How To Manage Remote Software Development Teams Like a Pro?
The Covid 19 pandemic also fueled the importance of work from home culture. Now companies — small or big — are managing their team remotely. According to a recent Flexjob survey, 66% of respondents said their work productivity is enhanced when not in an office. Another survey also revealed that by the year 2025, remote working will compete with the office location.
There are many famous names like Facebook, Twitter, and Shopify are considering permanent work from home measures after a successful transition. You can view the potential to cut costs by keeping your staff remote; such plans make an entirely financial sense, but how to manage small teams effectively in the first place?
If you are into managing remote teams or hire software developers, this blog is precisely for you. Read this blog until the end. Working from home or remotely is not the same as working in your office, so at first, stop managing your remote staff as if they work on-site instead, use below mentioned four practical leadership tips in order to manage work from home:
1. Focus on the long-term goals
Think about the last few months: how much time have you spent developing your long-term strategy and goals? It’s understandable if it takes less time than usual. It can be tough to think about the next chapter or next year when you are unsure what’s coming up next week. But as you adjust to working remotely for a long time period, it’s important to refocus on your company’s long-term goals. All these goals will help shape the priorities of your organization in the short term.
Take, for example, Alan Mullally’s tenure when he was at Ford. Mullally started as Ford’s CEO in the late 2000s and was responsible for leading this reputed brand through the ensuing financial crisis. He did not just go around cutting costs and hoping the company would make it to the other side.
Alan Mullally’s used the company’s long-term vision of building environmentally friendly, high-quality cars as a guiding light. Each and every decision he made was made to get closer to that goal. Also, he explains this much to his management team to ensure that they and the rest of their company align with this long-term effective strategy.
This is even more useful, critical, and challenging when you are effectively managing a remote software development team or hire app developer remotely. Setting priorities correctly is the way to stay productive and effective while working from home.
Communicate All Your Expectations Clearly
When leading a remote software development team, you lose non-verbal communication cues and various other elements. When your staff is dealing with parents at home, facing home network issues, caring for loved ones, and the challenges of learning to live during a pandemic, you need to take a more personalized approach in order to manage than you normally would. This is one of the challenges of remote software development team management.
You have likely been communicating frequently and clearly with employees at all levels throughout your organization’s pandemic response. However, just because you and your team have adapted to the new routine of remote work doesn’t mean that communication should stop. In fact, it’s time to step up your communication, especially when it comes to setting expectations for remote work. This is the key to effectively leading a remote team by an software development company.
According to Zapier, who has a fully remote team, setting expectations about how quickly employees should respond to messages, what tasks need to be completed, who is responsible for completing those tasks, and the deadlines for completing those tasks is critical. Once you’ve established your remote work expectations, create clarity around those expectations so you can distribute those messages to your team through multiple channels.
As all your employees get comfortable with these new standards, it can help remind everyone of them in company-wide emails, department meetings, and even one-on-one meetings between employees and managers. Managing remote employees isn’t as difficult as it may seem.
Set ground rules for meetings
Another key expectation to set involves how to conduct meetings in the virtual space. When managing a virtual team — wu could be setting yourself and your team up for disruptive and unhelpful conversations.
Without guidelines regardless of which video conferencing platform your team uses to connect, providing a little guidance can help your employees avoid making incorrect assumptions about how to make the most of their collaborative time. Christine Alemany, CEO of TBGA, a branding, and marketing firm, suggests that, at the very least, you should expect your employees to be punctual. Being late to a Zoom call can be just as disruptive as being late to a face-to-face meeting.
Beyond that, you might consider asking your employees to stay on camera at all times and asking them to turn off all tabs on their laptops. Do whatever you can to limit multitasking, reduce disruptions, and ensure your employees’ attention.
Set aside time for company culture
Just because you’re out of the office doesn’t mean you can make your company culture go away. In addition, your efforts to foster a culture among your employees may even be more important now. Consider that one of the main complaints about working remotely for long periods is the lack of facetime and co-workers’ isolation.
