Nowadays, IT companies are hiring remote employees for their business. Many of these companies have learned how to manage a remote developer team worldwide and get them to work well together. Companies also like to hire remote workers because it’s a great way to make the workforce more diverse. Any company that hires people from different cultures and backgrounds benefits from hearing new ideas and perspectives.

During this pandemic, many big companies, like Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, and other big tech companies, switched to remote work, which worked out very well. Because of this, many of these companies have decided to keep letting employees work from home even after the pandemic. The Nielsen Survey found that 52% of workers are willing to work from home in the future, and 25% want to work from home all the time.

How To Effectively Manage A Remote Team Of Developers?

1. Set Realistic Expectations: Each employee’s time zones are different. As the team leader, you should give your team clear instructions on how to do the task so that they can work together or on their own to finish it before the deadline. Give each team member a part of the task, and keep everyone in the same thread while you do it, so it’s easier for them to know who is in charge of what. Tell your team of developers how you want them to finish their task and what they need to do to finish it. Once you’ve given them a job, you need to monitor their progress to ensure they’re doing it right.

2. Communicate Effectively: Communication is one of the biggest problems when people work in different places. When working together from different places, you need to fill this gap by using tools that make it easy for the team to talk to each other. Set up a way for everyone to talk to each other, and make it a requirement for everyone on your team to join a weekly group call. The whole process keeps the remote team responsive and ensures you only have answered questions.

3. Use Advanced Tools to Improve Work Efficiency: To manage a team of developers who work from far away, you need to use different tools. From tools for talking to each other to tools for managing projects, all of these will help you and your team stay on the same page. We’ve picked a few of the most useful ones to help you decide. I suggest that you use it in your business.

Project Management/Tasks: Jira, Basecamp, Trello, Todoist, Harvest, PayDirt.

Employee Monitoring Software: CloudDesk, Workpuls, Hubstaff, Activtrack
Document Storage: Jira, Google Drive, TipeHive
Teleconferences/Online meetings: Zoom, Slack, Skype.

4. Avoid Micromanaging: it’s essential to trust the employees on your team. Monitoring software lets you see everything about how they do their work. Still, trust is a vital part of managing a team that works from afar. Trying to manage them hour by hour and asking them over and over how the goals are being reached will make them less motivated. You don’t have to check on them if you use monitoring software to keep track of their work and wait for the results. If the quality of what they give you matches what you want, that should be enough to let them work independently.

5. Employee Engagement: Employees who work from home often feel alone because they don’t get to talk to their coworkers directly. To help your workers stay productive, you need the plan to keep them interested in their work. A random video call to celebrate a birthday or anniversary will help build team spirit. Let your team members play video games together and have random online chats during coffee breaks. This will make it easier for team members in different places to work together.

You can only build a remote team that is good at making predictions after some time. Working toward the same goal will take time, hard work, and good communication. Sharing this information with everyone on the team is the most critical part of managing a remote team well.

Author: Stanly Palma: An passionate digital marketer who works exclusively for Saas solutions and helps companies to get the best monitoring software for remote employees.