How to Hire and Manage a Remote Development Team for Your Project
Remote software development has been on the back burner for many years. However, with the increased demand for software developers across industries, companies are now building remote development teams.
Since the pandemic, the trend for remote work has been increasing. While it was not highly prevalent for companies to have remote development teams, it has become the norm for smaller firms, companies who want to expand globally or want to outsource their work without spending much. Moreover, 51% of employees prefer working remotely, as it helps them to maintain a better work-life balance. Thus, remote working is a ‘win-win’ situation for both employees and companies.
Today, almost 56% of companies allow remote work, and it is expected to increase by 2025.
With such a rapid increase in remote development teams and remote workers, you must have the know-how of hiring and managing remote teams better, so that you can have a lasting and fruitful relationship with them.
Addevice specialises in providing the best tech talent for remote development, and their chosen members are capable of delivering the most complex software development projects hassle-free.
In this article, we will uncover everything about remote development teams, their benefits, how to manage them, and how to expand your teams by hiring the right people. But first, let's start by understanding the advantages of remote development teams.
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Advantages of Remote Development Teams
Remote development teams provide a plethora of benefits, and as a business, below are some of the benefits that you’ll experience once you start hiring remote development teams.
Access to a global talent pool
When you choose to go remote, you get access to a global talent pool and you can hire better for niche skills and core expertise in working with technology stack for app, web and software development solutions.
| Country | No. of Developers |
|---|---|
| India | 5.8 Million |
| Japan | 1.2 Million |
| Indonesia | 1 Lakh |
| Malaysia | 1 Lakh |
| Armenia | 65K |
Talking about developing countries that have great developers who work at lower rates, as an employer, you can get the best value for your money by building remote teams. Nations like India, Indonesia, Armenia, Malaysia, and Japan are becoming the preferred remote team destinations for many companies due to the best tech talent and competitive salaries.
This strategy allows you to overcome the shortage of highly skilled individuals in your area as you go global and remote.
Cost savings
When it comes to remote development teams, cost saving is one of the biggest advantages that each company experiences. Firms can save significantly as they don't have to spend money on office space, utilities, administration, and other costs related to operating a physical office space.
Moreover, by hiring from developing countries where the salaries are relatively lower because of the purchasing power parity, you can also save a lot. Apart from that, when there is high demand and less supply of developers, hiring from there becomes costly. Thus, it is best to go remote or outsource your work to save costs on salaries.
| Position | India | Indonesia | Armenia |
|---|---|---|---|
| Junior Developer | $18 | $20 | $25 |
| Senior Developer | $40 | $42 | $40 |
| Lead Developer | $50 | $45 | $60 |
| Solution Architect | $70 | $60 | $125 |
| QA Engineer | $8 | $10 | $20 |
Increased productivity and flexibility
Remote working has been associated with increased productivity, which is a direct result of better flexibility. When development teams have the elasticity to work from anywhere and at any time, they tend to perform better. With the given flexibility, productivity also increases rapidly as developers tend to work when they feel their best, and their output at such times is way higher than on normal days. Moreover, around 77% of people clocked more hours when working remotely.
Improved work-life balance for team members
Remote development teams often experience a better work-life balance when compared to teams that work fully in the office. This is because they can take time out of their schedules to attend to personal concerns.
Moreover, the commute time gets cut for all remote development teams, and they can do something productive during this time, like upskilling, going to the gym, or doing anything else that brings balance to their life.
Working with remote development teams is not all smiles. While these challenges are not big enough to halt the operations, it is essential to know these before building remote teams.
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Challenges of Managing Remote Development Teams
While remote development teams provide numerous benefits, they also have their issues. Below are some of the challenges that you might face while working with remote development teams.
Consistent Communication
Communication is the key to delivering better products by bringing the best out of your teams; however, this is also one of the biggest challenges when managing remote development teams.
Face-to-face communication is often well understood by everyone involved in it, and it is easy to ask questions during the conversation to get doubts resolved. On the other hand, communicating via emails, messaging apps, or voice calls can become a bit challenging.
