Have you ever come across talented professionals but hesitated to choose them due to different time zones? The last few years have demonstrated that geographical borders are no longer a barrier to building an exceptional team. With the right strategies, you can manage remote employees effectively and achieve your business goals. This article offers ways to overcome the main challenges of leading distributed teams, along with the tools to enable smooth collaboration.

Initiate clear communication

The proper management strategy makes remote teamwork even more effective than traditional in-person collaboration. With the help of asynchronous communication, all team members can share their opinions and ideas without interruptions or time constraints.

Challenge 

Lacking face-to-face interactions can lead to misunderstandings and delayed responses among team members. Basic collaborative activities, such as brainstorming and idea sharing, can also be affected. In addition, a remote team may experience a sense of isolation, which can inhibit the organic exchange of opinions and adversely affect team collaboration.

Solution

The key to reaping the full benefits of distributed team members’ expertise is to be on the same page and support them in feeling comfortable sharing their ideas. Managing virtual employees involves establishing clear expectations and ensuring seamless coordination through informative video meetings and asynchronous communication.

Tools

• Google Workspace: An ecоsystem that offers a number of essential instruments, including Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.
• Slack: A real-time messaging, file-sharing, and collaboration software. 
• Zoom: A solution for virtual meetings with the possibility of live screen presentation.

Embrace multiculturalism 

When a project brings together a diverse team, it provides the opportunity to consider development from different perspectives and choose the best implementation approach.

Challenge

Working with global project teams has become very common these days. However, team members from different countries can have diverse backgrounds, business practices, languages, and cultural norms. This can negatively affect team dynamics, working processes, and decision-making.

Solution

To enhance collaboration and minimize potential risks, it’s vital to promote open and inclusive communication. You should enable all team members to freely express their thoughts, ask questions, and seek clarification. Knowledge-sharing sessions or workshops can establish clear communication norms and guidelines that accommodate diverse communication styles, language proficiency levels, and time zone differences. Additionally, managing a remote team involves transmitting company values, creating well-documented procedures, and being open to feedback and input.

Tools

• Metroretro.io: An online whiteboard with unique templates to facilitate any collaborative session.  
• Miro: A visual workspace that often serves as an information radiator to create diagrams, roadmaps, boards for retrospective meetings, lessons learned, etc.

Benefit from time zone differences

Effective management of remote teams can help companies speed up product development cycles. By alternating efforts of professionals located in different time zones, businesses can effectively work 24/7. It will result in faster project completion times and give companies a competitive advantage in fast-paced markets.

Challenge

Limited overlapping working hours can lead to delays in decision-making, feedback, and overall project progress. Meanwhile, the absence of the right approach to handling time zone differences can negatively affect scheduling meetings, resolving issues in real-time, and maintaining a cohesive workflow.

Solution

The initial step is creating a communication management plan that outlines the ways information should be conveyed and distributed, including expected communication channels, reporting methods, and their frequency. It’s also crucial to schedule regular meetings with a clear agenda and relevant team members, as well as create a centralized location for all related documentation to ensure easy access at any time.

Tools

• Google Calendar: A tool for scheduling and managing your workday.  
• Calendly.com: A solution for meeting planning that can be connected to your calendar, setting the available slots, and checking the same for the team.

Establish an organized workflow

A well-planned remote working process can help businesses remain resilient in the face of external disruptions, such as natural disasters or pandemics. Thus, it can minimize financial and productivity losses.

Challenge

Managing virtual teams can be problematic due to the lack of physical oversight. Moreover, it involves unique tasks, such as fostering independence and providing socializing opportunities.

Solution

The first steps to creating an organized working process are establishing SMART goals and ensuring they are clear for every team member. Applying some Scrum ceremonies (even if another framework is used for your project), such as daily stand-ups, iteration planning, and review and demo sessions, brings transparency to a process for all involved parties. Project management tools, such as Trello, can structure the process by assigning responsibilities and setting deadlines. Another best practice is to have regular check-ins and meetings, as well as document decisions, ensuring that everyone involved remains on the same wavelength.

Tools

• Trello: A project management software with boards, lists, and cards for task management.
• ClickUp: A work operating system for project administration, workflow automation, and collaboration.

Ensure visibility and accountability

Balancing the autonomy and accountability of remote teams can yield valuable results, including a high level of productivity. The right strategy can also provide data, metrics, and insights to support informed decision-making by project managers, team leaders, and stakeholders, leading to more effective planning.

Challenge

Without direct supervision, ensuring equal contribution and accountability from each team member can be perplexing, resulting in concerns about trust and reliability. Additionally, as teams usually have common objectives, their tasks are interdependent, where one error can lead to a chain of failures. So, one team member’s missed deadlines and low-quality work can negatively impact the whole collaboration process.

Solution

For distributed teams, reporting can be a perfect approach to maintain visibility and accountability. It boosts productivity, ensures transparency, and helps align with project goals for better coordination and collaboration. Whereas tracking tasks, responsibilities, and deadlines helps employees be responsible for each other’s contributions, fostering a sense of ownership and commitment to project success. Proactive addressing and the mitigation of potential negative impacts on project timelines and outcomes is another benefit due to the early identification of risks, issues, and challenges during project execution. That’s why we prepare reports at the end of each iteration highlighting the planned and completed work, as well as reviewing whether the set goals were achieved.

Tools

• Microsoft Teams: A task planning tool that offers numerous features to make the reporting and monitoring processes as convenient as possible.
• Jira: An Agile project management app for software development teams, including issue tracking, boards, and workflow customization.

Our approach to managing remote teams 

At SysGears, we emphasize a smooth and efficient working process and aim to create a comfortable working environment for all team members. Therefore, we use Agile methodologies to manage teams and deliver successful products, as they highlight the importance of flexibility and collaboration.

To establish clear communication among employees and stakeholders, we create overarching communication plans, ensuring that our working process is efficient and coherent, regardless of geographical location and time zone.

Our culture of transparency ensures that you fully understand the development process and can independently decide the level of your engagement in the project, either as an observer, supervisor, or participant. Moreover, our team acknowledges the importance of reporting and tracking metrics, which have proven crucial for maintaining accountability, transparency, and alignment. We also value a personalized approach, so each of our projects has a customized reporting system.

Conclusion

With a proactive approach, managers can effectively supervise virtual teams and make the most of global talent and remote work flexibility. It requires promoting clear communication, fostering a collaborative and inclusive team culture, as well as establishing a well-structured and transparent working process. The solutions listed in this article can help you meet your business goals successfully.

If you are interested in establishing an efficient workflow for your team, explore our Project Management services!