Anyone having worked with remote development team members across different countries must have experienced the difficulties and challenges in maintaining communication. But strong communication when you hire remote engineers for your app is a crucial requirement for the success of the project.
But at the same time, remote hiring is perceived as an area of competitive strength for companies simply because they can easily hire developers from any location of their choice, and they can hire really talented developers for their projects.
So, the actual challenge is to know how one can make remote teams work smoothly. One needs a coherent and highly productive strategy to get the best out of remote teams. Whether you make a perfect mobile app or enterprise software, the communication challenges for remote teams remain the same.
With well-managed communication, you can establish meaningful bonding for the remote team of developers and ensure great output. Here we are going to explain how you can really do that.
Compensate for the physical distance
A key reason why remote teams often fail is the lack of bonding and understanding because of their physical distance. Often developers working in different locations forget about the viewpoints of the team members on the other side. Lack of communication and collaboration ultimately results in compromised output in the development.
In a remote development environment, one needs to create scopes for team members to communicate both formally and informally. This should lead you to explicit communication and the creation of opportunities like holding frequent meetings and informal chat sessions for everyone to mingle and share.
Keep an always active chat room.
Many businesses prefer to keep a chat room open constantly for all the team members to stay in touch. This is a great approach as developers can leave messages for other team members while others can brainstorm an idea left by anyone. It is also important to see that such a chat remains alive without causing distractions.
When you have a chat room for anyone in the company to participate, this actually helps people with a breathing space outside of the stressful tasks and responsibilities. A place where employees can talk about anything they like ultimately keeps everyone happy and content. Such company-wide chat rooms also help to foster a social connection among the employees.
The most reliable options for creating chat rooms are Skype, Slack, Trello, and HipChat. In case you consider a free option, Skype will be the best of them. On the other hand, Slack is great for task management in an organized manner.
Hold events for remote staff.
Social events create a sense of companionship and provide staff the opportunity to associate with others in the company who are not in their team. This also helps in developing stronger bonds with the company.
The events organized for both in-house staff and remote employees also create an opportunity to allow everyone to see their colleagues, team counterparts, and managers in an informal atmosphere. Most importantly, such events make all employees, irrespective of their locations, feel connected through a shared bond and company values.
A system to breach multiple time zones
Multiple time zones and their differences can undermine communication in a remote development team. When developers of the teamwork in separate time zones, you need to ensure facilitating an overlapping period to make all members meet and communicate.
On the other hand, this alone cannot be enough. Apart from creating an overlapping time for everyone to communicate, you need to switch schedules for selective members on a rotational basis so that some members can always work in collaboration from their respective time zones. How well you can deal with the time zone challenges can have a massive bearing on the effects of remote development work.
Follow up with the remote developers.
Alongside all the advice and suggestions that we already prescribed, there’s the time-tested approach of reaching out to remote developers frequently and often. Apart from tracking their inputs and issues, it would help if you constantly listened to their opinions on the project.
Remember that one-on-one calls made to the remote team members need not always focus on tracking their productivity. Such one-on-one calls from the managers can also be sufficiently motivating for the remote developers resulting in better engagement.
It is always advisable to schedule one-on-one calls regularly. Make sure to communicate individually with remote team members on a daily, weekly, or biweekly basis. Such individual calls will help the managers get an idea of how the employees are doing, detect issues and problems in the project, know about some future ideas regarding the project, etc.
Make a guiding content with tips from remote staff.
Developers or employees in a development company with years of experience across multiple remote projects always have something to share that can be put to practice for better results. Making such tips and suggestions available for everyone can really be valuable for the app project.
These data insights or tips can be put together through PDFs, simple videos, or easy FAQ video tutorials. Some of the valuable tips for communicating with remote team members include managing the development process in a day-to-day manner, personal habits to stay focused, maintenance of work-life equilibrium, time management tips, task organization ideas, and tips, etc.
Conclusion
While remote hiring is likely to remain popular for the vast majority of IT projects around the world, it is important to caress for the bonding and communication of developers working remotely. All these ideas and tips that we shared here are results of the experience of many successful app projects involving remote teams.
