Challenges of Virtual Teams and Solutions

 11 OCT 2020

Looking for custom software solutions to support the growth of your business? Or are you eyeing to cut down on your operational expenses? Either way, the first thing that comes into anyone’s mind would be; how will I build my team going forward. In a market fraught with uncertainty, there are many challenges that the companies face such as cutting expenses, augmenting their teams, increasing productivity and efficiency as a way to maintain their growth streak. At the same time, maintaining the same quality, assurance, and looking to stem market share losses. Have you considered Virtual Teams as a solution? If not, you should do it right away.

In this post, we’ll look at the challenges of virtual teams face most frequently, why those issues develop, and what you can do to address them.

Need of Virtual Teams

As teams start growing challenges in the organization grow, likely from growing one single office location into multiple locations and most often across multiple countries, different time zones, or downsizing/ reorganizing to reduce labor costs, eliminate redundancy, and better target scarce resources. Does your organization see the opportunity here working with remote teams or does it visualize the barriers associated with managing the regular challenges of virtual teams project? every solution was found because of the problems, hence the virtual teams problems can also be faced by adopting better strategies and proven solutions.

Yes, most of us would agree that managing virtual teams or geographically dispersed teams of technologists has often been difficult. Team members that are sitting right in front of you all the time are much easier. To make our lives easier, the markets have flooded with solutions such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and others that help you collaborate and manage communication challenges with virtual teams, no matter where you are, as long as you have connectivity to the internet! However, as I mentioned earlier, most of us talk about the difficulties that companies face during managing virtual teams and even at times go deeper into reasons why remote teams don’t work.

However, most of us fail to embark on a journey to discover what failed along the way even though there existed tools and technologies that were there to make our lives easier than ever and to do that companies should foresee solutions to overcome the problems faced during managing virtual teams. Anyhow, post-covid many of the organizations planning to keep practicing virtual teamwork due to its benefits of reduced infrastructure maintenance costs, greater work-life balance, global resource usability, employee satisfaction, etc.

Read: How we set up Remote Teams for a Microsoft Partner

As a modern workplace service provider, we have come across many industrial obstacles preventing them from digital transformation, however, there are no problems without a solution. Hence here we are describing some of the solutions for virtual team management issues that companies normally encounter.

Let’s talk about the pertinent Challenges of Virtual Teams:

1. Finding the right vendor who fits your business needs and helps you set up remote teams that match your requirements, specifications, and expectations.
2. Difficulties in communicating and understanding one another, resulting in a lack of common ground, trust, and shared responsibility, work effectiveness.
3. Failure to develop task-related processes such as setting clear goals and standards.
4. Inability to collaborate in a way that takes advantage of different perspectives, knowledge, talent, and expertise.
5. A lack of full engagement and commitment by all team members to deliver their best performances when completing tasks and progressing toward team goals.
6. Team leaders accustomed to observing and interacting with their team of engineers in person and conducting face-to-face meetings often find it difficult in remote team communication, training virtual teams or remote team building, and otherwise managing geographically distributed team members to achieve the highest possible performance.

So how do leaders adapt to overcome barriers and lead effectively from a distance and yet achieve the same goals as they would have with localized teams of developers and testers?

Strategies to overcome Associated Challenges of Virtual Teams

1. Choosing the responsible virtual team vendor who provides, manages, and ensures the capabilities of your teams.
2. Choosing Strong Communication Channels
3. Create a Collaborative Mindset
4. Helps you manage a remote team effectively
5. Clarify the team’s purpose and goals
6. Establish performance standards and expectations
7. Celebrate Milestones and Successes
8. Build plans to ensure complete engagement of your teams and resources
9. Helps you build trust
10. Have a face to face interaction via video calling tools/conduct virtual team meetings

Hiring remote teams as a model of engagement in comparison to your in-house human resource is now a possibility. In reality, it gives you the freedom to choose your resources as and when you need them. Furthermore, it discourages you from chasing uncommitted offshore freelancers. As a virtual remote resources business agency, our remote teams hiring services save you a significant amount of money in remote team building while also assuring that the quality of work provided is of the high quality owing to a variety of possibilities and abilities to pick from.

