Managing virtual teams

Whether you wanted it or not, at some point this year your team became a virtual one, and this is the reality that is here to stay for a while. Managing virtual teams is pretty much like managing the in-house ones: it’s tough and stressful but if you do it right, the results will exceed your most ambitious expectations. In this article we’ve collected three typical challenges that occur on the way of managing a virtual team and recommended our guidelines to resolve them.

Challenge #1: Communication

Difficulties with communication is an expected issue to arise when you’re not sitting nose to nose in the same office for a considerable amount of time. Communicating on a distributed team calls for a rigorous, well-structured approach and consistency from both clients and developers.

Solution: Create a culture of communication from the very beginning

If you don’t want to find yourself complaining about your virtual team’s lousy communication to a random stranger in a bar, build the right internal culture from the start. And by start we mean the first interview when you meet the potential hire. Estimate their communication skills, their behaviour during the conversation and their eagerness to keep in touch when both of you will be absorbed with the working routine. This will help you collaborate effectively in the future.

Apart from that, make sure that you’re being an example when managing your virtual team. Be the first to ask about their day, communicate in an engaging, understandable language, avoid complicated phrases and in-house jokes to make your team feel always welcomed for a chat.

Speaking of chats, choose wisely communication tools that your team will be using. There should be plenty of options to choose from:

• Use Slack or Google Hangouts for informal chats;
• Go for Trello or Jira for Project management;
• Install Zoom or Google Meet for video calls;
• And use InVision or Adobe XD for prototyping.

Here at Beetroot we use a bit of every platform, depending on the teams’ preferences and project needs. They help us create a virtual workplace similar to our ordinary babbling office, or at least to that kind of office it used to be before the pandemic intruded. One thing that we’ve learned from using communication tools is that there is no easy way of striking the balance between being detached and being importunate. It takes some time and experience until you can manage that virtual conversation with grace and ease. Just don’t forget to ask your team, if they feel comfortable with the chosen platforms, and keep the talk alive on each of them.

Challenge #2: Trust

Even if you have three daily standups with your virtual team followed by a stream of emojis and “what’s up”s in Slack, there still can be trust issues on both sides. Working at a distance, sometimes you can’t keep yourself from wondering whether your team is actually doing some software development or just watching YouTube videos all day long. Similarly, your developers might be feeling that you don’t care about their work and don’t consider them as a part of the “real team”.

Solution: Get together from time to time

However weird it may sound, but the key to high performing virtual teamwork is face-to-face interaction. Yes, we’ve learned to solve global tasks while sitting at home with our laptops, but when it comes to building trustful relations we still need to meet people in real life and spend some time together. Make sure to visit your team once in a while or invite them to come to your office and stay there for a couple of weeks. You’d be surprised how easily you solve issues that took you months of online discussions. At Beetroot we encourage every client to book some time for meeting and managing their virtual team in person and getting acquainted with the office and the city their future colleagues will be working in. Some of the visits last for a couple of days and others stretch into several weeks of productive work. The one thing that remains true for every face-to-face meeting is how much easier and more efficient the future collaboration turns out.

If you have no chance of arranging an offline meeting, try to have online 1-on-1 video calls with each member of your team. Use them as a chance to get to know each other better and throw in a couple of stories not related to the project you are working on. Informal communication, together with openness and genuine interest in your team’s well-being should make up a solid basis for trustful relationships.

Challenge #3: Efficiency

Being an outstaffing company ourselves, we know for sure that virtual teams perform as good as their in-house counterparts. However, sometimes the combination of poor communication and low trust levels can lead to the fact that your team is running out of steam and starts underperforming.

Solution: Set up clear tasks and develop accountability

When the distributed teams get to work, managers tend to focus on defining roles and describing the big hairy goals, which will be achieved some day. However, usually virtual teams would benefit more from having clear day-to-day tasks and processes thoroughly explained. Managing a virtual team, go an extra mile describing what your working routine looks like, talk them through each step of project completion and tell them in every detail what you expect them to do. In most cases, precise understanding of the task is the remedy for low productivity. No one likes to wander in the dark, right? At Beetroot we use weekly or daily standups to outline the tasks we’re working on and make plans for a few days to come. It’s a simple thing to do, but without it managing virtual teams will most probably turn into chaotic mess.

Another good thing to have is a system of progress monitoring. Use Trello or Jira to keep an eye on the working process and check up regularly on the tasks’ status. By doing so you will be able to notice the early signs of lagging behind the schedule and book a call to discuss the reasons with your virtual group. Usually the work gets slower because of the poor planning, lack of resources, incomprehensive tasks, or ineffective organization of time. Each of these issues can be solved if you talk to your team and come up with a solution that will work for both sides.

Beetroot builds distributed teams of developers for international clients and has a plethora of successful cases. Would you like us to create a team for you? Let’s get in touch!