Moreover, if your teams are spread across different countries, there are chances that you’ll have language differences to add to your issues of communication.
At Addevice, we use the latest technologies and regular team offsites to facilitate crystal-clear communication among the teams. You can also solve this challenge by implementing the latest communication tools like business messaging apps, and video conferencing solutions.
Coordinating Schedules
Many times, managers have to extend their hours to communicate and connect with teams working in different time zones. Due to this, managers are overworked, and they become less productive with prolonged exposure to such working conditions.
If you are trying to save costs significantly and hire teams in areas that have drastic time zone differences, you’ll face these challenges. To avoid such challenges, you should choose remote development teams that offer the least time zone difference.
Team cohesion and culture
Cultivating a team culture is easier when the teams are meeting in person, but it is quite challenging when teams work remotely. Many organisations are losing their culture due to an increase in remote working. Remote development teams do not feel the belongingness to an organisation and its culture, and this also results in higher attrition for companies.
Addevice hosts team meetings and other events regularly to foster a great culture among teams so that they work better with each other for a longer period. This issue among remote development teams can be solved by hosting regular meetings and enabling team members to connect with each other through cross-team tasks.
Balancing Accountability and tracking progress
Tracking the progress of tasks and keeping people accountable also becomes difficult when working remotely. Remote teams should have a whiteboard where all tasks are listed with their descriptions and other details. This whiteboard should also track the progress of tasks so that everyone is informed about the progress.
Moreover, when time zone conflicts occur and some tasks are not completed, teams can often hold other teams accountable for not being available to work with them or solve their doubts. Accountability and progress tracking for tasks can be done by utilizing project management tools that show the flow of each task since its inception.
Managing Productivity
Managing team productivity can be a challenge when working remotely. When the team members and stakeholders work across different time zones, the team’s productivity can take a hit as they might have to stretch hours to overlap and attend meetings.
This issue can be solved by promoting clear responsibilities across teams and letting them manage their work without much overlap and interference.
By now, you know the benefits and challenges of managing a remote development team for your project, so this is the right time to understand how to hire remote developers.
Key Considerations for Hiring Remote Developers
Today, the number of remote jobs has risen three times more compared to pre-pandemic times. When hiring remote developers for your business, you need to focus on a wide variety of factors to get the best team members. So here are some considerations you should take while hiring remote developers.
Define project requirements and skill sets needed
The first step in hiring a remote development team is to define why you need a remote development team, what project you are doing, and what skills you are looking for. At this stage, you should also define if the skills you seek are available locally or not and the extra benefits of setting up a remote development team.
Suppose you are building trading software, and you need Rust developers, which is already a niche technology, you might not have a huge supply of such developers in your area, so it is best to hire a remote development team from the areas where there is high demand and less cost.
Create a comprehensive Job Description
Writing a great job description that clearly explains the job role and day-to-day activities is important in finding the right developers. If you don't write a comprehensive job description, you will end up with lots of applicants for your jobs, and out of them, only a fraction of applicants would be suitable for your role.
Hence, have a look at some other remote developer hiring job descriptions, understand your project requirements, find the most important skills for your role, and then create a job description.
Use reputable job platforms and networks
There are multiple different job platforms and networks that you can rely on when hiring a remote developer. LinkedIn is still trusted by over 77% of recruiters to fill their open positions.
Based on your location, you’ll have many local players in the job portal business offering you advanced features to post a job and find the best candidates, but you can also rely on international products to widen your reach.
Implement a thorough screening and interview process
Having a robust screening and interview process will guarantee a standardized hiring process to build a team from the best developers. For this, you should have a technological questionnaire that focuses on evaluating the developer’s skills correctly and helps you in shortlisting the right candidates.
Apart from hiring, many other factors contribute to building effective remote team that exceeds expectations every time and delivers great products. So, let's look at what goes into building better remote teams.
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Building a Successful Remote Development Team
Successful teams are not built magically, but they require lots of effort, and this struggle increases when you have a remote development team to work with. Let’s find out how you can build a successful remote development team.
