Tips to Successfully Manage Outsourced Remote Teams

Remote team management is about keeping balance and being able to address the issues before they turn into major issues. Although work from home became a new trend a while ago, some managers still find it tough to deal with all the hurdles of communicating with teams sitting miles away from them. 

Virtual team management might become an easy task once you understand how to approach it correctly. The right strategy will help your company achieve the desired results and keep your employees satisfied. 

Having analyzed the best practices implemented by the companies that leverage the cooperation with remote employees from different countries, we came up with the following list of practical tips:  

1. Establish healthy relationships between team members

This is the golden rule for any company that strives to achieve success in its field. It’s critical for the employees to understand how to communicate with each other and adhere to the same goals. Besides, they’ll have to make decisions, which is complicated if each employee shares contrasting opinions about the issues. 

So, make sure your team members are on the same page and motivated enough to impact the overall performance positively. Also, you can share the workers’ achievements and not forget about praising them for reaching their goals. By doing this, you encourage the remote employees and emphasize equality in the team. 

2. Leverage right technologies 

There’s a handful of tools and software that can facilitate your remote team collaboration. You can use the most suitable ones to maximize productivity and make day-to-day work more potent. 

Although video chats are excellent for remote communication because they perfectly substitute the in-person conversations, it’s better not to overuse them. There are various messengers in which you can quickly discuss any issues or exchange updates on the progress. You can even introduce an internal social networking platform, which will make communication safer and help you to save costs and increase business productivity.

Also, there is a multitude of project management tools that help to stay on track with all the updates to the product development and address any questions as soon as they arise. Besides, they help to stay more organized and spread the load more evenly. 

3. Ensure regular check-ins

Be it daily or weekly catch-ups, make sure you have them. These should be one-on-one calls via video because it helps to establish a better connection with the employees. Such calls make the team members understand that their work is valued, and they are always welcome to reach out to their managers in case they need help or support. 

Schedule the calls depending on your team’s approach to work and avoid having unnecessary calls because it will make employees think you don’t trust them. Also, emphasize that people can text you anytime they need some assistance, and you can discuss their concerns via chat or video call.

It’s about letting workers know there’s nothing wrong with asking for help and discussing the challenges they might be facing. 

4. Clarify expectations

Since each person has their unique approach to work, all the processes might become too disorganized if you set unrealistic expectations. So, to avoid that, make sure to educate your team on why you need them to complete specific tasks and help them understand how you’ll evaluate results. 

Pay attention to clearly defining the scope, deadlines, and goals the team should achieve. This helps to avoid miscommunication between team members and be confident everyone’s up to completing the defined tasks. 

5. Focus on results, not process

When working at home, many people face certain difficulties, which mainly come to managing distractions. So, instead of making your employees work 9 to 5, offer them more flexibility. Besides, we all have different biorhythms, and if someone delivers excellent results in the morning, the other does it in the evening. So, pay attention to these specificities and don’t try to manage every aspect of the remote team’s work.  

Instead of focusing on the hours worked or activity, focus on the delivered results and their quality. It will help to enhance your business productivity and measure the team’s success more precisely. 

6. Introduce flexibility

If you give your team enough freedom to choose the time their productivity is at the highest level, you’ll see the positive outcomes of these decisions soon enough. Remote work isn’t about working for eight hours straight anymore. It’s about giving employees more freedom and flexibility to get their tasks done by spreading the load in the most convenient way for them. 

To make sure such working conditions won’t become an excuse for not getting things done, make sure to set deadlines and stay in touch with the employees. 

7. Find an approach that works

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to outsourced teams. Each person has different skills, traits, and preferences, so the method you implemented earlier might not be effective anymore. Understanding that each member has their own needs and customs paying attention to them is a key to setting up a productive remote team,

So, communicate with your employees, try to determine their preferences about the working rhythm, and ask them to share their visions about the project and remote collaboration. Such insights will help you create a healthy working environment in which everyone is equally appreciated.  

8. Be mindful of different time zones

Although different time zones might seem like an additional challenge for some companies, many businesses use them to their advantage. For example, if you opt for Ukraine IT outsourcing, there will be four hours of overlap with the US, meaning that even when your local team is off, the outsourced one will be working, and vice versa. 

Although asynchronous communication might pose some difficulties, there are many time zone meeting planner apps that show who’s online and when. 

In other words, with the right approach to managing outsourced teams, you’ll be able to leverage the advantages they offer. 

Conclusion

The key to successful outsourced remote teams management is about creating the proper strategy and ensuring balance in the workplace. The employees stay longer if their needs are addressed, and the working atmosphere encourages them to achieve better results.

That being said, these eight tips can help you manage your virtual teams more effectively and inspire them to perform better while enjoying the benefits of working from home.