How to Manage an Offshore Team Like a Pro: Challenges, Expert Tips, and Best Practices

Nowadays, companies look for every competitive advantage, be it time-to-market for products, growth, cost reduction, etc. One of the ways they can achieve that is by hiring and efficiently managing offshore teams for your projects. 

Hiring an offshore company can assist you in achieving your managing objectives and growing your firm, whether you run a startup or an established corporation. Nevertheless, effectively managing an offshore team is more difficult than managing an inside team.

This article will define an offshore team term and discuss the benefits and challenges of hiring an offshore team for your software development projects. We will also share some tips and tools to make sure your remote offshore team is managed effectively and communication is on point.

Drawing from years of experience in offshore team management, we’ve found that clear communication, well-defined roles, regular performance reviews, trust-building, and cultivating a strong team culture are crucial to ensuring productivity and achieving your business goals.

What are Offshore Teams?

An offshore software development team consists of employees who work from a location other than the one where your company is headquartered. 

Let’s take the manage technique of a tech company in the US as an example. Instead of hiring a software developer locally, you can hire an offshore development team situated in Eastern Europe. These offshore development teams for your project are service vendors or subcontractors that make working progress for your company. 

Now, the terms “offshore team” and “outsourced team” can be used interchangeably. 

Outsourcing is the temporary hiring of services, typically under the payment of another company for a specific software development project. For instance, a company and a service provider may decide that software developers talent should form a dedicated team for the project.

It’s also crucial to understand that offshore and remote distributed teams are two different things. Employees on a distributed team are dispersed both nationally and internationally. Offshore teams consist of employees that work from various countries.

9 Best Practices to Manage Offshore Teams

Teams from both onshore and offshore locations will struggle to complete work without collaboration and partnership. 

Miscommunication brought on by a lack of harmony can undermine the quality of the work and the way it is delivered. Let’s discuss some 9 best practices to effectively manage offshore talent resources and for handling workflow most efficiently.

Ensuring Clear Job Roles

The project manager should clearly determine job responsibilities for your offshore employees. Having a PM either on the client and/or vendor side will provide effective work and improve management. 

At Sloboda Studio, we work with the most professional employees on each software development project. However, they also must be coordinated, and project managers are responsible for doing this. Our PM uses Agile best practices to manage projects and teams, which help provide early delivery, easy adjustment to changing requirements, and continuous product improvement based on feedback.

Communicating workflows and deadlines helps to set clear expectations. Make sure everyone is aware of their and other team members’ roles because you likely have staff stationed in various locations. Teams can communicate more easily by setting up a shared group calendar where everyone can list their daily tasks.

Carrying out Assessments Based on Performance 

It’s crucial to fully comprehend the workforce’s capabilities to manage offshore teams and communicate with them. It’s advisable to conduct performance-based assessments weekly and monthly. Regular reviews will help you see how quickly the tasks are completed and identify workflow problems. However, data collection and analysis take a lot of time and work. 

So, Slodoba Studio has a dedicated HR department that helps maintain low resource turnover by evaluating the employees’ performance, progress and job satisfaction.

If you don’t want to bother with regular assessment and work progress optimization, you can hire an offshore team managed by a dedicated employee. By hiring a PM, you’ll have regular team members’ assessments and help you optimize the workflow. 

Providing The Right Equipment to Team Members 

One of the company’s business goals is to find a way to equip your remote offshore workforce with the appropriate tools. Those who work with offshore teams can be more effective and productive if they are provided with the proper tools, such as headsets, webcams, video conferencing, and online collaboration programs. 

Your offshore staff will collaborate more effectively if you invest in technology for them. This is a key element in raising organizational productivity and contributing to income generation. 

Additionally, these tools facilitate team communication for better coordination and quicker problem-solving.

Ensuring Accountability and Effective Time Management 

Just as crucial as developing outsourcing work schedules is communicating them. It enables remote team members to plan their workdays by knowing who will be working on what. This results in effective task management, hastening project completion. 

Putting accountability at the top of your members’ values fosters commitment, which helps the organization achieve its objectives. To begin with, you can hold virtual meetings with your entire team to kick off each work week. Also, it’s useful to implement daily reports to manage your offshore teams successfully.

At Sloboda, we have a communication kick-off meeting with the client and weekly or monthly meetings where we discuss any challenges or if necessary potential remote team scaling.

Prioritising Communication

Working with offshore teams may be difficult, particularly regarding project managing and communication. Building relationships with team members located in various places can be challenging. However, understanding how to close this gap makes things easier to handle. 

