Blending your onshore and offshore teams results in incredible business growth

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Remember that failing to adequately onboard your offshore developers and integrate them into the existing local team will trigger communication failure and massive inefficiencies.

To tackle these issues, this article will:

• Describe how to establish a training plan and the key performance areas for your offshore team

• Provide important tips on how to inculcate your business culture in the offshore team

• Provide suggestions on how to integrate both your offshore and onshore teams, thus ensuring a transformational business growth you aimed at

Step 1: How to establish a training plan and key performance areas for your offshore team

Establish a plan prior to looking for an offshore development team that will explain what is expected of the team. Create a new relationship with your new offshore team that will ensure the success of your venture.

• How do you sustain the offshore team’s interest in your project?

• What will make them more inclined toward providing you with the high-quality service?

It is important to engage with your team right away when hiring an offshore developer.

Briefly explain them your business objectives

It is important to provide the team a quick glance at your business goals. After all, it will allow them to match their professional goals to your success.

Use their skills for process improvement

Undoubtedly, you will look for the best offshore developers for your team. Once you are done with hiring one, involve them in brainstorming sessions and use their skills in process development.

Provide them with technical training

Technical training will enable your offshore team to deal with the most difficult aspects of your business. You can ensure a smooth project management and escalation procedures with soft skills training.

Offer them the required learning curves

Your offshore team may demand significant learning curves that will help them become familiar with the nature of your business and the technical requirements of your project(s).

Incorporating a training plan will help you to tackle the issues. Consider creating a spreadsheet outlining the following:

• Training topic(s)

• Date and time as to when the training will be conducted

• A link or description as to what training material is required

• How will the training be delivered and by whom

Remote vs. onsite training. Which one is better?

It is often profitable to visit your team in person and train it. However, due to the computer-based tasks that they perform, sometimes it is much better to train them remotely.

Identify key result areas for each of the team members

Thoroughly analyze the tasks and responsibilities of each member of your offshore team and then work out on your expectations from them in terms of productivity. Identifying key result areas is incredibly useful to make sure that your offshore team acknowledges what is required of them.

Step 2: Provide important tips on how to inculcate your business culture in the offshore team

Once you have executed the aforementioned step successfully, you can be assured that your onshore team is now quite comfortable with the idea of having an offshore team. However, sometimes one negative sentiment can make the whole process difficult. In such a scenario, it is best to make your onshore team responsible for training your offshore staff. It will be a crucial step, as your onshore team will understand the capabilities of the offshore team.

Boost communication with technology

Don’t you want to have both teams interact with each other often? Sometimes 10 minutes of talking to each other can prevent 2 hours of emails back and forth between multiple people. Setting up a large LED TV with a video conferencing platform will work wonders. It will provide both teams with a platform to easily discuss any issues and help each other out. Just make sure that your staff has that required video conferencing platform and is familiar with how to use it.

Make use of IP phone handsets

Offshore teams can be offered IP phone handsets that include a phone number with your allocated number range and a corresponding extension number. The staff members than just need to call the appropriate local extension. Even if they want to make outbound calls to customers or suppliers, they can do this with an IP phone.

Step 3: Provide some suggestions on how to integrate both your offshore and onshore teams, thus ensuring the transformational business growth you aimed for.

• Nothing can replace the face-to-face contact to build a long-term and a trustworthy relationship. It will help both teams facilitate the knowledge transfer, hands-on training, and will create an understanding of how the business operates.

• Encourage your offshore team to participate in planning sessions and get them excited about new features. They’ll be more likely to participate and bring more to the table with the pros and cons of each venture. Consider rewarding the best participants.

• It is important that you document all the requirements and tasks to remove any ambiguity. Documenting the communication between both the teams will ensure that there is no misunderstanding between how the requirements are expected to be delivered and just what the requirements are.

These steps will definitely help you with onboarding your offshore team members and be integrating them into your existing local team. If there is something you think is missed in the info above, please share it in the comments below.