Thousands of reasons and strategies can help companies to improve their collaboration with an off-shore tech team. However, according to my experience, one of the most influential aspects of a successful collaboration is "Feedback" - Both sharing and receiving feedback.
Remember your remote engineering team will be based in thousands of kilometres away with different mother languages, different cultures, and different perspectives. Therefore, providing clear communication will be key.
Having proper communication channels - MS Teams, Slack, etc will make it easy for back-and-forth communication. At the same time, it's mandatory to have a project management tool to communicate tasks.
It's very common when tasks are explained in detail in project management tools such as JIRA, Monday, ClickUp, or Trello, the quality of communication dramatically improves.
Whenever you see a communication gap, it's always good to point out the issue to the relevant stakeholders. It always helps when you speak up about the issue then and there without waiting.
I can remember one of our engineers involved in a remote engineering team was not performing as expected by the client management team, which was eventually informed to our management. We took immediate action to identify the issue, having one-on-one meetings with both the client and the engineer. At last, we found that the issue was something related to a family matter. Thanks to the client, we let the engineer rest for a few weeks and the quality improved dramatically after coming back.
This is something I have noticed in some cultures, especially in Asia. People are reluctant to express their opinions directly. But the other hand, clients from Western cultures expect direct feedback and this may lead to potential communication issues.
The companies, vendors, and engineers should come together to understand this as an issue and come up with an internal culture to foster open dialogue. When there is no fear, no discrimination, it makes it easy to identify issues and provide effective fixes.
You don't need to wait until there is an issue to provide feedback. There are well-established ways to provide and collect feedback for continuous improvements.
Recently at Fcode Labs, we established a 360-degree feedback mechanism for remote engineering teams, where Fcode Labs' HR team is practively working with client management, supervisors, and peer colleagues of the engineers to gather feedback about the team members. This helps a lot to understand the areas to improve
In conclusion, providing and receiving feedback is one of the most important things you should keep in mind when collaborating with an off-shore engineering team. It's not about finding issues all the time, but making smaller contributions to the incremental improvements.
Please feel free to comment and share your thoughts. Thank you and Good Luck!
