April 7, 2020 Remote Developers Business-Saving Cure During Pandemic

CEOs are in a panic because of the business growth stop that was caused by COVID-19. But there is a solution – remote development teams.

The question about hiring a remote development team is often raised in many companies but is often postponed because of more burning issues. The key fears and uncertainties on the offshore outsourced services include miscommunication, low quality of performance, lack of transparency and control. However, companies that operate with distributed development teams across the world, are not disturbed by the question on how to make the transition from onsite to remote working model mutually painless.

Gradually, within several days, the world has frozen: people are staying homes, shopping malls, schools, universities, and other public places are shutting down; more and more countries are closing their air, road, and sea connections – the world becomes entirely isolated. While our normal daily life is undermined by the rapid spread of COVID-19, businesses also do not stand on the sideline – the emergency plan for most corporations was to go remote. By implementing these measures, executives and governments want to protect their employees and citizens from the virus to prevent its spread. Workers are offered to work from home and refrain from going out without crucial needs. Working from home is far away from being experienced by some employees, which is why managers and CEOs are disturbed with the issue of how to maintain the business processes after transiting their staff members to a remote working model.

Let’s discuss how beneficial it might be to think ahead of crises and hire remote developers.

Your Distributed Team Knows How to Work and be Productive Out of Your Office

For companies that never practiced remote working with distributed teams, the biggest challenge these days is how to manage employee’s productivity, effectiveness, and on-time tasks delivery working from home. They explore communication tools to stay in touch, analyze how to motivate the staff members, and, at the same time, not pressuring them with shortened deadlines or complicated tasks. Simply saying, all the working mechanisms, which work in the companies with distributed teams, need to be established and implemented within the nearest time.

There is no big secret that employees on a fully office-based working model feel more efficient and effective in their workplaces. For them, the office is a place to work while the home is a place to relax; therefore, working from home may lead to being less productive and lazy. Let’s see the remote development teams attitude to this: yes, they work in the vendor’s office, but their mindset is different since they work remotely for your company all the time, during the outbreak of viruses nothing much changes for them in terms of project delivery. You will get the same level of responsibility, loyalty, dedication. Your team will get you to the point where you don’t have to be afraid of failed tasks, missed deadlines, and unsolved issues.

Offshore development team usually has a stiff schedule of priorities, meaning that no task is left until it’s completed and passed on to the next stage of execution. The members work as one united mechanism to deliver the results not only despite the global virus outbreak but diversifying domestic risks – like hurricanes, tsunamis or forest fires in your home country.

Avoid Stress by Transiting the Whole Company for Remote Model

‘Set daily meetings, install applications to keep in touch with the team, ask for reports’ – these and other advice are highlighted in most today’s articles about how to manage your team working remotely. Distributed teams know well what it is because they had it before the outbreak. Various tools for setting tasks with requirements and deadlines, communication with the client, constant two-way feedback – everything is working despite announced global quarantine.

You can always hire remote developers from the different parts of the globe for your technological needs to avoid your business closure.

In case your company goes remote you will never know for sure what your employees are doing while working from home – making a cup of coffee every 2-3 hours, cleaning the dishes, doing the laundry, or laying on the bed. Having a nearshoring vendor, you are guaranteed that a dedicated remote development team delivers the tasks on time, has excellent communication skills, loyalty, and treats tasks responsibly.

Avoiding Local Incidents and Epidemics is Easily Solved with Nearshoring

A pandemic occurs once in 50-100-200 years, but local incidents are likely to hit your business much more often. A few months ago, Australia was on fire: people were afraid of leaving their homes and the whole country could have been burned to ashes. Not only did this natural disaster shook the citizens, but companies were disturbed about what would happen to their business. Luckily, for those companies who cooperate with distributed teams, the question of how to manage all panic around the fire wasn’t a big deal.

For instance, Australian company Z signed an agreement with the company Y in Ukraine to hire 2 teams of developers with 17 people in total. They have been working together, establishing friendly and trustworthy relationships, getting to know with the team members. After several months of prosperous collaboration, the fire hits Australia, but it doesn’t hit company Z as their employees are working hard in Ukraine.

Local disasters may occur any time, and the best way to prevent your business from the stress of transitioning in-house developers on a remote model is to hire at least a part of your staff via nearshoring services.

Support is Still Needed

COVID-19 is spreading all over the world really fast. We don’t know for sure whether it’s a hype or a real threat to humanity, but preventative measures and support is highly important these days.

1. Talk to your team.
   Personal disclosure is highly essential for people to stay positive thus motivated and productive.
2. Update them about the situation in your country.
   People need to feel that they are not alone despite being isolated. Share your local news and ask them if they feel safe and healthy.
3. Socialize.
   Conducting video calls would assist you in keeping in touch with the mood of each other, talking about something besides COVID-19, and reminding them that things will be gone and resolved quicker than we think.
4. Trust them.
   When workers go remote, they are afraid of you losing trust to them and after getting back to a normal working model, you will be more attentive to the way they perform their daily duties. Pressure – no one likes being pushed, so try to generate more trust for your employees and the result will be forthcoming.

Key Points

A sudden transition to the remote model of working will bring you new challenges and fears: you will need to work on your team’s motivation, bring them to the new approach of communication, ask for reports and feedback that were not typical while working in the office. By having distributed teams in different countries, you not only avoid the pitfalls caused by unexpected shifts in a working approach but also are able to maintain the project processes in times of crises in the home country.

Distributed team has one huge advantage (along with others) – you know what your developers are able to give you, they will work at the moment when your country is in collapse, and bring you to a point of endless project delivery. COVID-19 does not possess a threat to the companies who operate based on nearshoring services, so why don’t you start acting before another crisis occurs?

Kateryna Boiko

About the Author
Kateryna Boiko is a Marketing Director at Mobilunity, the provider of Dedicated Development Teams with 9 years of hands-on experience in digital marketing. Kateryna managed to work with diverse industries and markets and now is keen on sharing unique cases with the world and coach on topics relevant to Business Management & Administration and Digital Marketing.

kate.boiko.mobilunity@gmail.com

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