That is why at Sloboda Studio, we provide a dedicated manager who speeds up the delivery process by facilitating communication and ensuring mutual understanding within a team.

​​Here are some things we practice in Sloboda Studio:

• Daily stand-ups – short (up to 15 minutes) meetings every day where the team talks through their daily tasks. 
• Weekly meetings – a team summarizes the results of the week and plans tasks for the upcoming week, and team members suggest improvements.
• Monthly sync-ups – summing up results over the month, planning further tasks, and discussing the client’s feedback.

There are different ways to work with offshore teams to keep them involved. You can hold virtual daily meetings and communicate by email and work chats to encourage team familiarity. Similarly, you can plan online team-building activities that boost spirits, promote creativity, and increase communication.

Ensuring Team Collaboration and Trust

Ypo recently surveyed to cast the light on what trust means to CEOs and business leaders. The results showed that over 96% deem trust the essential priority for their business. Over 40% of them believe that communication is the key to trust, and around 34% think that lack of time to connect is the biggest factor that affects building trust within a business.

Communication can be a problem for offshore outstaffing in some cases, much as the time for building a solid connection. However, to achieve this, the manager can take a few steps from their side. 

First, keeping every detail of the process under control can overall oversite the confidence of the specialists – it’s important to know that hired professionals are indeed professionals and can be trusted with their work. 

Second, it’s important to schedule a few weekly or monthly meetings with the new team, especially if they are an addition to an existing team. This way you can foster a connection that will help everyone stay on the same page. Despite this connection sometimes needs additional effort and tuning in, offshore remains very popular among companies of all sizes. And the wave only grows, bringing it more and more to the top as the IT industry becomes more narrow-focused. 

Source

Micromanagement Should Be Avoided

By allowing your outsourcing staff sufficient latitude to carry out their remote duties and projects, you may demonstrate your confidence in them. Avoid micro managing when you work with an offshore team. In doing so, they will feel more competent in performing their duties, boosting their confidence and productivity.

Providing Growth Opportunities for Team Members

Make a product development plan for your offshore staff as an excellent place to start. If your outsourcing development team does not have a clear understanding of the career route they can take, it may be challenging for them to feel motivated. You can guide them in making decisions for their professional progress by comprehending their motivations. 

You can specifically provide them access to remote training programs or certification programs. To monitor their success, make sure to perform regular evaluations of their professional development. Professional development helps sustain remote staff productivity, avoid burnout, and enhance communication in addition to upskilling the company’s value.

Creating a Strong Team Culture

Managing offshore teams might be difficult. An effective team culture that fosters employee engagement and boosts organizational efficiency may be developed. You now possess the necessary information to effectively manage your offshore teams, thanks to the best practices covered above.

3 Key Benefits of Offshore Teams

Working with offshore teams allows the business to attract diverse talent and make an experienced team without managing issues and possible great communication. 

As a product owner, you can find a way to reduce development costs and work and focus on other important tasks, such as marketing or advertising your product. See the three key benefits of doing work with a offshore team explained below. 

Increased Capacity

Having a committed software development workforce located overseas will ensure the improvement of your work capacity and growth by providing the knowledge and scalability required for company success. 

An offshore software development team can assist with the kind of product you will require, the equipment, and robotics if necessary. An offshore team of employees can also help you maximize your marketing and engagement initiatives.  

Focusing on Your Core Business

Without managing offshore software developers talent, you’ll have more time to devote to the crucial progress that has been put off, like product marketing. As your company will be carefully taken care of, which will ensure you have more time for focusing on core business rather than handling and managing problems in the sphere you never worked with. 

Increased Profitability

Hiring an offshore development team might significantly lower your work and managing expenses. Doing work with an offshore team of employees does not ensure that you will ensure saving money if you hire staff that does not fit your company. However, you can anticipate cutting costs significantly when the offshore crew is well-matched to your company.

Challenges of Managing Offshore Teams

When you work with offshore teams, there are advantages and challenges as well. We will discuss potential difficulties you could face when leading or working with offshore teams and how they can be solved below.

Data Security

The confidentiality of the data you give to your offshore employees may be compromised. You could make a local database and give access to it to everyone on your team to keep your data secure. In this manner, you are in charge of your database’s backups, product security, etc. You can consider implementing certified software to track remote workers’ adherence to firm security policies. This will ensure your business process stays flexible.

Time Zone Difference

While working with an offshore development company, some clients have concerns that time difference may affect the software development process. Some of our clients used to be worried about issues with the synchronization of teamwork, and some were afraid of having less control during the working process.

But in practice, we see that different time zones may even be beneficial to your company and cooperation.

