Team lead skills in the remote teams world
/Software team leadership is always a challenge. A great team requires a fine balance of super geek, hyper proactivity, low ego and great sense of business needs - an almost impossible mix. We’ve written extensively about the traits and good practices of software team leads. Here’s a recent one about some of our top tips of becoming a great software team lead, based out of a survey we did with our teams. In this already complex and difficult role a new set of skills requirement is becoming very important - the skills of maintaining remote teams.
In the post pandemic world remote teams are becoming the norm. Remote software developers can based locally or be dispersed over a wide geography. With remote teams comes additional layers of issues like communications issues, cultural gap, teambuilding challenges, etc.
We asked our leads who manage remote teams for their best advice about managing these remote software developers well. Here are the top tips that came from this survey:
“Focus on output rather than effort”
One of our leads say this is the only mantra that a software team lead working with remote software developers need. His only focus is on the achievements of the team rather than how long it’s taking things to be done.
“ If a developer takes just hours to complete something that usually takes days, she is being productive. I don’t care about how many hours she is working per day”
This is not to say schedules are not important. Obviously. Keeping to a project plan is essential. But a great lead has to balance that with the fact that everyone works differently, which means a one-size-fits-all solution just doesn’t work in the software space.
“Monitor teams and give feedback regularly”
Constantly monitor and quick feedback is the key to managing remote team says another experienced team lead. He says his top priority is to keep an eye how the team is performing and give early feedback if things start to go wrong. Questions to ask are:
Is the team underperforming? Do they need training or mentoring?
Is the team overperforming? If that is the case could they take on more tasks?
Is there a team member who is not communicating enough? Or the reverse: is someone putting up too much noise in the discussion thread on the collaboration platform?
Do all team members understand their colleagues well? Is there a cultural issue that is creeping up creating a divide in the remote team? (this last one is the super important one when you have team members from different countries - social biases start creeping up in technical conversations that need be addressed asap).
“Find the optimal working times”
Remote team members generally mean different time zones, and even if the time zone is the same WFH leads to disparity about when is the best time for work for team members depending on their home circumstances. It’s vital for the health of the project and the team to find out when your remote team members are most productive, what are their preferred time for working. Once you have this information you can setup a system where there is the most overlap between the team members and yet there is no loss in performance.
“Forcing a fixed time on remote teams just doesn’t work in the long run.”
“Set guidelines”
Remote working gives your team certain flexibility, but that should not mean they can do things as they please. Setting guidelines about remote work/WFH is essential to create a set of rules that team members can follow and refer to when things go wrong. Setting these ground rules will mean the difference between a team that is well coordinated and a team that is constantly going through one chaos after another.
Note that guideline also involves scheduling. You can create a schedule for them that offers some amount of flexibility to your remote team. That is one of the biggest positives of remote work environments, and as expected studies have found that more than 78% of employees agree that flexible scheduling makes them more productive.
“Publicly acknowledge hard work”
It is vital to acknowledge team member’s success in the remote team working environment says one our most experienced team leads. That is because team workers can feel isolated and underappreciated in the remote team working model. It becomes the team lead’s job to find successes to celebrate and bring high performing team members to highlight. This creates motivation, takes away the isolation and the feeling of not being appreciated.
Acknowledge success during team meetings. Praise during a team meeting is a great way to publicly recognize someone’s success. It gives the team member a team-wide exposure and recognition of their capabilities and skillets.
Remote teams are here to stay and software teams and their leadership has to learn the new set of skills to manage such teams well. Hope this little set of tips from our team leads helps in that journey.
