How to manage a remote developers team
Imagine that you have a company in Illinois. And since you recently increased your working volume, you need to hire developers. Your HR starts the process of looking for programmers in Chicago. But the costs are higher than your budget. The developers who can fit in it have at best, some questionable programming skills.
To save you and your HR from banging your heads in the proverbial wall, we are gonna let you in on a secret: talent knows no boundaries. This goes for the coding community, too. So, for your Chicago-based company, you can simply hire someone who lives on Easter Island. Or in Poland… or in Egypt… or in any other place on the globe. If their skillset fits with your needs and if their pay requirements do too, then why not go remote, like Reddit did recently? Yes, we know what the biggest concern is: how to manage a fully remote team of developers. To make your life easier, here are some tips:
- Make it multicultural. Interteam cliques are bad. When you build your remote team of developers make sure they come from all over the world. This way they will not be united by language and culture but by work interests, skill base, etc. It will also make it more interesting for everyone, since being a part of such a diverse team is usually an enriching experience.
- Make a flexible schedule. Every team needs to work together in order to function as such. But the time zones might be a problem. Not for your company though. Create a team, where the developers have at least a couple of overlapping work hours per day. This way, they can retain the feeling of belonging to a team and keep their beloved flexibility and independence at the same time. Speaking of which,
- Make the developers communicate. We know that it can be lonely at times while working remotely. Sometimes we even miss the canteen talk. To combat this, Remotemore uses Slack. It is simple and yet functional. What’s even better, it got acquired by Salesforce, so not only the support is better but you also may use some of the Salesforce CRM features. Ensure that the remote developers who you hired can use this or a similar platform. Because talking to other human beings is essential, even for programmers.
- Make micromanagement obsolete. Nobody likes his superiors to breathe down their neck. Moreover, one of the most valued things about remote work is flexibility and independence. A smart decision to avoid micromanaging remote developers is to have a team leader in-house. Not a manager but a person responsible for the team and actively coding together with the remote workforce. This way you’ll create a flatter organizational structure and the remote developers won’t feel oppressed.
- Make the developers part of the company. We’ve covered similar topics before, e.g. lockdown isn’t remote work and so isn’t freelancing. Don’t treat the remote developers as a second class employees. Because they are your full time employees, period. Working from a couple of time zones away doesn’t make them less important part of the company. Try to engage them in the firm’s daily life, even for a remote Christmas party. Make them feel home.
Before you put all the above into practice, make sure that you know how to hire remotely. And to do that, you can always check our remote hiring marketplace and browse among thousands of prescreened developers’ profiles. Or in case you are on the lookout for a remote job, register with us. You can even calculate what salary to ask for during the registration process.
