How high-performing can be an overseas development center?
Many companies still consider assembling distant working teams a bit risky. Why so? Fast-growing businesses might shy away from this option due to team effectiveness and cooperation concerns. SD Solutions has proven experience establishing and building high-performing teams in Eastern Europe and LATAM countries. So what strategies to follow and how to build a successful overseas team? We invite you to the inside kitchen of smart scaling for IT companies.
Have a team lead on-site or overseas?
The key to the right solutions is not relying on fast answers; it depends. If there are several junior specialists in a hiring plan, it's important to offer them the necessary guidance and assistance to excel. Why? They often need help with complex tasks and have many questions to be answered quickly. That's why having a team lead on-site can be an absolute game-changer and puts an overseas team to a high efficiency level from the very beginning. This is where the value of turnkey R&D centres is found: hiring remote junior specialists with no decline in efficiency. The team gets an office for gathering, communication, and work and becomes a delivering unit for the company.?
Talking about the team with mostly senior or middle professionals, it doesn't matter where the lead is. Since those team members already have a pack of knowledge and experience, they can handle distant work with their manager and perform as much the same as if they were near the team leader. This brings us to the next question…
Office or working from home?
Glassdoor's recent statistics revealed that more than two-thirds of employers (68 percent) offered remote work conditions, and candidates considered it a benefit, which means they are more motivated to perform better at work.??
From a perspective of business development, among other things, hiring in distant locations aims to cut costs on maintaining expensive offices in California, Toronto, or Tel Aviv, right? If new developers are thousands of kilometres away anyway, what's the point of setting up an office for them?
However, all of the above contrasts the reality: most of the decision-makers in 2023 opt for setting up a new team in a full-package office with IT infrastructure, on-site managers, coffee and snacks.?
In our scaling scheme for companies, we have developed a perfectly balanced option for companies. Hiring in countries where the SD Solutions office is available. Leading managers can work together with an overseas team from our office every month or several times a year, even if the team works from home most of the time. 100% of the SD Solutions team works with overseas managers, and nearly 72% of our teams successfully work remotely or in a hybrid format. We assist with organising business trips for our partners whether their team works in the office every day or comes over only for team building sessions.
To Track Time or Not to Track
The first thoughts on managing a remote team in terms of efficiency control brings us to time tracking.? It's important to consider the potential downsides of excessive monitoring.?
It might make augmented team members feel like they're constantly under a microscope, triggering the smell of micromanagement — and nobody wants to be checked all the time. Some aspects of software development, such as creative problem-solving, don't neatly fit into time-tracking categories. A focus on tracking hours can lead to a culture prioritising quantity over quality. In SD Solutions practice, quality hire with motivation check and deep background analysis leads to the high efficiency of a remote mode in most cases.
If implementing a time-tracking system is a must, follow it with the right company culture. To ensure that everybody is still motivated, the support should be provided by a dedicated personal People Partner who knows the best practices of the country chosen for building an overseas team.
The Need for Daily Calls
While time tracking can distance you even more from your overseas team, daily calls can bring many benefits. These regular check-ins act as a lifeline that links remote team members, even though they may be far away from each other or their manager.
Good communication is the key to success for remote teams. 40 minutes per day may cut waiting for dozens of messages and describing the issues in written form.
What if on-site managers of a company can not conduct daily meetings with the team in another country? How can the value they bring can be compensated?
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Integrating Overseas Team Members
To achieve a high performance rate, it's important to make your team members in the R&D centre on the other side of the world feel appreciated and valued as much as those in the main office. By creating an atmosphere where everyone fits in, you can ensure that your overseas team members don't feel isolated and can work in harmony.?
How to achieve it?
Start with welcoming guides. They play a big role in helping overseas team members settle in. Welcome books provide a simple, easy-to-follow introduction to your company: values, “about us” stories, office address, wi-fi, contact information, legal matters, etc.?
A key aspect to consider is aligning all onboarding processes with the main office. This includes when and how the HR team provides information and where and what kind of information is shared. All of these factors form the foundation for successful work and communication.
TIP! Training, seminars and joint discussions on one united platform for everybody create a sense of integration and involvement so the R&D team will feel part of the company even across the ocean.?
Sound overwhelming? That is the point of a full-circle scaling partner who covers everything but not your product development.
Using different time zones as a strong side
Development team that can cover production issues 24 hours a day while working at their regular hours are a reality for many of our clients. We also build high-performing customer support centres covering night shifts of another continent and maintaining excellent work-life balance. Each case is individual, and we help companies get the most out of the locations available to us — from Tbilisi to Lisbon, from Lisbon to Bogotá.
At the same time, considering time zones is necessary to establish proper productive collaboration in future. For setting up online meetings and project deadlines, assigning tasks and defining working hours. at least a couple of hours should overlap so that teams have time to discuss the project, their tasks, etc.?
Shared Business Culture
Since the team will be working remotely, to get rid of fears of misunderstanding and not fitting in, there is a need for all team members to share the same values and believe in the same business culture. An example is the diversity of Japanese and South African businesses; they have different approaches to certain concepts in communication and attitudes towards work. This can sometimes make it challenging for them to work together effectively and achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.
Insight! Representatives of the same business culture will cooperate better and have fewer disputes, and the team's overall success will be higher. Nevertheless, relying on national stereotypes is a big mistake in international companies, as you can lose a lot of talented people. How do we solve this problem? 1 - recruiters can ask specific questions at the prescreening specifically tailored to your culture. 2 - conduct a special cultural fit interview to discover if you can work in synergy.
Building a team does not always mean creating it from scratch. More often than not, there's already a foundation, or at the very least, an individual who serves as the team's backbone.?
The evaluation process is the basis for informed decisions about remote team augmentation. Just like with a puzzle, sometimes there are already pieces in place, and you just need to find the missing ones to complete the picture.
A scaling partner can be your ally in building a remote team. While assessing companies' in-house resources, we identify what the details are already in place and then work on filling in the gaps with new hires. Scaling partners specialise in connecting organisations with highly skilled remote professionals, streamlining the hiring process, providing ongoing support and reducing administrative burden.
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