How to manage remote teams
It is all about communications, because you do not have the team physically at your workspace it is depending on sending feedback and waiting for responses which are communications. Here are 6 tips to let the overseas communications better÷
1- Team Building: although the team is not exist physically in the same place but you still can be creative about having this team building over the internet by online games or by another venue which is available for both side of the teams.
2- Build Interpersonal Relationships: encourage the personal side between you and your team by going beyond the project scope and ask about team member’s personal life or about his/her kids. Having such activities will give your credit to use later when the project goes for crisis or risky situations.
3- Daily Standup: it is not questionable practice, you must have daily stand up meetings for 15-30 minutes maximum to review what team has done yesterday compared to what he had to do and what he is going to do during the day.
4- Phone Conference / Video / Web Sharing: do not depend on mails only for communications because mail is asynchronous but Phone Conference, video or web sharing is synchronous communication which leverage effective communication between the team members to eliminate any misunderstanding might happen because of mails.
5- Follow the Sun: take care about your team geographical representation and try to put the tasks and activities to follow the sun so that dependencies would not be affected.
6- Daily Summary: get this kind of commitment from team members to summarize all activities during the day compared to what was planned stating any obstacles they faced or any dependencies affected him/her to achieve his/her tasks to be discussed again in the standup meeting.
Finally, remote team might be a blessing or a curse. If you followed above steps it will be a bless because you will have good monitoring to your remote team as if they exist beside you but if you did not follow it will be curse because the project will go away from you because the team will go around here and there doing things which are not planned.
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