A case study from our practice:

Our Canadian client, Creyos, has a time difference of 7 hours with us. Anyway, they took this as an advantage. As they start their workday at 9 AM — the time when our team has all the daily tasks done by that time. That’s the case when differences helped our software development working process.

Cultural Differences and Communication Gaps

Managing offshore software development teams may surprise you with cultural differences. 

Each country has different customs, hence everyone has different attitudes toward social patterns, family, lifestyle, and work processes.

Some cultural differences you may face:

Level of openness. Will your offshore software development team keep their opinions to themselves or voice them to you? Dutch country people are very open, however, people of Asia tend to be less open, especially when it comes to contradicting a boss or project manager. If varies from country to country. Sometimes it is worth asking people to be more proactive on the working place.

The habit of making promises. Another case: Indian people always say ‘yes’, even if the answer is ‘not sure’ or ‘no’. In this case, you will need to emphasize that the honest answer saves time and working process for the whole offshore software development team, while the incentive to please the client won’t make you happy in the end of the working process.

Tasks and goals orientation. Working people in the West are often task and goal-oriented. They want to get their software development stuff done. 

Friendliness. In Asia, people are very social and believe in building long-term relationships: they would rather spend several months fostering the relationship before granting a project to a new vendor.

Fear of uncertainty. Swedish people are less strict when it comes to the details of tasks during working with the offshore development team. Actually, this is the case from our experience: our Swedish clients were OK with specifying the tasks during the work process. Meanwhile, we are used to planning tasks ahead, so sometimes we have to adjust to some cultural differences, as described above.

Performance Management

Performance management is a big issue when managing offshore team of employees. It’s important to determine how to keep tabs on offshore team working hours and productivity, as team performance evaluation is crucial in ensuring business profitability. Fortunately, you can track the billable hours and productivity of your offshore workforce using a variety of time-tracking applications.

Unclear Expectations and Goals

When offshore teams don’t know what they need to do, problems can arise. Here’s how to help:

Writing Everything Down: Make a list of tasks and when they should be done.

Using Pictures: Charts and diagrams can help show what needs to be done.

Asking and Answering Questions: Let the team ask questions if they are unsure about something.

Teaching: Make sure to talk about the project and what needs to be done regularly, especially when things change.

Communication Problems

Talking clearly with offshore teams can sometimes be hard. Here’s how to make it easier:

Using Common Tools: Use easy and popular tools like Zoom or Slack to talk and share information.

Having Rules for Talking: Decide what should be sent as an email, what can be a quick message, and when to have a video call.

Thinking About Time: Remember that offshore teams might be in a different time zone. Try to find a time that works for everyone when planning meetings.

Learning About Each Other: Sometimes, words might mean different things in different cultures. It’s good to learn about these differences.

Having a Helper: It can be useful to have someone who understands both sides and can help in explaining things.

Letting Everyone Speak: Make sure each employee feels okay asking questions or sharing their thoughts.

Our Expertise: Tips to Address Challenges when Managing Offshore Team

Collaborating with teams from different countries can be an opportunity, although it can also present some challenges. Through our experiences, we’ve gained insights, and here are some suggestions:

Use Communication Tools

We use Jira, Slack, Google Meets, or Zoom to keep in touch with the team and clients who live across the world and time zones. This is how we make sure we have all tasks on our hands all the time and can communicate easily.

Document Everything

We document every meeting with our clients to make sure we do everything that is planned. This also helps to spread responsibilities and tasks evenly so everyone performs their part on time.

Embrace Cultural Awareness

We take time to understand the market of our clients to meet all the cultural differences that may arise during our work.

Empower Your Team through Training

Each of our team members has a development plan, so with each work, we bring better results to our clients. This helps both of our clients and team members to get better with their business and craft.

Promote Open Feedback

Each team member has a call with HR and the tech lead once a month or upon request. During the call, we provide feedback on both hard and soft skills. Also, we run an annual NPS to see the team’s satisfaction rate and spaces for improvement.

Offline Meetings

Team building is a true diamond in this world as we work remotely. We take time to meet offline and learn more about each other to develop trust and openness. 

And our account managers seize every opportunity to meet with our clients offline as well. This helps to build strong relationships and understand each other better.

Adaptability is Key

We try to be ready for different unexpected situations. Luckily, we have managers who help us plan the work, considering the possibility of force majeure.

3 Essential Tools for Successful Offshore Team Management

Using task management apps, you are killing two birds with one stone: you work with offshore employees from different time zones and control the status of the tasks. In Sloboda Studio, we mostly use JIRA and Trello boards to track tasks of our remote team.

