3 Best Tips for Managing a Team of Devs Across Time Zones
One of the great romance quotes says that love doesn’t recognize boundaries, distances, borders, or time zones. It’s worth to draw conclusions from it because if you truly love your company and you want it to develop and grow, then you need to start looking further. That means looking for opportunities regardless of whether they will be associated with the challenge you need to confront or not. In this case, the challenge is hiring software developers who will work remotely from a different part of the world if they have the appropriate skills required for your company to succeed.
We prepared a compilation of the three most valuable tips that will help you manage a team of devs while working across multiple locations. We also have something special for you at the end of the article.
Want to know more about how to recruit developers? Read the article Hiring a Remote Developer While Scaling up a Company — 5 Must Know Facts.
1. Make everyone responsible for their own commitments
Working as a team is great. However, if you’re working with a time shift, you’ll need to help people take ownership of their work. It’s crucial to make sure your employees know their tasks. If they would have to wait until someone assigned them, and the person responsible for that would be asleep while they’re working, your company would never get any work done. In the onsite office, there is usually a person called a team leader who schedules tasks and tracks each person’s work results. It doesn’t mean that such a position is unnecessary when the team works remotely. Although, working across time zones requires additional solutions.
The most important tenet in running a remote team is giving each team member a project they will be responsible for. Yet, owning a project doesn’t necessarily mean doing everything that is associated with it — the project might be broken up into chunks that can be worked on individually. In such a case, each person is aware of what actions must be taken to make it move forward. If someone runs out of daily tasks there is always something else to dive into. It’s also worth using such tools as Zenkit, Asana or Monday (there are many more) to have some score in mind. Besides that, make sure the employees are aware that the actions of each person affect other team members’ abilities to accomplish their goals.
2. Prepare a work schedule that works for both sides
One of the benefits of telecommuting is the opportunity to work according to one’s own daily schedule. People have different habits and ways of organizing and managing their work time. Some of us achieve higher performance early in the morning while others late in the day. While working remotely employees can shift their schedules to pick the best part of the day for them to work. Also, the working time of each person will differ depending on the time zone. However, keep in mind there always must be some overlap when the team can cooperate, socialize, and share information.
The first thing that should be done is the preparation of the individual work schedule. Check which working hours are best for your employees because of their location, and add them to a timetable that should be available to everyone. It will allow you and your teammates to organize a corporate calendar and schedule meetings where you can discuss the project over. You may use online tools like World Time Buddy, which helps to find overlapping time zones. Shared Google Calendar is also useful — team members can mark local holidays and vacations in it so that you won’t be wondering why someone doesn’t respond when such a day happens.
3. Use tools and develop rules that allow collaborating on a project
It’s often not enough to just meet online to talk about a certain project. To work effectively with a time shift, you’ll need to provide the team with tools to do work in a public mode. Recently we’ve tried out eyeson for real-time video collaboration and we were amazed by the current state of technology. The tool allows you to jumpstart a call from Slack or have public video chat groups to use in your meetings. You can record your dailies, so the entire team stays on top of communication and you don’t need to install anything, so it’s perfect for remote collaboration.
When it comes to software developers it may sometimes be necessary to have a coding partner. Find and provide the software that makes simultaneous coding accessible (ex. Visual Studio LiveShare). Pair programming provides several advantages in terms of progress — leads to higher quality code and fewer bugs by making continuous code reviews. In such a case, you don’t want your employees to be forced to send files to each other over and over again.
When developers are not working simultaneously, but the project is still subject to several people, help the team to develop sensible rules to make it more transparent. Sometimes changes that have been made in the code or progress are not noticeable right away. Remind each team member to leave a comment with the information where a person hung up and what should be done next. Developers, for example, may use code comments and pull requests. That way the rest of the team will always know what has been done while a certain person was working on the task.
What to do to empower teamwork across time zones
As the consulting agency providing developer recruitment services, we have encountered many times the concern of our clients to hire remote software developers. Moreover, we realized that when it comes to hiring a software developer who also lives in another time zone, it is even more disturbing.
If you’re running a remote team or thinking about starting one, we encourage you to take part in the Running Remote Conference 2019. It is carefully curated to teach you next-level, actionable strategies and tactics you can utilize the very next day to manage & grow your remote team.
We are also happy, as ITCraftship, to be a community partner of the Running Remote conference in beautiful Bali, Indonesia. That’s why we have a 20% off promo code for you to join the event: itcraftship
