There are a lot of tools and applications to move a team to remote work. However, the technical side is not everything in switching to a new operating model. It is important to keep employees motivated and to consider different time zones when scheduling calls. We have gathered recommendations and tips for adapting a development team to remote work, which will help avoid common mistakes and explain how information technology consultants can help in the adaptation process.

Reasons to Shift Development Team to a Remote Team

The format of remote work is no longer as unusual as it was 5 years ago. Companies that move their development teams to a remote work format benefit for several reasons:

Savings on rent. Many of the processes that developers perform can be done from home. This has a positive effect on the company's budget since there is no need to pay for the rent of huge premises

The ability to add talented developers to your team from anywhere in the world. Your company may have good players, but by transferring the main staff to a remote format, you get the opportunity to expand your team not only with local specialists but with remote developers that live in different parts of the world.

Employee loyalty is higher due to the ability to organize comfortable working conditions without leaving home. Not everyone likes spending time getting ready for work, traveling, and then returning. Therefore, when you provide your employees with more opportunities to support work-life balance, they will reward you with greater efficiency and loyalty to the company.

Reasons to hire IT-consultants

To make the transition to remote work as smooth as possible, you should consider the option of contacting an IT consultant. The need for such a specialist arises when you want to get the expected result while changing the usual situation. An IT consultant can take over part of the work to set up processes, work out strategies, and help rebuild work processes for a remote format.

Among the key tasks of the consultant can also be attributed to the optimization of costs for the implementation of information technologies, increasing the efficiency of the business, and the degree of manageability of the company through the formation and implementation of a unified IT infrastructure. 

The IT consulting industry provides consulting services: both IT consulting services companies and independent IT consultants. The latter usually specialize in certain areas of the company's activity. Among the basic tasks performed by consulting staff are developing and implementing new software tools for a specific area of ??activity and information security. Information technology consultant salary in the USA is $79,377. Cost for IT consultant in Germany is $67,044, and Ukraine - $11,477.

6 Tips for Developing Your Remote Employees

Remote workforces management to approach a business in a more organized way. Here one cannot do without well-functioning business processes, a clear system of control and motivation. There are also certain tips to help improve the efficiency of remote developers.

1. Perform team rituals

Having a team ritual - whether it's weekly meetings, monthly one-on-one meetings, or any other form of routine - is absolutely essential. This provides transparency, especially when discussing project status or progress.

2. Use the right digital tools

Flexibility is another imperative for managing teams remotely and it is facilitated by having the right digital tools.

Choose for yourself the main means of communication for various tasks, for example, Skype for calling, Microsoft Teams for organizing, Slack for communication. You can switch between these and other platforms to adapt to what your customers are using.

3. Focus on the result, not the process

It is impossible to control every aspect of the work of a remote team. It is not necessary to try to do this with the team in the office, but it is especially meaningless when people work for you from different locations. Instead of focusing on what they are doing or the number of hours worked, focus on the results and that is the way to judge the team's work.

4. Motivate your team

Praise in public, reprimand in private. When working remotely, you still need to maintain positive behavior, even fixing mistakes. This must be done carefully when working from home. People who get reprimanded in public tend to lose motivation later on. 

Try to use the theory of multiple intelligences, which Howard Gardner proposed. The theory says that we were all born with 8 different types of intelligence and a somewhat similar potential for each of them. Try to motivate people according to their type of thinking. That is, a person with social intelligence should often be praised and interested in the success of his work and hand over more complex tasks to a developer with a highly developed logical and mathematical intelligence, thereby stimulating his professional growth.

To cut a long story short, you can follow these pieces of advice:

Managing Remote Software Development Teams Across Multiple Time Zones

You can work on a project even if the team members are divided by the ocean. However, it is worthwhile to better understand how to work if developers live in different time zones.

1. Establish rules

If the working day is fixed and the time difference is small, you can simply shift the schedule for a part of the team by a couple of hours. To avoid confusion, establish uniform rules for the team and follow them. Agree on what days and hours and through what tool to get in touch and resolve urgent matters. Also agree not to disappear from access without notifying the team about it.

2. Check on your time

In a remote team, it is important to be able to find out what time a colleague has quickly. There are handy applications for this. For example, the World Clock Meeting Planner is useful for choosing the best time for a meeting when participants are in different time zones. For this, the date of the meeting is set, and the cities where colleagues live are also indicated.

3. Write letters

Thanks to mail and instant messengers, you don't need to get in touch in real-time so often. The exchange of short messages allows colleagues to promptly receive the necessary information and when it is convenient for them. You can choose your favorite command means of fast communication: Slack, Messenger, or WhatsApp.

4. Set tools for scheduling tasks

Project planning tools often allow you to use country-specific holiday and weekend calendars, as well as individual calendars for each employee in your organization.

Adapting of a Development Team for Remote Work

The team must be supported and a lot of time spent on those issues that have not been touched upon before - the order of work, the rules of communication, the channels through which you communicate, to establish those responsible for individual issues. However, the adaptation process also includes simplifying the work in the first stages. And here's how to do it:

• Organize short meetings on important topics. This creates an important rhythm for the work of the remote team.
• Take an interest in each other. Family, kids, cats, dogs, weather, whatever. Face-to-face communication increases levels of oxytocin and vasopressin, important happiness hormones that enhance attachment, warm feelings, and team spirit.
• Analyze what is happening within the organization. When people more or less adapt to new conditions - this usually takes from one to several weeks - the company faces another important problem: how to control and maintain the efficiency of business processes? With the program¡¯s help, you can see at what stage the task is being completed, whether there are deadlines and other violations.
• Detect burnout. Burnout is a big problem. Detect it at the earliest stage with passive and active feedback from employees. This knowledge helps to apply stress management strategies, which ultimately maintain a good atmosphere and high performance in the company.

Also, try to avoid these mistakes:

Conclusion

At remote work, the control and management of the team become more accessible since the history of all actions and conversations is documented and available to everyone at any time. On the other hand, onboarding takes time, and business processes are set up more slowly than usual in the office. However, it is important to remain flexible in accordance with the events in the world and reconfigure the work processes so that all organizational aspects play into both the developers and the company's management.