Monday for Time Tracking and Productivity Management

Monday Homepage

​​Monday is a complete platform for project management that includes several features. Managers and team members may always access pertinent information organized in the most effective way possible with the help of this tool.

Monday key features include:

• Integration and automation technologies. The website can conduct thousands of jobs, including repetitive, conditional, but very important everyday tasks that will help manage offshore teams. It can also interact with hundreds of different apps and platforms. 
• Various sorts of a process for different sectors, from software development to customer care, are included in a template collection.

The pros of Monday:

• Simple user interface
• Multiple board views (Table, Timeline, Kanban, etc.)
• Tools for robust collaboration
• Numerous Integrations
• Time tracking
• Flexible reporting options

The cons of Monday:

• Few task dependencies
• Limits in pricing plans
• No built-in feature to track employees free time

Pricing

There are various Monday pricing plans: 

Free. Basic functionality and a team size of two are the only restrictions on the free edition. 

Basic. This plan, which costs $8 per seat per month, enables you to construct one dashboard and give customer assistance first priority. 

Standard. This plan offers numerous views, automation, connectors, and dashboards that aggregate five boards for $10 per seat each month. 

Pro. in this plan, you may access advanced tools like automation, integrations, time tracking, dependencies, formula, and more, which cost $16 per seat per month. 

Enterprise. Last but not least, the Enterprise plan offers premium resources like comprehensive reporting and analytics and has flexible pricing based on your organization’s demands.

Customer ratings: 4.6/5 (over 3000 reviews) on Capterra

Zoom for Communication

Zoom Homepage

Zoom is a cloud-based video communications app. You can make virtual video and audio conferencing, webinars, live chats, screen-sharing, and other collaborative features with the offshore team via this app. To join a Zoom conference, you don’t need an account, and since the product works with Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android devices, almost anyone can use it.

Zoom has numerous features, including:

• Online meetings
• Team chat
• VoIP phone system
• Virtual whiteboard 
• Conversational intelligence
• Email and calendar

The pros of Zoom:

• Large audience support
• Streaming your meetings on Facebook
• Google Calendar support
• Easy-to-use interface

The cons of Zoom:

• Numerous subscriptions and add-ons
• Inability to delete comments
• The possibility of strangers crushing the call
• Inconsistent Cloud File Sizes

Pricing

There are three main plans:

Free. This plan includes meetings with up to 100 attendees and a 40-minute limit, whiteboard, and team chat. 

Pro. This plan costs 139.90 Euro a year and allows meetings with up to 100 Attendees without any time limit, 3 whiteboards, team chat, and 5 GB cloud storage.

Business. For 189.90 Euro a year, this plan includes meetings with up to 300 Attendees without any time limit, unlimited whiteboards, team chat, and 5 GB cloud storage.

Customer ratings: 4.5/5 (over 52000 reviews) on G2, 4.6/5 (over 13000 reviews) on Capterra.

Asana for Project Management

Asana Homepage

With the aid of the work management platform Asana, you and your offshore team can keep track of tasks, business processes, and projects. It does not, however, come with built-in time tracking capabilities; instead, you must combine it with a program to track your offshore employees’ work time. 

Key features of Asana:

• An interface that is easy to use. 
• The calendar feature provides a summary of tasks and projects for effective scheduling. 
• You can view the evolution of work over time in a portfolio. 
• Effectively supervise projects from any device – compatible with Android, iOS, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. 
• More than 100 integrations to help you better handle your tasks. 

Pricing: Asana paid plans start at $13.49 per month per user. Additionally, a free package with restricted features is available. 

Customer ratings: 4.3/5 (over 7000 reviews) on G2, 4.4/5 (over 9300 reviews) on Capterra.

Conclusion

There are many benefits of hiring offshore teams, including improving work capacity, avoiding business focus dispersal, and achieving scalability. Additionally, you may cut costs and have instant access to the global talent pool. Despite all the advantages, this type of model is not without challenges. 

Here are some of the best practices for managing offshore teams:

• Setting Clear Job Responsibilities
• Conducting Performance-based Assessments
• Ensuring the Team Has the Right Tools 
• Implementing Work Schedules and Accountability
• Making Communication a Priority
• Building Trust and Inclusion
• Avoiding Micromanagement
• Providing Opportunities for Growth
• Creating a Strong Team Culture

There are 2 ways of finding an offshore team: with your internal resources or by working with an outsourcing development vendor. You can delegate it to us if you don’t want to spend time hiring and managing your offshore team. We will make sure that you have a dedicated qualified team that will be better managed by our project manager and communicate with you directly. Contact us to find the best fit for you.