‘Outsourcing’ can be considered as the word of the decade (the worldwide outsourcing market had already surpassed $524.4 billion back in 2015), and some companies (especially the IT sector) tend to thrive on this. Although an InHouse team promotes better liability and consistent communication with the organization, Remote employees manifest their own merits.
However, a recent survey by the training company VitalSmarts claims that 20% of leaders are unprepared to lead their teleworking team.
With a different set of rules, perks, and management style, let’s delve deep in this arena of In-house vs. Remote Employees.
There are three essential differences between the two modus operandi:
Conflicting time zones.
Work Culture
Physical presence
Conflicting Time Zone
Organizations with remote teams and In-house teams face the biggest challenge of a diverse time zone. 9 am in India is 11.30 pm in the USA. Managers have to adhere to “time fairness” and schedule calls in such a way that is feasible for all the team members. And it is no easy task to achieve.
On the flip side, a manager will have a propensity for the InHouse employees since she/he will be spending some hours of the day with them and hence render the feasibility of communication.
Apart from meetings, managers will also have to decide on the deadlines accordingly to avoid any hassle due to separate time belts.
Work Culture
Remote employees tend to exhibit more independent behavior. Since they demand less supervision, companies may require fewer managers to control their co-workers and, therefore, more money on the plate.
Work culture also incorporates the cultural and language differences that may turn out to be a hindrance to the project deliverables. It is essential to understand the messages of the employees with clear objectives and find common ground among the variations for seamless management of the team. A manager needs to make the remote team feel comfortable and connected.
Physical presence
The space difference appends to the challenges of managing a remote team for the manager. Since they are not sitting next to you, leveraging the best communication tools to stay in touch is the only viable option.
Frequent video calls and scrum calls are the only efficient way to keep the whole team on board. Although scheduling too many meetings can induce various problems and lessen productivity. According to the recent Harvard Business School report, starting April this year, there’s a 13% increase of meetings per person, compared to the first quarter of this year (before there were worldwide lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Luckily, there’s a decline in the average length of these meetings – by 20%. This survey gathered 3.1 million workers from North America, Europe, and the Middle East.
Another challenge of having distributed teams is that performance and productivity tracking becomes a bit tricky. A few of the most effective solutions to the problem are filling out timesheets. But a manual timesheet again tends to give way to ‘timesheet stress’! xTimesheet is the answer. It is automated and sends a notification via email and push notification on your device.
In addition to this, xTimesheet gives out reports and charts to give a glimpse of your working hours in a better way and easy to understand at any particular time of the month.
Wrapping up with food for thought:
“Remote working is the future, but you need a physical presence at least a couple of times a year to truly create an amazing team.” – Ricardo Fernandez