Clearly
When a team of remote developers joins your company, it’s essential to make them aware of your business goals. As you let the offshore team understand your vision and goals upfront, it becomes easier to work together and achieve the desired results.
Therefore, you should be prepared to answer as many questions as possible to help remote developers understand your goals better.
4. Utilize Collaboration Tools
Remote collaboration tools like Slack and Skype make it easier for you to communicate effectively with an offshore team. These tools allow you to connect with your remote workforce and communicate in real time via chat, video meetings, etc.
With these tools at your disposal, you promote effective communication and clear conversations. This, in turn, leads to fewer conflicts and complete transparency. These tools are also ideal for sharing important files and documents safely with your remote team members.
5. Understand the Work Culture of Your Offshore Team
When you hire an offshore team from an offshoring company, you need to get familiar with their work culture. By doing so, it becomes possible to communicate effectively with the remote developers.
Familiarize yourself with how the remote team usually works on their projects. Talk to them about their processes, work trends, and more to acknowledge their working style. Once you get an insight into their work culture, it becomes easier to collaborate with them.
Wrapping Up
Assigning your business’s development projects to an offshore team can benefit your business in more ways than one. You can bridge the skill gap in your existing team, save money by hiring developers at low rates, scale your business quickly, etc.
To reap the full benefits of offshoring, you need to strengthen your communication with the offshore team. Good communication is essential to working with remote developers successfully.
If you are looking to hire the best remote developers, reach out to Teqnovos. We are a team of expert developers with abundant experience in working remotely. Our developers ensure effective communication so that you reap the maximum benefits of hiring remote developers. Get in touch with us today!
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Why is good communication important when working with offshore teams?
When working with an offshore team, good communication is essential for facilitating effective collaboration. You promote cohesion, improve productivity, and prevent misunderstandings by bridging the communication gap with your offshore developers.
2. How to communicate with an offshore team?
There are several tips that will help you communicate with your offshore team. Some of these tips include conducting regular video meetings, using messaging tools for instant communication, understanding the language and culture differences, setting common goals, etc.
3. How to work with an offshore team effectively?
Good communication is the key aspect of working with an offshore team. To collaborate effectively with remote specialists, you must make communication your number one priority. Make sure you communicate with your offshore team members regularly to avoid complications later on.
4. What are the main challenges of offshoring hiring strategy?
Time zone differences, language and cultural barriers, and lack of transparency are a few major challenges associated with the offshoring hiring strategy. However, you can overcome all these challenges by ensuring strong communication between your in-house team and offshore team.
