It can be easy to work in a remote environment and efficiently handle a remote team if managed effectively.
Therefore, it is significant to assemble a competent team to execute and handle in a remote environment. However, managing virtual teams can be tricky unless you know how to do it properly. The top 5 strategies for managing virtual teams of web programmers for hire are below.
1) Choose the Proper Communication Style
Choosing the proper type of communication is necessary for managing your virtual team, as your entire communication will depend on it.
Email: Used for quick interactions. Emails can be replaced with a short communication and collaboration system.
Chat Programs: Google or Skype chat are great applications for quick and instant messaging to create a team chat environment.
Video Chat/Phone Calls: Some communication can only be handled over the phone. These could include emotional issues, etc. Video chat can further provide you with a visual cue to get a better idea of the other person.
You can have a mixture of different communication styles; for example, you would probably email your remote web programmer daily, but when required, you can have a Skype call to explain the task in more detail.
2) Setup a Continuous Chat Room
Chat rooms can help a lot in managing a virtual team. With the help of chat rooms, team members can communicate with one another and leave messages for the group of which they are a part. It is vital to keep these chats alive, however, not distracting.
The conversation should be meant to discuss important issues and make the members feel connected as a team, but it should not be so much that they feel distracted by it.
3) Use of Screen Sharing Tools
Screen Sharing tools are great applications that share your computer screen to show the other person precisely what you are doing. In addition, some of the apps further allow people to control the computer remotely.
Some of these tools are free of cost and can be easily downloaded and used by remote teams. These applications include Team viewer and Skype. An example of screen sharing would be your remote website programmer showing you a demo of the work assigned to him.
4) Use a Project Management System
As for small virtual teams, you must be willing to handle everything through email, which is dangerous. Using a project management system can help you assign tasks on the fly, organize documents, share files, track progress and collaborate on projects assigned to your remote team of web developers and programmers. This makes life a lot easier to find things, messages, and files afterward when required.
If you solely use emails to run your business, it will soon become an unimaginable and disorganized mess. Therefore project management systems help you to organize your work correctly. Examples of such tools are Timely Projects, Basecamp and Trello.
5) Allow Flexible Work Hours
People working from their homes will rightly need flexibility regarding their work hours. And, significantly, you let them have some degree of flexibility. But, again, this will help you gain a positive response from your team members.
On the other side, if things are unpredictable, it may be pretty tricky to get a mutual collaboration window when all of your virtual team members are online all at once, and all of them are available to chat.
One of the best solutions to this problem would be to hire a remote team from a web development company. You can hire the number of remote web developers you want, and the good part is that they all will be in the same time zone, usually the same office so it won’t be a disrupted team but a much knitted-together team.
You can scale up or scale down depending on your needs. Some offshore remote development teams do not have long-term contracts, so usually, you can have one or two months’ notice. My Web Programmer is one web development company that lets you hire website programmers on demand (hourly or monthly).
An added advantage of engaging My Web Programmer as your web or mobile app development partner would be their value-added services that you get free of cost. More specifically, if you hire one or multiple web developers from them, you get a Software Quality Assurance Engineer and Project Manager to work on your tasks/projects without any additional charges.
Final Thoughts
Managing a virtual team effectively is crucial for remote business success. To do so, assemble a competent team and follow these strategies: 1) Choose appropriate communication methods like email, chat, and video calls. 2) Establish a focused chat room for team communication. 3) Use screen sharing tools for better collaboration. 4) Implement a project management system to assign tasks and track progress. 5) Allow flexible work hours and consider hiring from a web development company like My Web Programmer for a cohesive team. These strategies, along with value-added services, ensure efficient remote team management.
