Solutions for the challenges in virtual teams

Looking for custom software solutions to support the growth of your business? Or are you eyeing to cut down on your operational expenses? Either way, the first thing that comes into anyone’s mind would be; how will I build my team going forward. In a market fraught with uncertainty, many companies have focused on cutting expenses, augmenting their teams, increasing productivity and efficiency as a way to maintain their growth streak. At the same time, maintaining the same quality, assurance, and looking to stem market share losses. Have you considered Virtual Teams as a solution? If not, you should do it right away.

Read: Benefits of having remote teams

As teams start growing an organization grows beyond one single office location into multiple locations and most often across multiple countries, different time zones, or downsizing/ reorganizing to reduce labor costs, eliminate redundancy, and better target scarce resources. Does your organization see the opportunity here working with remote teams or does it visualize the barriers associated with managing virtual teams?

Yes, most of us would agree that managing virtual teams or geographically dispersed teams of technologists has often been a challenge. Managing teams that are sitting right in front of you all the time is much easier. To make our lives easier, the markets have flooded with solutions such as Office 365, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and others that help you collaborate with your teams, no matter where you are, as long as you have connectivity to the internet! However, as I mentioned earlier, most of us talk about the difficulties that companies face during managing virtual teams and even at times go deeper into reasons why virtual teams don’t work.

However, most of us fail to embark on a journey to discover what failed along the way even though there existed tools and technologies that were there to make our lives easier than ever, and to do that companies should foresee solutions to overcome the challenges faced during virtual team management. Anyhow, post-Covid many of the organizations planning to keep practicing virtual teamwork due to its benefits of reduced infrastructure maintenance costs, greater work-life balance, etc.

Read: How we set up Remote Teams for a Microsoft Partner

As a modern workplace service provider, we have come across many industrial obstacles preventing them from digital transformation, however, there are no problems without a solution. Hence here we are describing some of the challenges and solutions in virtual team management that companies normally encounter.

Let’s talk about Challenges in managing a virtual team:

1. The right vendor fits into your business needs and helps you set up remote teams that match your requirements, specifications, and expectations.
2. Difficulties in communicating and understanding one another, resulting in a lack of common ground, trust, and shared responsibility, work effectiveness
3. Failure to develop task-related processes such as setting clear goals and standards
4. Inability to collaborate in a way that takes advantage of different perspectives, knowledge, talent, and expertise
5. A lack of full engagement and commitment by all team members to deliver their best performances when completing tasks and progressing toward team goals
6. Team leaders accustomed to observing and interacting with their team of engineers in-person and conducting face-to-face meetings often find it difficult in virtual team communication, coaching virtual teams or virtual team building, and otherwise managing a geographically distributed team to achieve the highest possible performance. So how do leaders adapt to overcome barriers and lead effectively from a distance and yet achieve the same goals as they would have with localized teams of developers and testers?

Strategies for Successful Virtual Team Management

1. Choosing the responsible virtual team vendor who provides, manages, and ensures the capabilities of your teams. Maintain Strong Communication Channels
2. Create a Collaborative Mindset
3. Helps you manage a remote team effectively
4. Clarify the team’s purpose and goals
5. Establish performance standards and expectations
6. Celebrate Milestones and Successes
7. Build plans to ensure complete engagement of your teams and resources
8. Helps you build trust
9. Have a face to face interaction via video calling tools/conduct virtual team meetings

Hiring remote teams has become an opportunity now as a model of engagement in comparison to your in-house human resource. As a matter of fact, it confers flexibility in selecting your resources as and when needed. Moreover, it keeps you away from chasing offshore freelancers with a lack of commitment. As a virtual remote resources business agency, our remote teams hiring services save you a great deal of cost in remote team building besides ensuring that the quality of work delivered is of superlative degree due to a multitude of options and talents available to choose from.

