Top 7 Tips to Hire and Manage your Remote Developer

Remote Developer

How to hire and manage remote employees effectively?

What steps should you take to build trust and open lines of communication when not everyone is one site every day?

How to help remote developers feel part of a team?

Working with teams scattered across the country or the world is very common these days. Finding remote employees and getting them on board is one part of the equation.

Then comes the time of managing them.

So, let us look at top 7 tips to hire and manage your remote developers effectively:

1. Create Ease and Friendliness While Communicating

When team members feel comfortable with each other whether you are remote or not, the conversations automatically become easier, direct, and friendly. One thing you can implement is to start your meetings with a few minutes to talk about what’s been happening in your lives both professionally and personally.

Why is this important?

Well, because sharing personal stories helps build empathy which then paves the way for trust. You can even create meetings and call them ‘virtual coffee’ or ‘virtual hangout’ and make it very informal.

As a manager or a leader, you also need to lead by example. You cannot expect your remote developers to open up, get to know you, or discuss projects and share their opinion if you do not do that by yourself.

It gives them space and allows them to feel comfortable sharing their personal stories.

2. Maintain Transparency with Your Remote Employees

Be transparent with all aspects of the business. Share the company’s vision and mission with your remote developers. Let them resonate with company’s objectives. Then set clear expectations and ask for inputs so they can share their ideas and opinions.

3. Establish a Virtual Meeting Schedule

Setting up a meeting rhythm is very important. What doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get managed. So, if you are not meeting with your remote developers on a set time to a set rhythm, then your remote developers can get distracted and they would not be able to focus on executing their tasks.

For example: you can set up a meeting schedule weekly or bi-weekly. You should not be meeting your remote developers less than once a week. If you end up meeting monthly, it would not get anything done, and they may go in a completely separate direction that you did not intend them to go in.

So, make sure it is either daily, bi-weekly, or weekly. Also, make sure that the meeting is very clearly understandable to your remote developers, and has easily identifiable goals that everyone needs to meet. Hire developers in India and meet all the aforesaid requirements.

4. Effective Collaboration on Documents and Spreadsheets

Whatever documents you are trying to use, make sure that they are in the cloud so that you can edit them live on spreadsheets. So, different virtual employees can go into a single document and then you can add, edit, or delete information. You can see what people have added or removed. Google apps does this beautifully, and it is also very cheap. There are a lot of other options in the market such as Apple, Microsoft, etc.

Whatever you are using does not matter as long as they are in the cloud and collaborative. It is very important if you run to manage remote employees.

5. Establish and Use a Project Management System

A project management system is very important in a remote organisation to make sure that everything is documented because when stuff is in your head it unfortunately cannot be communicated to the rest of the organisation easily, which is why it is important to establish and use a project management system.\

6. Deploy Flexible Work Hours

It is very important to deploy flexible work hours as long as there is consistency. Empower your virtual developers to work wherever they want. It does not matter how long you have worked or where you have worked from, as long as you get the job done.

Focus on efficiency not necessarily how long somebody worked. That is not a good measure of productivity. Have your virtual developers to gain access to flexible work agreements. Having said that, it is still important to maintain consistency and show up for meetings at a particular time, and if your remote developers are not showing up for the meetings, then it is a big issue.

So, make sure that you are giving your remote developers freedom to have their own flexible work hours but also ensure consistency and productivity is maintained.

7. Quarterly Reviews of Team Members

Do a quarterly review of how your remote developers or teammates are doing. It is also known as 360 review. It is going to give you a lot of information like what your colleagues think of a particular employee, what does your manager think of that particular employee, what is that employee think of their manager, etc. This means that you are getting a whole bunch of variables to one particular employee.

It is critically important to do quarterly or however it suits your organisation.

These aforesaid attributes make it easy to manage remote employees.

Here are some of the benefits of remote development and outsourcing:

  • Faster development with total talent management
  • Accessibility to top industry talent
  • Improved development quality
  • Lesser distraction and focused development
  • Lower developmental costs compared to in-house teams

Things to Consider Before Hiring Remote Development Team:

  •  Create detailed development plans with well-defined timelines
  • Gauge developer’s capabilities by evaluating him through a thorough screening process
  • Leverage remote team’s talent by adopting a flexible development approach
  • Use tech-based tools to improve collaboration and communication

Bottom Line:

Through detailed action plans, modern tools for communication and by keeping everyone on the same page, higher level of efficiency can be achieved in comparison to in-house teams. With hourly and fixed engagement models, Indian remote development teams are known to offer the best return on investment. So, hire developers in India as Indian remote teams are the backbone for so many established companies.

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