Managing a remote team can be a challenging task depending on the approach you use. With most organizations and companies hiring remote development teams, you need to know how best to manage the remote team to ensure you scale productivity. We will focus on nine tips to scale your remote development team. Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
How to Scale Your Remote Development Team
Earlier, the biggest concern for most companies was how to hire remote development teams. However, we dealt with that, and now the task at hand is understanding how best you can scale the productivity of your remote development team.
1. Accommodate Different Time Zones
When working with a remote development team, the difference in their time zones is a crucial aspect you must work around. The aim is to try scheduling the working hours to accommodate everyone’s timezone and, where possible, schedule tasks when time zones match. That way, the remote team can collaborate and communicate when working on a project.
Still, don’t overstress the team by forcing them to work simultaneously, yet the time zones are different. It’s best if you implement a routine that reviews everyone’s job done within 24 hours in their time zone.
2. Use Team Collaboration Tools
Unlike an in-person development team, where members can meet and physically collaborate, a remote development team is a different case. You must implement collaboration tools that foster teamwork while allowing team communication.
That way, projects won’t lag due to dependencies or other factors. You can use different collaboration tools, such as Slack, and they offer excellent tools to enhance team collaboration.
3. Schedule Meetings
Another way to scale your remote development team is to schedule meetings periodically. The purpose of the meetings is to help the team to know each other, discuss the progress made so far, and give the members a platform to air their views regarding the project or other issues or challenges affecting them.
There are different videoconferencing platforms, such as Zoom, which you can use for remote meetings.
4. Track Time
Time tracking is essential when handling a remote development team. Productivity increases as every member will be tracked on their activities during the tracked time. Hence, you eliminate idleness in your team and push members to be committed to their work.
Time tracking also helps recognize and reward the most active members. Moreover, time tracking helps manage your projects effectively and create a time chart of how and when to accomplish different tasks. For instance, freelance platforms like Upwork offer room for the client to check the time report when working with an hourly contract for a remote team.
5. Work with Milestones
When you want to scale your remote team’s productivity, split your work into milestones. The team can then focus on achieving the milestone within a given time. While at it, you will end up completing many milestones as members will feel motivated to work to accomplish the milestone instead of the entire project once.
Besides, milestones are a good way of measuring the progress of each team member.
6. Enhance Transparency
As a team leader, your transparency can motivate or kill the morale of your remote team. You must be true to your word to keep your remote team in action. Remote working gives room for tricks; unless you are clear with your team on what’s working and what is problematic, you can kill your team’s motivation.
Ensure you accommodate and engage the team in decisions and brainstorming where necessary.
7. Define Rules
Your team needs to know what is right and expected from them. Hence, clearly defined rules ensure every remote team member does what they should without being monitored. Rules help in creating self-motivated team members. Moreover, everyone will know the consequences of going against the expected behavior.
8. Encourage Creativity
When handling a remote team, give room for members to test and share their creativity. This can be achieved by creating an open meeting where everyone can share their ideas and opinions. That way, members will feel confident approaching you and each other, which can bring advanced skills and knowledge.
9. Offer Room for Social Interaction
Remote team collaboration is not as fun as working in a physical setting. Therefore, it’s a good idea to give members room to interact. You can achieve this by hosting online parties, chatting sessions, etc. Your team will feel motivated and work more to achieve the set goals.
Conclusion
Scaling your remote development team relies heavily on how you accommodate them and guide them in the development process. We’ve covered nine tips to motivate your remote development team, increasing productivity successfully. Try them out.
Also Read : Storage And SSD Storage, The Best Solution For Your Data
