9 Lessons For Hiring and Managing Remote Teams (Part 1)

We set out to share nine lessons for hiring and managing remote teams but ended up sharing ten!

At the beginning of the final quarter of 2024, we got together in the same room with about 15 CEOs, CTOs, COOs, and professionals involved in hiring for and managing technical projects in the Netherlands and the USA. The intention of this auspicious gathering hosted by our CEO, Ernesto Spruyt, was to discuss hiring the right people for remote technical teams and how to successfully work with and manage a team of technical people in different locations. 

We began by asking our audience about the most significant challenges they have faced when hiring and managing remote teams, and their responses were enlightening. 

While many believed that finding quality people to work with was their biggest challenge, an equal number of our audience said it was managing the cultural differences that came with working with a diverse and distributed team. Only a few others believed the biggest challenge was legal, security, and financial. 

From this, a conversation ensued about how to address these challenges, and by the end of an hour, we had shared ten case-study-driven lessons we have learned in almost 10 years of managing and hiring remote teams. Interestingly, one of our clients voluntarily joined the session and attested to the insights we shared based on their experience working with us. 

In the first part of this series, we share 3 of the 10 valuable lessons discussed during the conversation. We invite you to dive in!

LESSON 1: DETERMINING THE QUALITY OF YOUR TECH TALENT

Q: What is essential to look at when you hire remote developers? How do you know if a developer meets your quality criteria?”

Whenever we talk to clients, we find that quality is their number one, two, and three concern.

When hiring remote developers, you must first define the criteria for measuring candidates. These criteria depend primarily on the type of projects you’re running, the skill sets required, the seniority level necessary for the role, and the culture-fit qualities you seek to match internally in your organization.

After you set your criteria, you have to use a mix of diverse tools to ensure that you’re assessing not just the technical skills but also soft skills and other secondary skills that are important to your projects. For example, if you’re hiring a CTO to lead a new project in an innovative area, you want to focus on not just the technical skills but also their problem-solving skills. It is critical to ensure that you first set the criteria and then use the proper assessment methods to evaluate potential candidates’ fit for the role.

We had a unique experience with one of our clients, a US-based startup that builds and deploys innovative solutions in the financial services sector. 

When they came to us, they had just hired a team of developers. However, their development team needed specific skills because their solution was built around a financial data analysis platform. They needed a developer with problem-solving and data science skills who could devise the best technologies and approaches for deploying their solution.

It was particularly challenging because while many developers have data science skills, the number reduces significantly when we narrow it down to those with knowledge of the financial services domain.

Then, we proposed a solution that worked wonderfully well. We proposed hiring a team of two developers, one data scientist, and a PhD theoretical data scientist with a PhD in financial engineering. We matched domain knowledge with another developer who had more practical knowledge in the data science field. We paired them together, and the match was a success! Months later, our client is still quite happy with the result.

LESSON 2: MEASURING CULTURAL & PERSONALITY COMPATIBILITY

Q: “When hiring, especially from another cultural background, what are ways you can ensure that the developer has what it takes, not only in terms of technical skills, but also in personality, soft skills, and cultural values alignment?”

Soft skills are critical for remote teams because technically advanced developers often need help fitting into many organizations’ remote cultures. The MBTI framework is one tool we use to evaluate soft skills internally at Tunga. The MBTI profile is a reliable predictor of a developer’s personality. Carl Jung has written many articles and theories on this concept. The personality test based on Carl Jung is a reliable assessment we use.

We match personality with what our client is looking for. So, for example, if a client is looking for a developer who can function in a role that extends to client-facing responsibilities, we will typically match them with an extrovert.

Also, communication is very critical. There are many communication assessments, but we always advise that you design something that ensures you can identify developers with good written and verbal communication. That is always very critical. You can also have check-in calls with them to measure their communication skills. Nothing will give you a better picture of how well a developer communicates than speaking to them.

LESSON 3: TEAM BONDING FOR REMOTE TEAMS

Q: “How do you keep a remote team connected?”

There are two aspects to connection. 

One is trust. You can establish trust by providing clarity, creating transparency, creating insights, and having clear coding guidelines so that everyone on the team knows what they need to do. Not only that, but also so they know what their teammates need to do and what they can expect from them. Focusing on providing clarity is a basis for establishing trust in a remote team. 

The other aspect is fun. People need to enjoy spending time together. At least it makes the workplace a lot nicer. There are various ways to do that. We advise clients, for example, to have social gatherings. Once a month, take about 30 minutes and discuss a topic that has nothing to do with work. For example, “present your favorite food dish” and “present a city you want to visit once in your life.”

Within Tunga, we are an enormous fan of Kahoot — an online quiz you can make into a fun quiz. It can be work-related but also non-work-related. That’s the beauty of Kahoot. People have to answer the questions, which can get a bit competitive, which is good. Fun is crucial. And there are many ways that you can, even in a distributed setting, organize fun. On our management team, we once had an internet meme contest. We took about 30 minutes to share memes from the internet and have a good laugh together. So it’s as easy as that.

In summary, always establish clarity, build trust, and ensure people have fun together. That way, people can create strong connections despite being in vastly different places.

Would you like to learn more about how we hire and manage remote teams for our clients? Join our next roundtable with C-level executives or set up a 1-1 chat with one of our business managers.