Delegating Tasks to a remote team has become a standard in businesses, adding diverse talent to the team beyond geographical barriers. Having a remote team can be an advantage for almost every business, but also a challenge for a professional given the changing standards and ways of work.
Table of contents
- Advantages of a Remote Team
- Disadvantages of a Remote Team
- Communication and Task Management
- Conclusion
The advancement of technology has opened unimaginable possibilities and made easier for teams to complete their assignments outside of the office, in fact, while I am editing this piece, I’m having a good time under the California’s sun. For management to ensure that the work is completed in a timely and satisfactory manner, the SaaS space has come up with some innovative tracking tools to keep an eye on the proceedings.
Though technology makes everything easy, still there’s a margin of error which needs to be taken care of. Through this blog, we are going to lay down our experience and talk about pros and cons of hiring a Remote Team to let you know how this workflow would help you improve your own business.
In our blog Nearshore DevOps, we give you 6 reasons why this model is good for your company, we recommend you read it.
Advantages of a Remote Team:
1.- Increased Flexibility: One significant advantage is the flexibility, which allows the team to work irrespective of location or time. This means higher availability for urgent matters or steady availability for simple stuff that requires staying connected for a long time. People don’t spend time on traffic, or away from their workstation.
2.- Higher Productivity: If done right, working remotely can lead to a more focused workday. Employers fear the distractions of TV and household chores, but the office also comes with noise because of meetings, hall talks and many other interruptions from colleagues.
3.- Saves on Office Expense: If you operate 100% remote, you’ll save a lot of money by not renting or owning an office building and maintaining equipment for a certain number of employees.
4.- You Can Hire Anyone: Why limit yourself to hiring people at a particular location? When you hire remote team members, you have the possibility of finding the best talent to get the job done, without concerning about their location or even their time zone.
5.- 24/Hour Support: Hopefully you have customers all over the world using your product at any time of the day. By hiring in different time zones, you can provide 24-hour customer support to ensure those customers are taken care of no matter what time it is.
Disadvantages of a Remote Team:
1.- Company Culture: There’s practically no social interaction between the team unless they live in the same city. Building a company culture with a remote team can be hard. You’ll need to find ways to keep your culture alive through technology and periodic face-to-face meetings.
2.- Communication: Personal communication and collaboration amongst the team members are vital. Thus you need to put a lot of effort on this. Email is considered to be a remote team’s communication killer, so use video and messaging chat, with others communication group tools to build a remote office.
3.- Home Distractors: The distractions at home can be a lot: TV, kids, pets, chores, etc. You must learn to balance these correctly. Build a bridge of reliability between employer-employee to get the work done in best conditions and also be available when you’re expected to be.
Communication and Task Management
Since communication with the team is the key factor in this kind of environment, you must ensure seamless communication. There are all sorts of tools, software, and tutorials to help you with it.
To maintain communication between departments or workers, you can use free software such as Slack, Skype, HipChat, or even Hangouts; to have conversations via text or video. You can even, in some of them, share screens to show progress and so on.
For task management tools, there are free and paid options. In the free range, you can choose between Trello, Asana, Teamwork, or Basecamp, with lots of tools but also with limited options or user capacity. On the other hand, paid options offer you a lot of premium tools by paying around 10 dollars per month; some of them are Jira, Assembla, Hub staff, and many others.
Most software solutions have organization and report tools to keep on with the progress of team activities. Tracking the time it takes you to work on a project is also important to help you manage your tasks, so you can take advantage of software like these or search the market for the best Mac time-tracking tools.
For documentation or file sharing, you can use a lot of free platforms. Dropbox, Onedrive and Google Drive can work perfectly for sharing documents. You can also use Google Docs or EverNote for file creation and management with your team.
Having all the tools available on the market to manage your remote team would be useful if you follow or apply a work method. Using a defined workflow of methodology benefits your team to the extent that you can have complete control of it and also know the exact status of your product, page or application without missing key details.
The Agile methodology is the most used and efficient to implement in IT environments; it will benefit your team and product through daily meetings, defined workflow, and task distribution.
Planned weekly or bi-weekly sprints also boost productivity and help track the work better.
Conclusion
Working with a remote team takes practice, commitment, and another level of communication. Software companies have adopted this practice at a high pace in the past decade. After all, who doesn’t want some freedom, trust, and flexibility in their lives?
You can start introducing a remote team to your company, or create your startup in this way and benefit yourself with the advantages.
Our Team of professionals emphasizes in Quality solutions and services based on our proven best practices and top-notch technologies and Agile DevOps. Focus on your Product strategy and let us manage your online business as we did with Boatsetter . ClickIT is your best option when it is about working with a remote team Contact us!
