The Benefits of Embracing A Flexible Work Schedule With Your Remote Workforce
The old school “9 to 5” work day doesn’t exist when you have teammates in different time zones or working on an opposing schedule from you, and let’s just say this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, there are many benefits to embracing varied work schedules.
VentureDevs is composed of our tech team in Poland, primarily in Poznan and our business team located in the US, mostly in Los Angeles. On top of that, we work with companies across the globe — in cities ranging from Hong Kong to Sydney, Los Angeles to New York, and Stockholm to Berlin. We set up project teams to augment our clients’ existing operations, which varies greatly from client to client. As a result, we support a flexible working environment for our internal team to allow for collaboration across the varying time zones and schedules of our clients.
Working with distributed teams, we have learned that there are some secret advantages to having team members working across different schedules. Two of which include fostering more productivity and allowing for different work styles and locations, which in turn opens you up to the possibility of working with better talent.
Greater productivity
Differing schedules pushes you to better prioritize your meetings and working methods for more productivity. Face-to-face meetings are essential to working together, but modern technology allows us to expand the definition of face-to-face. For a full or partial remote team this often means connecting via video conference or VOIP with fewer yet more meaningful meetings. Internally, we make sure to have a monthly company-wide meeting held via video conference to maintain open communication across the company, despite location.
What’s more, studies show that having fewer meetings actually promotes productivity across your team. One study conducted by the Harvard Business Review reported that 71% of managers feel meetings are unproductive. But when you’re working with a remote team, this can help you to be more organized because there is less available facetime. It pushes you to consider what is important for you to talk about in the time frame you have with each other and what can be done on your own.
At VentureDevs, we ensure each of our meetings is well prepared for and documented, wasting no time, as opposed to standard meetings which are typically bogged down by unnecessary discussion. This is a great benefit to our team and our clients alike. We like to joke with our clients that our teammates are “coding while they sleep,” but for some clients, this is truly the case. Because of the time difference, our US-based clients wake up to serious progress made on their product, which allows them to be much more productive during the work day ahead.
When you work with colleagues on different schedules, you are actually able to get more done. It calls on you to be more concise in your meetings and to better prioritize how and when you deliver your work.
Accommodates different work styles and allows you to work with better talent
Everyone’s working style is different, this we know for sure. Setting strict office hours adds pressure to teammates and often stifles productivity. We have worked hard to create a pretty epic office environment for our tech team in Poznan, so people working on projects together come into the office daily to meet and collaborate on the tasks at hand. In fact, we are moving to a new office this month to accommodate our growth and give everyone more space to come together…but that’s for another post!
By having a centralized Tech HQ, our clients can rest assured that their project team can work together in one place, instead of being scattered across unknown locations. We create this space for them to brainstorm, have daily standups, and conduct whiteboard sessions that help them come up with solutions and suggestions to continue improving the client’s product. Our tech office is a place for creativity and collaboration, as it also serves as a space for us to hold workshops, hackathons, and other events that bring together the larger tech community and foster knowledge sharing and skill growth.
That said, our teammates are all able to work from home when they need to and do not have to adhere to a strict 9–5 schedule, as we know that hours differ based on each project’s circumstance. Instead, we encourage each individual project team to work together and come up with a working agreement that makes sense for them. What is important for the success of our client projects is that at the beginning of each project, the team and the client agree with each other on a set of working norms to adhere to — including meeting times, hours of availability, methods of communication etc. That way, everyone respects each other’s schedule and is held accountable for getting work done on time.
Opening yourself up to remote teammates helps shift your company mentality away from attempting to find or recruit talent in the city your office is in and towards something more meaningful, and that is results. Working with us, our clients benefit from far superior tech talent than can be found in leading US tech hubs like San Fran and Los Angeles. They also benefit from our experience managing those teams and creating work environments where each individual will be able to achieve peak performance.
Convinced that a remote team is the next step for your business? Both Worldwide101and VentureDevs take the work out of finding qualified, vetted, and trusted remote individuals to add to your team. We partner with our clients to carefully select virtual employees and craft remote teams that are both appropriate for the task at hand and also a perfect fit for our clients’ larger team and company overall. Reach out to VentureDevs or Worldwide101 to find out more.
This is part of a series offering strategies and tips to best leverage a remote team for your business. You may also be interested in:
How to Scale Your Business Using a Remote Team
How to Shift Your Management Style & Lead a Successful Remote Team
Maximize Your Remote Team Performance: Focus on Deliverables Over Attendance
How to Create a Strong Culture With Your Long Distance Employees
3 Tips for Creating Solid Processes to Support Your Remote Team
