5 pillars for improving off-shore team communication
A team consists of people with different expertise who use their skills in coordination with each other to create innovations. These teams need to be in sync and working comfortably with each other for the success of their innovative projects. Hence, the underlying key factor here is COMMUNICATION.
However, what happens when the communication needs to take place during your dinner time? Or when you need to put your kids to bed? Or when it’s your early morning and the sun is still not out yet?
While working with offshore teams these are few common problems that can be encountered. Along with these small, uncomfortable problems, come big problems, such as:
- Feeling tired while communicating, resulting in a lack of engagement to participate fully, which can lead to gaps in communication
- Confusion and fires resulting from unanswered questions and uninformed decisions which can cause problems down the project pipeline. For example, unanswered design-related questions from developers can lead to building the wrong feature
- Stubborn conversations that can result from big communication gaps, leading to a situation where no one wants to compromise, creating a not-so-friendly environment
- Difficulty maintaining work-life balance due to un-focussed time for family (or yourself) leading to frustration
- Reduced efficiency from working ‘til late in the evening and coming to the office in the morning
Many of these problems can be avoided when people work in the same location and have the luxury of face-to-face conversations.
And then there are problems that aren’t in our control such as:
- Language barriers which lead to unclear and/or long discussions which are in itself not desired in the evenings or mornings
- Adjusting between the offshore team’s other meetings and your meetings to find a good time to talk
- Time confusion when meetings get delayed or postponed
Finally, you’ll end up working on and off around the clock to balance both offshore teams and in-house teams.
No energy and time to relax or unwind = unhealthy work-life balance
Work-life balance, although very important, is very hard to achieve, especially when you want to make sure that your work is up to the mark and there are no communication gaps with the offshore teams. But there is a way out where you don’t end up getting burnt out. Below are some ideas on how to help balance your life when working with offshore teams without sacrificing communication.
5 ways to balance time with offshore teams and reduce communication gaps
- Constant communication — Provide a quick short informal update almost daily on any chat/communication channel. This small step takes no more than 5 minutes per day, but saves a lot of frustration and communication gaps in the longterm. It is synonymous to a daily stand-up in an agile process. Soon, this step will lead to transparency and trust on the team as everyone will have an idea of which step in the workflow the project is on and what the timeline is that they are looking at. Not to mention, it will expose any potential risks so fires can be caught immediately before they lead to bigger problems.
- Group your meetings — Instead of spreading your meetings evenly throughout the week, group them together and dedicate 1–2 days of the week for meetings. Joining even one meeting in the evening reduces your overall efficiency and your ability to compartmentalize office life and work life. This best practice will help free you up mentally on the other days to balance your life.
- Office hours — Set aside office hours for yourself, for example, 9 pm — 11 pm on a specific day of the week. If needed, people can schedule a time with you in that time window. Decide this time based on your convenience, and stick to it. Before and after this time window is the duration for your personal life. This helps to set expectations for the offshore team on when they have your time (or not). It also helps to compartmentalize your time to make sure that you are not working on and off around the clock.
- Short meetings — Instead of big meetings with a lot of topics on the agenda, have short, quick meetings with 1–2 discussion points. This structure leaves more time for smaller questions that may arise. Following this simple rule of thumb helps avoid small questions being left behind during big meetings which can lead to communication gaps later on. Having short meetings gives time to clear any confusion to make sure that everyone is on the same page and clear on what they need to do next.
- Strong interpersonal relations — Just like we develop friendly interpersonal relations with colleagues we work with face-to-face, we should make sure we create the same level of relations with offshore team members. For example, getting to know offshore partners on a deeper, more personal level, aside from just work and projects. Creating these relationships can help reduce friction. Small miscommunications become easier to deal with when you have fostered a friendly work atmosphere. Sometimes, if the work environment is too formal, frustrations can lead to unnecessary miscommunications later. As a result of the strong personal relations that I created with our offshore teams, we became comfortable enough to discuss all the communication issues that lead to some of the delays in our project timelines. This discussion led to the daily stand-up which I discussed in the 1st point (constant communication).
When I began working with our offshore team a year ago, half of my team was offshore, including designers, PMs and developers. It was a challenge for me to overcome. Being dedicated and new in my role, along with a passion for my work, a work-life balance was hard for me to find. Experiencing stressful situations, fires, and some communication gaps, led me to slowly establish the above 5 pillars for offshore team communication. Today, I have overcome most of the above-mentioned problems, but I am still learning. Are there any other solutions/challenges that you came across to make the offshore team communication seamless?