Foster a positive remote work culture
Building a positive work culture helps your teammates to perform well and give their best to the team every day. Keep politics out of your team, and nurture an environment where every team member is treated equally to have a successful remote team.
Set clear expectations and goals
Setting clear expectations for each team member’s yearly performance and assigning them a bit challenging yet achievable goals is the way to have a good and competitive team.
At Addevice, our team members are encouraged to build something unique frequently, no matter if it is related to the business we do or not. This encourages our teams to research, innovate, and learn new things for their career progression.
Provide the right tools and technology
Even the best developers fail when they don’t have the right tools and technologies to support them in building and shipping your products. Help them learn new technologies whenever there is a change and this will surely boost your team’s expertise and make them successful.
Address time zone challenges
Communication makes working easier, and when working with remote teams, you must address time zone challenges to keep the project completing successfully. Set up overlapping hours where both, onshore and remote, teams are available for meetings to discuss doubts and address any blockers.
Now, you should understand communication strategies for remote development teams to work with them effectively.
Effective Communication Strategies for streamlined Remote Work
As remote development teams don’t have physical meetups or in-office presence, it is often hard to get people inside out. But if you focus on having better communication strategies, it may become easier.
Below are some communication strategies that you should look at:
- Regular team meetings and check-ins
Regular team meetings serve as a medium to keep team members synced with things happening across the panel and how their work creates an impact. You can schedule a short meeting every day to get the task status and other information from team members.
- Utilizing video conferencing for a more personal touch
It is good to have a video conference call with your team members occasionally to make a personal connection. Without video calls, your team members will feel like they are talking to their laptops every day, and it will become boring. Hence, it is better to opt for video calls every time possible.
- Written documentation for clear communication
Remote development teams should focus on developing high-quality written documentation for all their tasks. This ensures that other team members understand their work even when they are not around to help them.
- Foster an environment for open feedback and suggestions
Receiving and giving regular feedback as well as suggestions helps teams to understand each other better. This also helps teams to work on their weak points and deliver high-quality work the next time.
After you have learned the communication strategies for remote development teams, you also need to understand how to monitor them and track their progress toward goals. So, let's discuss that in the upcoming section.
Monitoring and Tracking Progress
Measuring the success of development teams is important as it helps you to give better feedback and also progress the careers of your team members. Here are some of the ways to monitor and track the progress of your teams.
- Implementing ‘Key Performance Indicators’ (KPIs)
No matter what you are working on, there are always some business KPIs and product KPIs defined for the items. You should try to implement them for your teams by helping them understand those KPIs and guiding them to perform accordingly.
- Regular project updates and reporting
Keep every team member in sync by hosting regular project updates and reporting. This can be a short daily meeting that includes all team members and they provide their updates as a short description. During this time, the team members can also raise any blockers being faced while completing their tasks and ask for solutions.
- Tools for tracking work and productivity
Many project tracking tools are available at minimal costs and provide many customizable features to suit all types of teams. Add these productivity and work-tracking tools and experience a seamless way of monitoring project status.
- Addressing challenges and roadblocks promptly
If you want to progress continually, it is important to address conflicts and obstructions as and when they come up. Developers should highlight any flaws or issues in the implementation of the process whenever they encounter them so others can help jump in and get it resolved.
After you have built a successful team, you also need to keep them pushing the bars of success higher and higher. One of the ways to do this is to offer team training and development options.
In the next section, let’s understand how team training and development can be included to keep remote development teams successful.
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Team Training and Development
If you want the best team, you should encourage them to spend significant time on personal development too.
Below are some ways to inspire team training and development for your remote development teams.
- Continuous learning opportunities
Provide continuous learning opportunities to your teams, whether it is through in-house training or research and innovation. Encourage your teams to spend some time every week learning so that they are more relevant to the market and keep learning new things that can be helpful to your business.
- Skill enhancement programs
Develop aptitude betterment sessions that help your teams get better at their work. Such schemes can also be used to train new hires in your teams and get them to speed quickly.
