Tips on effectively managing offshore teams

Setting up and functioning with an offshore team in itself feels like a major task. Finding the right company at the right price, matching your vision, setting long-term goals and strategies and ironing out all the details over the deliverables, these tasks are just a few of the processes that you have to undergo when selecting and setting up with an offshore company. Now you have to answer the real question - How do you manage your offshore team?

Unlike with in-house teams, you cannot just check-up on your offshore team by dropping down and visiting them quite regularly. Offshore team management requires open lines of communication, trust and most importantly, strong and focused leadership, this brings us to one of the key indicators of effectively managing offshore teams!

Managing Offshore Teams

1. Select a strong team leader:

Your offshore team can only be as strong as your team leader. For effective offshore team management, your team leader needs to be well-versed with the local language as well as english, as it is a globally recognised and spoken language, they must be able to bridge the cultural gap between your base company and the offshoring company and also be able to effectively oversee day-to-day operations and assess them on the basis of your organization's long-term goals. What if your offshore team still isn’t functioning properly or your offshore team management is poor?

2. Change the team leader, not the consultant

You have poured valuable man hours and money into finding and setting up with an offshore company; repeating that entire cycle to move on to another due to inefficient offshore team management or a disagreeable quality of output seems tiring as well as wasteful. Instead, change your team leader while also identifying key performance issues in the team and targeting them. A new perspective, fresh management style and new set of skills might be all it takes to rejuvenate or remarkably improve on your final output. This is also one of the reasons you should choose an offshore company instead of a freelancer.

3. Find the right people with the right skills

At this stage, you’re not alone! You already have an offshore team leader to help you determine whether the on-ground team has the right skill set and experience to meet your project requirements. Your offshore team management and efficiency effectively rides on this selection so feel free to get in touch with us and learn more about how we can help you meet your staffing requirements.

4. Avoid micromanagement

Managing offshore teams also involves placing a certain amount of trust in your offshore team. You’ve found a capable team leader to continue managing your offshore team, you’ve gathered the right people with the right skill sets to improve upon your output, at this stage, your offshore team should do a comfortably capable job of managing itself without the need for constant intervention, in fact, constant intervention may add tensions to projects without stronger and more open channels of communication.

5. Keep an open line of communication

Communication is vital to functioning effectively for organizations with in-house teams, so just think how important communication must be to offshore team management when your entire team is sitting in an entirely different nation! A few ways to build this communication line is to establish a clear chain of command and hierarchy as well as to integrate the right technology to uphold this communication. A few effective tools that you’re already aware of may be Zoom or Skype, but more detailed and specialized tools such as Slack and Basecamp can also be of help.

This usually goes without saying, but in order to manage your offshore team effectively, you have to first pick the right offshore company or consultant. Our wide range of services along with our reputation as a trusted and reliable off-shore organization makes us the perfect fit for your next base of operations. If you’d like to learn more about setting up and managing offshore teams with us, click here to get in touch