Understanding Offshore Teams & How to Handle Them

Outsourcing with onshore teams usually involves working with employees within the same city or country where your company is. Contrary to that, an offshore team would comprise members from different countries working under your company.

One of the best ways to communicate with an offshore team is through video calls. Given how offshore team members work remotely, there are high chances of miscommunication. Simply communicating over team huddles or slack channels isn’t enough to achieve transparency and effective communication. You can introduce the human element with video conferencing, encourage offshore employees to voice their concerns and opinions properly, and be team players. Plus, a video call is one of the best ways to gauge how your team members behave, clearly communicate your feedback/opinions to them, and work on project bottlenecks more collaboratively.

Offshore teams usually involve employees operating remotely from various time zones and locations. As they aren’t a part of your in-house team, there can always be bottlenecks caused due to misunderstandings, miscommunications, unclear expectations, etc.

However, you can easily avert these and handle such teams effortlessly by following a few vital pointers. These include clearly defining and communicating your product’s vision and roadmap, overlapping work schedules for seamless collaboration, and using video conferencing for transparent communication. More importantly, you must treat your offshore members as your team to ensure they are comfortable with your company and work to their full potential.

Some of the best tools to collaborate with your offshore teams are Trello, Slack, GitHub, GitLab, Zoom, and Jira are some of the best tools to collaborate with your offshore teams. These are ideal for offshore team collaboration, be it just to discuss tasks, software project management, or development.

Hiring an offshore team offers multiple benefits and enhanced flexibility in business scaling. You can scout global talent with offshore teams instead of only searching within local markets. You can avoid the hassles of full-time hiring by simply sourcing the required talent for a project and steering clear of capacity issues that occur with a sudden influx of new work. Moreover, working with offshore teams will also help you address and focus on overlooked projects or areas.

The best time to hire an offshore team is when you not only need to quickly outsource your projects but also have the required budget and an ideal vendor at your disposal. If you don’t have a proper budget or vendor to outsource your work, you may hire unsuitable developers who stretch out delivery timelines and churn out work that cannot yield the desired results.