- Encouraging knowledge sharing within the team
Foster a culture of sharing knowledge among your teams. This will help each member to learn something new. Knowledge sharing among the team can be through small articles, videos, or even bugs someone has solved.
- Providing resources for professional growth
Provide a clear path to your team members regarding their professional growth, and help them walk through the path so that they can achieve promotions, and become better developers that contribute more to your business.
Remote development teams are not in your physical vicinity, and as everything is online, it is important to have the right security and data protection measures to keep things safe. Let’s discuss them in the next section.
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Security and Data Protection
Security and data protection are some of the biggest issues faced by remote development teams, and you can make it better by following the below points.
- Establishing secure communication channels
Every business has lots of communications through emails or instant messaging apps, and it is important to keep those channels secure. You should use tools that guarantee end-to-end encryption for your messages so that no messages are exposed and used against your business.
- Implementing best cybersecurity practices
Follow best cybersecurity practices by building a robust cybersecurity expert team. Moreover, cybersecurity knowledge should also be given to all employees regularly so they don’t end up being the weaker link on the chain.
- Training team members on security protocols
Major attacks happen when someone gets compromised; hence, training everyone and keeping your networks secure is better. Create courses on how common cyberattacks take place, how to avoid them, and the best practices to be followed while developing critical production applications.
- Regular security audits and updates
Besides training your employees and developing robust security measures, it is also important to regularly test those security measures through audits and internal attacks. This way you identify new attacks and generate prevention.
Conclusion
By the end of the sequence, you have passed through the nitty-gritty details of recruiting, coordinating, and scaling up the operations of a remotely arranged project development team. These inductions are priceless to journey through remote work environment as well as your resourceful contribution progress. You can also read our guide about DevOps as a Services.
On the other hand, if you still find it hard to step on this road by yourself, or you are having some concerns, worry not. addevice is a reliable balls-to-walls remote development team provider ready to deal with all difficulties, no matter whether you need our services to build or maintain your remote crew. Through Addevice, all the unexpected cases of remote work will not confuse you, and you will easily maintain productivity and meet outstanding outcomes.
Visit us now and find out how we can bring you a remote development team as well as tailor it specifically for the project requirements. Let us, therefore, embark on this trip jointly and discover the great merits of remote programming.
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FAQ
Consequential quality partnership with a remote app design team is inevitable for successful outcome. Reduce communication barriers by applying communication tools such as video conferencing, messaging apps and email Create regular team meetings to keep the communication on point and give the individuals explicit step by step details and clear instructions regarding the job. On top of that, make a working atmosphere where team members will not be afraid to get their questions answered or seek additional explanation.
When looking to hire remote developers, it's necessary to clarify the task(s) you want to get done and the specific skills required for each task. Formulate a detailed job description in which you will state the authorities and qualifications for the candidate. Employ your local and international networking channels that are well ripped via trustable job platforms to explore candidates around the globe. Propose a rigorous and productive screens and interviews process to find the right person thereby building a successful team.
Someone working across time zones may face challenges but with the right strategies this can be overcome. Think of hiring remote developers that are from locations having less time zone variation rather than those who have work hours ranging at the same time. have at leasts biannual meetings and check-ins in times mutually suited for all team members. Use project management tools for the sake of monitoring the progress of the project as well as for ensuring the consistency of its course during different time zones.
Security and data protection are the most important things in a remote development environment, thus you have to be alway focused on them. Secure communication channels should be established by using encryption that is end-to-end for the exchange of confidential data. Establish appropriate cybersecurity policies, commit funds, and organize regular training workshops for all employees on security measures. Do frequent security reviews and upgrade solutions to discover and eliminate vulnerabilities and threats.
Building a good work culture is necessary as this will create good team cohesion and productivity that are needed at remote workplaces. Develop an open communication and collaboration through organizing team meetings and check-ins among the teammates and getting them nor as a whole. Aim at the recognition and acknowledgment of achievements in order to motivate morale and encourage the team. List of key words: achievements, morale, motivation, celebrate, recognize A platform for personal development and professional skills development should be available to motivate workforce and stay interested in their jobs.
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