Fortunately, you’ve likely acquired some tools you need to address this issue. Use an instant messaging platform like slack to post prompts that allow employees to interact with each other as casually as if they were around a water cooler at work. These prompts could include sharing baby pictures, birthing tips, work-from-home setups, or photos of pets as a start. Encourage your staff to use video for check-in calls as a reminder that humans exist on the other side of the screen.
If you can, consider sending snacks or treats to employees through the mail in lieu of the free snacks in the break room. The opportunities are endless, just make sure they align with your existing cultural practices, so you don’t have to break company culture in order to manage a remote team.
3 Top Tools for Managing Remote Teams
Now, here I’m going to share some essential tools that will allow you to manage a remote team effectively and without any hassle. Outsourcing software development companies are widely using these tools for managing their workforce.
So let’s begin with these tools:
1. Asana
Asana is a project management tool. There are other tools or software similar to this like Trello and a few others out there. Asana is great because it allows you to basically put-in projects in different tasks and then assign them to different people on your team. You can set due dates for your team and comment underneath, and there are calendars where you can prioritize things.
It’s just a great way to communicate effectively with your team. You know, before I used Asana, everything was just sending the project details over Skype or over email and it’s just a very disorganized way of managing projects. Using Asana is great because again I can put in the project you can categorize it and organize it in effective ways.
You can assign the subtasks for different people on the team and break down what that project details. So asana can be a huge game-changer for your business. They have a free plan and they also have a paid plan as well. The free plan of this tool is amazing. You’ll get more benefit by upgrading for it you probably should.
2. Slack
Slack is a software that allows you to communicate with your team almost like basically a chat system. Before slack, businesses were using Skype which is fine just for maybe doing certain video calls or interviewing people to bring on board to your team. Slack is awesome because it allows you and your whole team to communicate in a more efficient way. This tool is also free and you can use the free plan for it.
There’s also a paid plan but there is no need to upgrade to the paid plan unless your business is too complex to manage. With slack, you could set up different channels so you have channels in your business that you break down different categories for example video for the blog, pay-per-click advertising for search engine optimization, for events, and for products. With all these different keywords, you will have different channels and then based on who’s involved in those projects you can invite those people on the team to have chats and discussions.
Then also the slack you can share files through it and you can even do calls through it. Also, you can do group conversations and group chats. So slack is amazing it’s what a lot of internet marketers use with their team. They also have web-based software that you can access on their website or you can download an app to your desktop or even to your mobile device.
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3. LastPass
This one is probably one of my favorites. LastPass is something that you should be using regardless of if you have a virtual team or not. It basically is an extension for your browser that allows you to save and remember your passwords. A lot of people have to memorize their passwords, every website they go to they have to physically type it in and they forget what their password is.
There’s a lot of time that people spend just logging into things and typing in the username and password. LastPass allows you to store everything, you have one master password and then you have different vaults based on all the different websites that you log into. If you want to hire remote developers, then this tool can help you a lot.
The reason why LastPass is beneficial for a virtual team is that when you have a team you’re gonna have to give them access to some of the websites, tools, and resources that you have in your online business. People on your team — for example — they may have access to your PayPal, they have access to your Clickbank, they have access to your click funnels, etc. What is great about LastPass is it allows you to give login access to these different websites without having to give up the password and for you to remain to have control over it.
For example with LastPass, you can set up folders for marketing, finances, and different folders that I have in your business. Then what you can do is you can add in all the different logins to your team and share it with your team. Your team can log in to them and you don’t have to give them your password; therefore, you don’t have any risk of them changing the password or hijacking your account in any way. You can also revoke their access when they’re done with the job. This is just a really amazing way to have control over your business and be able to share passwords and logins without actually having to give up the password.
Let’s Wrap Up:
Start practicing virtual team-building exercises, focus on the long game, keep everyone in the loop on expectations and meeting guidelines, and find ways to inject company culture into your new routines. You’ll set yourself up for successful work from home leadership. Make sure that you practice these remote team management strategies with consistency. If you are a business, you can hire an expert software development team and manage them like a pro with these tips.
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