Hiring and building a team is never easy and what’s even more challenging is forming a remote software development team since there are numerous risks associated with managing a remote development team: will such a group be motivated to work? How will the development process be organized? What about the difference in time zones? And these are just the beginning of the questions when you plan to hire remote developers.
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On the other hand, remote work’s business advantages are equally measurable and meaningful. From increased employee retention to saved overhead costs and positive environmental impacts, remote businesses are undoubtedly paving the way for the future of work.
Tech behemoths such as Alibaba, Skype, Basecamp, and GitHub outsource their web development to remote software development teams. Well, it turns out that outsourcing helps in running a profitable business. A successful remote team can be built with just a few essential management skills.
Soft Skills to Look for When You Hire Remote Developers
When hiring a software development team, the key to success comes to every team member’s skills. Furthermore, candidates should share your company’s vision and mission and be technically sound.
- Being Team Players: It’s not just about writing programs to develop products. Teams that work together in sync have a better chance of producing a successful product than a group of isolated developers. As a result, when you hire remote developers, try to assess the candidate’s communication skills, accountability, and decision-making capabilities. For instance, I work at Turing, and the Turing hiring process is done keeping in mind the soft skills the applicants possess.
- Balance Between Responsibility and Freedom: Flexibility is frequently associated with trust. Trust to get things done, to set your timetable, and to work somewhere where no one is watching your every move. According to the Harvard Business Review, respondents who worked for ‘high-trust organizations’ were “50 percent more productive.” They also discovered that “compared to employees at low-trust companies, 50 percent more employees at high-trust companies expected to stay with their employer over the next year, and 88 percent more stated they would suggest their company as a place to work to relatives and friends.”
Most remote work businesses allow their employees to plan their schedules. Rather than keeping track of their employees’ hours or watching their screens all day, they concentrate on the outcomes that their team achieves. - Putting Business Needs First: Analyze the questions applicants ask during the interview to see if they are business-oriented. If these questions are related to your business objectives, the candidate is more likely to be of use to you. If not, try explaining your company’s goals to the candidate and asking how he/she might help.
Your remote software development company or team may have excellent specialists who excel at completing tasks and solving challenges. However, it is important to emphasize that every decision you make in your company should be based on the firm’s demands. Here is the list of soft skills that a candidate must possess:
This is accomplished when you challenge yourself to view the bigger corporate plan, grasp the difficulties that need to be addressed, identify the gaps in the solution, and then offer a solution to help bridge those gaps. When you hire a software development team, make sure to pass on this concept to them.
Organizing Working Procedures In Software Development Team
Another thing you can do to make your software development team’s work more aligned is to structure the working process. For your team to perform efficiently, you’ll need explicit working norms, deadlines, and well-defined documentation (that’s one thing where turing company has also invested their time a lot of). You can achieve this goal by following the steps below:
- Reveal The Idea Of Your Project: Leaving an element of ambiguity for your software development team and project is the worst thing you can do. You must give all project specifics, explain your ideas, and ensure that the software development team understands your aims to achieve the greatest results. Make sure you do this in the beginning when you hire remote developers. Furthermore, the development team can give project estimates faster with more information.
- Provide Your Team With Tools For Communication: As easy as it may appear, choosing suitable communication and project management solutions for your team is critical. Thankfully, there is no shortage of such apps and devices, and several gained traction during the pandemic lockdowns (Zoom, for example). Here are some of the tools that can be helpful for your remote team:
- Slack – for day-to-day operations
- Figma – for design development
- Google Meet and Zoom – for video calls
- Miro – for real-time teamwork utilizing a whiteboard.
- Provide Documentation: The documentation for a project is a collection of all the functional and non-functional specifications and restrictions that developers will need to get started on the project. As a result, when hiring remote developers, ensure you’ve covered your project’s requirements and clearly defined a shared vision and values.
Setting Up The Communication
Effective communication is the most important aspect that comes to mind when managing remote developers. This fact can be found in any article about the subject. And this text isn’t an exception to the rule. The core of an effective team is well-organized communication in a software development team, KPIs, and a review process, and these should be made clear to all new joiners when you hire remote developers.
So, here are a few pointers to assist you in communicating effectively with your outsourced team.
- Setting Up A Calendar Of Meetings: Regular communication is essential for good communication. Being methodical is critical for any organization, whether in paperwork, marketing, or outlet distribution.
The same can be said for how developers communicate with their coworkers in a remote software development team: it’s better to be organized than unplanned. Meetings with a project manager or team lead or a personal check-in with each team’s members are examples of these. The critical thing to remember is that they should be done regularly.
- Build Personal Connections: When you hire remote developers, make sure they keep in touch with the remote software development team leads or managers regularly but don’t forget to cultivate strong connections with all team members. You may do this by holding informal online meetings and scheduling individual check-ins with each team member, such as 1:1s.
- Define Your Remote Software Development Team’s Roles and Responsibilities: Depending on your business objectives, the composition of your remote software development team may vary. A typical software development team includes experts like software engineers, QA engineers, product managers, etc.
Conclusion
Building a software development team, whether remote or in-house, is challenging. However, because these people are about to become a part of your product, determine what you need in applicants. Also, sometimes you can’t invest your time in the vetting and interview process to hire remote developers for your company. Hence, searching for a company that does it for you may be more viable.
Turing.com is a silicon valley-based company with a pool of more than 1M developers and a rigorous vetting process that only 1 percent of the applicants pass the test. With a retention rate of 97 percent, Turing has proved its supremacy in the remote work culture. Turing has now made it possible for you to focus on things that matter most and have peace of mind when hiring remote talent.