When the world is discovering innovative ways to work without human interference, a new trend of remote working gets a facelift. It’s a sudden outbreak of global pandemic- corona that has turned the table upside down. The organizations that were less interested in hiring remote developers were left with no choice other than to join the race.
Before COVID-19, a study from the bureau of labor showcases that 24% of people prefer to work remotely, and 82% like to work at their workplace.
After COVID-19, a Stanford survey shows that 42% of Americans work from home, and 26% favor working at physical offices.
The shift is a big change but maximizes the developer productivity. The dedicated remote developers have experienced a 77% increase in their productivity and a hike in earnings due to saving on travel time and cost. The business revolution is expected as a new norm, but still, some organizations don’t foresee it as a future because of the challenges involved.
The downsides to offshore developer hiring are not allowing some businesses to switch to a remote hiring model. Fortunately, the challenges posed by the remote hiring model overcome with technological solutions. It indicates businesses can hire remote developers with no confusion in mind.
The Challenges and Solutions Involved With a Hiring Remote Developers
Project management becomes arduous
When the companies work on large projects, they either employ a hybrid model where a mix of remote developers and in-house developers work or hire remote developers to work on the projects.
Under the hybrid model, managing the team members spread out globally and making them complete the work before the deadlines is difficult. When there’s a sudden change required in the project, then making the team works on them right away is a hard nut to crack.
Solution: The best solution to this problem is using project management software. The software makes it easier to assign tasks, track the progress, and instantly update for changes. The all-in-one platform makes sure the project management has done rightly.
Remote communication and collaboration
With a remote hiring model, making the team members from different locations communicate and collaborate on the same project is quite a task. The office meetings for every project sprint with documents make the team more comfortable. The language barrier is another problem when team members want to share ideas or make suggestions.
A single misunderstanding or confusion negatively impacts the project’s progress and team productivity. Email communication is not an answer to remote communication. There are remote communication tools, but they won’t resolve the collaboration issues.
Solution: The problem is resolved with a responsive and instant communication channel for the remote teams that facilitates instant messaging, group chat, and notifications, shows availability status, and enables file sharing.
Slack is one of the collaboration tools that streamline communication while keeping everyone in the same boat with an easy-to-use interface and sign-in process.
In Vision is also a popular collaboration tool for ensuring seamless interactions and collaboration between developers and designers, as it enables sharing of elements dimension, and CSS styles with a single click.
Keeping tabs on the team’s work progress and productivity
The project scope is divided into smaller tasks to simplify development and task allocation to the team members. It sounds good. Completing the tasks within the defined times is vital to ensure the project gets completed without missing a deadline.
Also, tracking the task allocation and their progress is equally important to know how the team is working together. Tracking tasks and their productivity on a daily basis is tiresome and not feasible.
The project management software is not a feasible solution because it updates the manager when the remote team members started and completed the tasks with no real-time information. It won’t allow the manager to track the productivity for ongoing tasks.
Solution: Some project management tools allow the manager to look at the real-time progress of the task. A single prompt makes all the remote developers provide the details that display what developers are up to anytime, anywhere.
The blockers ensure zero interruptions created with pointless messages. Toggl-like tools show the time that remote developers take to complete the task, which is compared with benchmarks to improve productivity. It helps identifying the best performers that enable intelligent task assigning for the next time.
Coping up with time zone and location differences
Hiring dedicated remote developers means having a team with members from different locations of the world working in different time zones. Different time zone makes it difficult to make the remote developers’ team communicate and collaborate. It means when managers want the remote developers, they are either sleeping or working, which puts productivity at stake.
Solution: Creating a schedule and making the dedicated developers available at that time is essential. Well, it doesn’t aim to infringe the freedom of remote developers to work at their availability, but to strike a balance between freedom and productivity.
You can allow them to work according to their availability, but tell them to define the working hours and schedule ahead of the time. Traditionally, project managers cannot pull out everyone’s calendars and make them work in sync.
With the Teamup Calendar tool, the manager can view the availability of every remote developer in a single place, which help them know who will be up for meetings or collaboration session in a couple of taps.
Engineering trust
The remote team on the board means no face-to-face meetings. Besides, the lack of ability to view what remote team members are doing in real-time creates a trust issue. Also, if one team member is stuck somewhere and makes a mistake, they should feel free to ask other team members or discuss with the project manager to better deal with issues.
Solution: With the right collaboration tools, the manager should make the remote team members know each other to create a social bonding at a professional level. Encourage transparency with shared goals and rewards that promote experienced remote developers to create interest in working together and show their trustworthiness.
Handling cultural difference issues
When you hire remote developers, the team members will be from different location, which means different cultures. The language barrier can be tackled at one point, but handling corporate cultural differences is a big thing.
Various social conventions make it difficult to work collaboratively. In the same vein, religious beliefs, political principles, social rights, and others create a lot of problems.
Solution: At first, the manager should assess the language skills of remote developers before selecting and adding them to the team. Having patience and respecting the language ability of non-native speakers is important.
Share the details in emails so that they can read and understand. Provide a room to ask for anything unclear to them. Try avoiding any discussion related to social, political, and religious for a healthy work environment.
Summing it up
The remote working model has enormous potential that enables companies to complete the project before deadlines alongside improved developer productivity.
Making the remote model work for your company by hiring remote developers team is not an easy endeavor. The solution for a smooth work flow as a business lies in dealing with remote work challenges intelligently to make the most out of this working style.
Having a top Software Development Company to partner with can help you overcome the remote working challenges and maximizes productivity, keep the developers motivated, and stay focused on work. Let’s do it!
