According to recent research, the global market size of outsourcing services has reached over $92.5 billion, and over 70% of this value falls underhub the category of information technology outsourcing.
And that’s not surprising, as this sphere involves the employment of various IT-service providers, application services, and infrastructure solutions for enhancing the core business processes.
Why do companies outsource? Well, the major reasons for this are to reduce and control the hiring costs, enhance the core business processes and improve the company’s focus, boost the KPI and perform more tasks at tight time frames, etc.
However, before the business gets the outsourcing benefits, it needs to resolve its main challenge — to establish efficient remote team communication.
In this article, we’ll uncover the main business challenges of remote teams communication and also the best practices of enhancing team communication while outsourcing software development.
Collaborating With Remote Software Developers: Main Challenges
First of all, let’s analyze the potential challenges and communication issues companies can encounter when hiring a remote development team.
Having covered the majority of these, it becomes much easier to develop an effective yet efficient business strategy to resolve the existing problems and prevent the issues that might occur further.
Miscommunication Problems
Communication is one of the core factors that have a huge impact on the employees’ well-being and productivity. According to McKinsey’s recent research, the teams who feel engaged in detailed remote communications are nearly 5 times more likely to enhance their KPIs.
Furthermore, the post-COVID-19 realities uncovered that only 32% of employees have experienced the great communication set up from their organizations, which means a vast majority of businesses nowadays still have vague remote team communication.
The miscommunication can not only impact the workflow and employees’ well-being but also result in serious losses for the organizations themselves.
This means great delays in the project development, as well as spending tons of time, costs, and effort for correcting the issues and troubleshooting.
Disconnection Issues
The other huge drawback of the poor remote team communication is that the workers are isolated from the traditional working environment, and need much more time for clarifying the issues and troubleshooting.
Not to mention how the lack of connection impacts the process of managing remote development team: it becomes harder to build effective communication with remote teams and regularly control their performance as well.
The thing is the team-bonding moments always happen, especially when working at a large organization since you have some off-work interactions like a common lunch or small talk by a water cooler.
The peculiarities of telework only compound the problem: you need to consider the schedule of each member and find the right tools for team-building opportunities.
Disunion Challenges
The lack of collaboration is another important issue when onboarding a remote development team. It often occurs because of the absence of teamwork, low motivation, and a minor input into the common cause.
As a result, everyone minds only their own business and avoids sharing important ideas and feedback because of that feeling of undervaluation and also the burnout — common issue team members might feel because of the lack of collaborative work.
In fact, by helping employees understand how their work connects to the goals of the company you can improve the company’s performance by up to 10%, according to Gartner. That is why, one of the most essential points while developing the business performance is to improve team communication.
Alienation Feeling
With poor team communication, employees may also feel like a sore thumb because of the lack of live communication and interaction with each other. The stressful feeling caused by the so-called alienation results in increased employee anxiety.
The researches have shown that this issue can greatly decrease working performance, reduce job satisfaction and even lead to resignation. For the global economy poor mental health, caused by insufficient remote team communication, can cost up to $1 trillion per year.
Management Issues
The last and most significant problem of remote communications for business performance is the remote control issues. For the project managers, it becomes even more challenging to organize and control the working performance of each employee, track their progress and define the most effective strategies for the KPI improvement.
As a result, the team members feel uncertain about their work, and cannot interact comfortably with each other — they just try to avoid talking with anyone, even if that impacts the quality of their work.
Strategies to Improve Communication with Your Remote Software Development Team
After you know the main challenges of setting up effective remote team communication, let’s review the ways you can resolve these problems.
Basically, the 3 core factors will matter here: the correct team-building techniques, managers with high leadership skills, and professional software. To lift up the lid for you: the last one turns out to be the most essential for developing the best remote communications.
Use the Right Team-Building Techniques
One of the first things to consider when developing remote teams’ communication is to apply the most effective team-building strategies that can emphasize the importance of each member’s input. For example, it’s essential to:
- Listen to the employee’s feedback or suggestions and encourage them to voice their opinions;
- Brainstorm the ideas of how to improve the workflow and increase the employee’s performance;
- Set up the small talks and engage the team members in the off-work interactions to prevent burnout;
- Organize informal events to encourage better interactions between the team members and managers so no one feels left out.
These simple yet effective techniques can be modified or complemented depending on your organization’s goals and needs. However, the application of even one of these strategies can significantly enhance the productivity of your remote employees and improve business performance.
Develop the Leadership Skills of Your Remote Team
The other method of developing remote communications is hiring a professional manager that features vast experience in remote work optimization.
This person is aware of the most effective team-building tactics and can analyze which of them will provide you with the best performance results and enhance your company’s KPI.
Additionally, the professional manager can guide you in employing the pre-made or creating the fully-customized software for remote communication, a perfect option to establish the production workflow for the telework or outsourcing. Still uncertain about its efficiency? Discover the essential benefits it can bring to your business below!
Employ the Effective Team Communication Software
One of the core options that define the success of the remote team interaction improvement is choosing the right communication software. Such software opens up a lot of perspectives for productive remote work, as it:
- Allows reaching the team members anytime and from anywhere;
- Enables creating multiple working chats (formal and informal) to communicate, share the news and updates, ideas, and suggestions regarding different topics;
- Enhances the time-management with the in-built calendar for the task scheduling;
- Improves the employee management and control (for instance, by showing the current status — online, offline, at the meeting, etc);
- Speeds up the entire working process and improves its quality, so that the projects are always completed in time and are less likely to contain human errors and other issues;
- Prevents leakage of business-related data that can happen if personal challenges are used for corporate communication.
Of course, if some of the features your business needs are not covered by the premade communication software for remote teams, it’s a great idea to launch the custom software solutions.
They will not simply meet all the essential requirements, needs, and business goals, but are also great because of the advanced personalization, painless integration, high security, and cost-effectiveness.
Created by the professional team of developers, such software won’t require the additional costs with licenses or the constant changes, as it can much easier adjust to your business and be used in the long run.
Additionally, the custom communication software can be integrated with other software allowing the remote employees to increase their working performance and productivity as well.
Why Is Team Communication Important?
Setting up the right remote development team communication allows your departments to effectively interact with each other, saving tons of effort, costs, and, which is more important - the time needed for troubleshooting, clarification, optimization, and other pivotal business processes.
For the outsourced remote teams, setting up the is even more critical, as the written communication becomes the main information channel remote team uses to perform various business tasks.
If this outsourcing factor is neglected, the businesses can’t get any benefits from the remote employees at best. At worst, this will lead to an enormous loss of resources, including the time and costs spent on employee onboarding.
Conclusion
Knowing the best practices of how to improve communication with a remote team, businesses can make the most of their employee outsourcing.
The right team-building tactics, professional and experienced leaders, and, of course, the key option — innovative software for remote team communication — are the best methods of how your organization can boost the interaction with remote employees. And, the only thing you need to create professional communication software is to find a dedicated development team for your business project.
Due to the years of experience in the outsourcing industry, Intellectsoft knows how to ensure flawless communication with remote teams. Feel free to contact us if you want to benefit from the best remote team communication tools and set your project up for success.
