The global pandemic turned the traditional office hours for many organizations and small businesses into remote working. Many organizations allow their staff to choose if they want to work from the office or at home. What started as an option to keep work flowing has become the new normal for many people. Today, it is normal for design agencies to function as remote teams.
Technological advances play a critical role in enhancing remote work. Besides ensuring efficient collaboration, technology optimizes communication tools to simplify the design processes. Remote design collaboration is an approach that is cost-effective in terms of infrastructure and daily commute for workers. Design companies with a vision are adopting this solution to expand into new markets without overheads of physical offices.
Most designers prefer the freedom of remote working, and they are committed to maintaining trust. You can easily hire competent experts and retain them due to flexibility and attractive payment perks. Besides, such design teams are more productive and deliver timely projects.
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However, remote work is not all rosy. The entire design team might encounter various challenges. For instance, miscommunication, non-collaboration, and mismanagement. This might result in poorly-designed or flopped projects.
Fortunately, you can follow some key principles to ensure your remote team functions seamlessly without issues. This article highlights the resources and tools to make your team productive.
Reliable Collaborative Tools
When you have a remote product development team, ensure you have efficient collaborative tools. Implementing the right systems in place will make it easier to link the team for a smooth workflow. You need to incorporate modern tools where the team can easily search and index their work. Moreover, it’s vital to teach the team about optimizing the virtual tools properly.
Implement Fair Policies
Many agencies suffer due to a lack of equitable policies. The team might feel demotivated when the agency does not have clear remote work policies. More so if the design team perceives the policies as biased and unreliable.
That is why the project manager or the agency owner needs to implement fair policies to guide the entire design team. These include compensation perks, work etiquette during virtual meetings, or travel allowances. Moreover, you need to make the remote workers feel like part of the organization by regularly sharing newsletters and updates about the company. This approach will enhance team spirit, resulting in job satisfaction and high productivity.
Ensure Reliable 24/7 Support
Another challenge that affects remote work is system failure. When collaborative software is down, the entire team might not work effectively. Therefore, you must ensure a reliable and responsive support team on standby, ready to assist the team. You must develop a consistent infrastructure that responds to the requests of remote workers immediately, without delays. The agency should also be able to visit the workers in case of hardware complications.
Set Clear Roles and Responsibilities
When you have a remote design team, it is vital to communicate clear instructions during the recruitment phase. Ensure each expert understands the company’s objectives and business model. To avoid future complications and late project deliveries, you need to elaborate on their roles and responsibilities. Clear job descriptions allow the team to work efficiently on their assigned tasks.
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Define the Organizational Culture
Does your remote work approach align with your organization’s culture? It is important to have a well-defined goal to help you build a valuable team. Why does your agency want a remote design team? How will you support the team and ensure smooth collaboration? You must have an accommodating company culture that will make the workers feel valued and part of the team. If your culture is positive, the entire team will be motivated to deliver exceptional results.
Manage the Change
Not all workers will accept the shift of remote work when you implement it. The change will affect each person differently. When the remote change is not planned and structured effectively, it might cause work interruption and project delays.
So, how to organize it smoothly?
Therefore, you need to be strategic and make the transition seamless. Ensure the needs of each worker are met with the right tools. It is vital to think through and plan before making the change. You can organize workshops and training to help your works adjust to the new setup.
Let the team know that you trust their expertise and judgment regardless of their work location. Furthermore, communicate and listen to their concerns and address them accordingly. Overlooking the significance of workers’ emotions is a mistake that might cause productivity flaws.
Invest Fully
When you decide to have a remote design team, you need to know that it is an expensive venture. You need to sacrifice and invest fully in the project if you want to enjoy the results later. Do not take shortcuts because your business will mitigate costs and other overheads required to operate a physical office when the project is complete.
What does 100% investment look like?
Invest in the right collaborative tools and design resources to enhance workflow. Ensure that your support is efficient, as mentioned above, to guarantee optimal productivity. Ultimately, you will enjoy the benefits of remote working instead of on-site.
Conclusion
In this digital world, most companies don’t care about the location of their employees as long as they deliver results. The management focuses more on each individual’s talent, skills, and commitment to the team. That is why web agencies embrace the remote work approach in product development projects. Having a competent remote team is essential to delivering excellent products to clients. Apart from being cost-effective, it enhances flexibility and company growth.
To make the remote working mode work, ensure you have the proper tools and design resources to help the team work seamlessly without any problems. Besides, if you have a good company culture, you will retain the best pool of talented designers and developers. Thus, you will reap the immense benefits of remote work and grow your design agency.
Follow the above principles and apply them to your design team for better results.