Daily Stand Ups
We do daily stand ups with clients and the teams they’ve hired. This is where we talk about what each developer has worked on the day before and what they are currently working on. This process isn’t necessarily all about accountability, it’s also about aligning priorities with clients making sure the things that are most paramount to them are being given preference in each developer’s workflow.
In addition to daily stand ups, we use platforms like Slack and GitHub to over communicate daily, several times a day, within our own team. This gives team members an opportunity to clarify who is working on what and when ensuring that there is no overlap. If team members are good about sharing code they are working on they can even get the help of other team members who may catch errors they might have overlooked.
Applications like Slack, GitHub, Asana, & Google Hangouts are making communicating cross distributed teams easier than ever.
Maintaining Transparency
Not only does this result in the many benefits mentioned, this also creates a positive perception in the client’s mind. A client may be concerned with the “out of sight, out of mind” paradigm, especially if he or she is new to hiring remote workers. Openness and transparency provides not only a sense of trust and peace of mind to the client, but on the other side, it helps the remote worker feel like an integral part of the team which will result in them producing their best work. So in the end, everyone is happy. The client is satisfied with the work being done, and the worker is assured that their contributions are significant.
We couldn’t stress enough how over communication is vital to the success of a distributed team. And technology has made it possible to make constant communication accessible and effortless. Slack, and GitHub are just two examples. Asana and Google Hangouts are another set of applications that we use daily here at Upstack. We’d love to hear your thoughts on other platforms we might be missing out on and are always looking for new ways to make our processes even more efficient.