Solutions for the challenges of virtual teams:

1. Hire the best talent
   Team augmentation service gives you the option of choosing the best talent (remote employees), which is in line with your programming and development needs; and you get specialists in all the fields including SEO, .Net, CMS, JAVA, PHP Developers, Mobile Application developers and many more. You can also increase or decrease the size of your team with time, thereby, optimizing your operational cost and scaling as needed.
2. Let go of the hiring and managing overheads
   Your Microsoft Team-as-a-service vendor not only takes care of your hiring process, provides you options that you can select from, and supports infrastructure like hardware and software, workspace fall under the ambit of your service provider. Thus, it negates your focus required on unnecessary tasks while concentrating more on the actual task. Focus on your core business rather than bothering about things that can eat away your productive time.
3. Remotely manage your offshore team at your convenience
   Your remote team employees albeit part of a different country/continent are available for communicating with you and collaborating at your convenience and availability. The Microsoft Teams service provider equips your dedicated development team with the necessary communication support including video conferencing, PC sharing, high-speed data sharing, and mobile connectivity so that you gain real control over your virtual employees / remote workers by monitoring them remotely.
4. Bypass legal boundaries
   Is your remote team spread across the globe serving different needs? Does every remote team member work in a different zone? Irrespective of that, you save yourself from delving into legal issues including Government clearances, taxes, or company registration specific to the laws of the land whether it is North America, Asia, or Latin America for that matter. Everything will be taken care of by the service provider, besides the legal issues. Some vendors offer an additional level of assurance and guaranteed value by offering maintenance warranty and liability insurance.
5. Control over data security
   Virtual employees in developing countries have access to sensitive information about your business but with cloud-based servers owned by your company, whole information is stored within your company’s servers. Moreover, data security is of the utmost importance to well-established vendors. When choosing a vendor, it is extremely important to choose teams and vendors who are truly genuine and have a proven track record. Companies like banks and other private institutions need to operate under strict compliance rules and it is extremely important that the vendor is capable of delivering what is needed.
6. Accountability
   The Remote Team agency is entirely responsible for keeping a check on the workers and their functioning, and they make sure that the dedicated team working under your company is aligned as per your instructions and developmental goals. Besides this, any goof-ups and irregularities by your virtual team are daily reported to you so that you can take timely action and ensure the effectiveness of remote team working.
7. Staff management
   The remote team working under you is under a contractual agreement with the vendor. Consequently, all HR-related issues like employee leave and employee benefits are subjected to the vendor’s jurisdiction and control. Thus, leaving you unbothered about any challenges of managing virtual teams. Whether it is attrition rate or salary hike, none of it is your concern as far as your work is being delivered. Furthermore, you need not invest in annual bonuses, insurance,  and medical allowances.
8. Nurture long-term relationship
   

   Your in-house team works in tandem with the offshore development team. Continuous working over various projects develops a level of understanding between culturally different teams, thereby, nourishing strong working relationships among them. Collaboration and communication are the key success aspects here and having a vendor as a partner who understands this becomes extremely important.

9. Make significant savings
   Due to the growing needs and requirements of businesses, continuous up-gradation of both systems and in-house resources becomes extremely important. And these tasks don’t come cheap and have often expensive training costs associated with them. By having the responsibility transferred to your software vendor, your life becomes extremely simple as the vendor would be the one responsible to make sure all the resources are trained to the latest tools and technologies.
10. Establish clear remote work expectations
    By establishing that team members understand their responsibilities and can complete assignments on time. If you wish to enhance response time, do the following. Find out what is causing the slow response times, which including internet access, and try to assist them in finding solutions. You could also consider automating operations like mass emailing and social media management. It helps employees time saves and they can focus on tasks.
11. Improve office culture
    Because of the disparity in work locations, remote employment may lack office culture. Utilizing technology to link employees in a more personal way, such as using virtual meetings to conduct a virtual quiz session, might help enhance workplace culture.
12. Build Trust
    It can be harder to build trust and hold team members accountable in a virtual setting, as there is less face-to-face interaction. To build trust, team members should make an effort to be transparent and open with their work and should be responsive to requests for information or assistance. To hold team members accountable, it can be helpful to establish clear expectations and deadlines, and to use project management tools to track progress and identify any issues that may arise.

Conclusion

All things considered, the benefits of establishing and managing challenges of virtual teams are enormous; but, the route to success with remote teams is not without its own set of challenges. Choosing a partner that knows your needs is the most important step to overcome challenges of communication, collaboration, project group management, leadership management, etc. Failure to do so might lead to project failures and the purpose of hiring remote teams.

However, this by no means guarantees success if you maintain in-house teams. Both in-house and virtual teams have their own set of challenges and obstacles where each can be solved based on the right vendor chosen. With the number of tools, processes, and proven methodologies, today’s world is seeing a revolution with remote teams and make the world seem closer and smaller than ever.

Now the question remains, are you ready for setting your perfect virtual team? Contact us to hire remote developers and explore our different engagement models.