Whether your workforce is composed of fully offshore employees or partly offshore workers, you need a lot of management tools to handle your employees. Many businesses are opting to hire foreign workers either to replace or support their traditional offices. This practice allows companies to save on labor and operational expenses. It also gives them the opportunity to tap a global pool of talent who are as skilled or more skilled than their local counterparts.
But with the increasing modernity of the business environment comes the need to sustain team collaboration no matter where the staff is based. If you are managing offshore employees for your offshore software development company, you need to use project management, file storage, teleconference, and social network tools. These are designed to build a strong offshore team and reach the goal of the company.
Project Management
Project management programs are one-stop platforms for collaboration, partnerships, and communication. With these platforms, you can assign tasks, share files, work on multiple projects, and create discussions. It allows everyone with access to the projects to edit and update files. These programs are also fully responsive and notify team members of any changes. This way, a team member would know if co-workers who live halfway across the world are done with the web design elements tasked to them.
File Storage
In the traditional office setting, workers are going to share files using the local network. They also print the documents and distribute them to each department or unit. But this isn’t possible with an offshore workforce. That’s why teams are using cloud computing and file-sharing services. With a username and password, any member of the team can access the files, photos, documents, and other things.
File-storage services also help keep the office organized. Without papers and other documents piling on top of tables, the office becomes a breeze to work in. That also works for your offshore teams because the set up allows them to work from anywhere in the world. All they need is their laptop and smartphones to connect to you.
Teleconferencing
No matter how great project management tools are right now, teams cannot collaborate and cooperate without directly discussing projects with each other. That’s why audio and video teleconference tools are important. This is when you can develop the teamwork between your employees. Even though they aren’t meeting face-to-face regularly, they should know each other and be able to work harmoniously.
Skype and Zoom are the most popular platforms today. Many of these tools also allow for the sharing of screens, which keeps the presentation of ideas and projects interesting. They offer business accounts that keep meetings more private and secure.
Social Network
No, this does not refer to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. One example of a Facebook-like social network platform is Yammer. Owned by Microsoft, Yammer offers collaborative experience among employees. In the platform, employees can create blogs, upload files, and comment on each other’s posts. It’s not only a collaborative experience but an immersive one, too. Team members can immerse themselves in the projects that others are working on.
This is a helpful tool especially for new members of the team. The platform will give them all the information they need to get to know the team, as well as the projects everyone is working on. This kind of platform is helpful for bigger organizations that have trouble keeping up with all projects.
Monitoring
Although your staff is primarily working as freelancers, they are duty-bound to you. Time-monitoring tools keep track of your employees’ login times. This is important to keep them productive and manage performance issues. Some of these monitoring tools will even take screenshots of your employees’ work. This ensures the supervisor that the employees are working on the tasks assigned to them.
Offshore workers are used to working this way. Some may not like the feeling of being micro-managed but monitoring the productivity of your workers is a win-win situation. On one hand, you’re assured that you’re getting what you’re paying for. On another, your offshore employees can get the performance rating that they deserve.
There are still many tools that help employers manage their offshore employees. Anyone who communicates with people from another country understands how, even with technology, communication can be lost in translation. These tools are developed to get past those hurdles. They help ease the everyday process of the job. So, is it any surprise that experts believe that half of the workforce will be comprised of offshore employees by this year?