Solutions for managing the virtual teams effectively:

1. Hire the best talent
2. Team augmentation service gives you the option of choosing the best talent (remote employees), which is in-line with your programming and development needs; and you get specialists in all the fields including SEO, .Net, CMS, JAVA, PHP Developers, Mobile Application developers and many more. You can also increase or decrease the size of your team with time, thereby, optimizing your operational cost and scaling as needed.
3. Let go of the hiring and managing overheads
4. Your Team-as-a-service vendor not only takes care of your hiring process, providing you options that you can select from, and supports infrastructure like hardware and software, workspace fall under the ambit of your service provider. Thus, it negates your focus required on unnecessary tasks while concentrating more on the actual task. Focus on your core business rather than bothering about things that can eat away your productive time.
5. Remotely manage your offshore team at your convenience
6. Your remote team employees albeit part of a different country/continent are available for communicating with you and collaborate at your convenience and availability. The service provider equips your dedicated development team with the necessary communication support including video conferencing, PC sharing, high-speed data sharing, and mobile connectivity so that you gain real control over your virtual employees / remote workers by monitoring them remotely.
7. Bypass legal boundaries
8. Is your remote team spread across the globe serving different needs? Does every remote team member work in a different zone? Irrespective of that, you save yourself from delving into legal issues including Government clearances, taxes, or company registration specific to the laws of the land whether it is North America, Asia, or Latin America for that matter. Everything will be taken care of by the service provider, besides the legal issues. Some vendors offer an additional level of assurance and guaranteed value by offering maintenance warranty and liability insurance.
9. Control over data security
10. Virtual employees in developing countries have access to sensitive information of your business but with cloud-based servers owned by your company, whole information is stored within your company’s servers. Moreover, data security is of the utmost importance to well-established vendors. While choosing a vendor, it is extremely important to choose teams and vendors who are truly genuine and have a proven track record. Companies like banks and other private institutions need to operate under strict compliance rules and it is extremely important that the vendor is capable of delivering what is needed.
11. Accountability
12. The Remote Team agency is entirely responsible for keeping a check on the workers and their functioning, and they make sure that the dedicated team working under your company is aligned as per your instructions and developmental goals. Besides this, any goof-ups and irregularities by your virtual team are daily reported to you so that you can take timely action and ensure the effectiveness of remote team working.
13. Staff management
14. The remote team working under you is under a contractual agreement with the vendor. Consequently, all HR-related issues like employee leave and employee benefits are subjected to the vendor’s jurisdiction and control. Thus, leaving you unbothered about any issues with managing teams. Whether it is attrition rate or salary hike, none of it is your concern as far as your work is being delivered. Furthermore, you need not invest in annual bonuses, insurance, and medical allowances.
15. Nurture long-term relationship
16. Your in-house team works in tandem with the offshore dedicated team. Continuous working over various projects develops a level of understanding between culturally different teams, thereby, nourishing strong working relationships among them. Collaboration and communication are the key success aspects here and having a vendor as a partner who understands this becomes extremely important.
17. Make significant savings
18. Due to the growing needs and requirements of businesses, continuous up-gradation of both systems and in-house resources becomes extremely important. And these tasks don’t come cheap and have often expensive training costs associated with them. By having the responsibility transferred to your software vendor, your life becomes extremely simple as the vendor would be the one responsible to make sure all the resources are trained to the latest tools and technologies.

All things said the advantages of having and maintaining virtual teams are extremely high however, the path to success with virtual teams is not simple has its own set of challenges. Choosing a partner who understands your needs is the most critical step that needs to be taken to overcome challenges of communication, collaboration, project group management, leadership management, etc. Failure to do so might result in project failures and the purpose of hiring remote teams. However, this by no means guarantees success if you maintain in-house teams. Both in-house and virtual teams have their own set of challenges and each can be solved based on the right vendor chosen. With the number of tools, processes, and proven methodologies, today’s world is seeing a revolution with remote teams and make the world seem closer and smaller than ever.

Now the question remains, are you ready for setting your perfect virtual team? Contact us to hire remote developers and explore our different engagement models.