5 reasons dev team culture is key to your offshore team’s success
This article was previously published for the Forbes Tech Council and was written by our CEO, Emilien Coquard.
Ask any CTO or senior software engineer to describe the best teams they’ve worked in and they’ll all focus on one thing — the culture. But the type of culture will differ.
For some, they’ll point to the hardworking, driven team looking to deliver breakthrough innovation in a high-stakes industry. For others, they’ll focus on the casual and playful team who constantly find new ways to delight their users.
If you ask those same IT leaders to describe the worst teams they’ve worked in, they’ll have a string of complaints — poor quality work, bad attitudes, personality clashes, low retention, etc. — but all streaming from a weak team culture.
Hire niche tech talent and set up a team abroad that feels in-house
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDespite the acceptance of culture as a key factor in the success of development teams, it’s often neglected in dedicated offshore teams.
Instead of setting up a team that understands the company and adopts its goals, values, and operating processes, they focus only on finding candidates who match the skills gap with suitable experience.
After 10 years of setting up more than 80 world-class offshore teams for our partners, here are the top 5 reasons I’ve seen to put culture first in your offshore development team.
What does culture mean to a software development team?
Culture is too often reduced to a policy document and an occasional free snack or team-building activity. In reality, it should be a way of working that binds everyone together and creates a sense of purpose and direction in their work.
Culture is “how things are done around here”. It’s the spoken, and unspoken, values, ideas, and norms that make things tick. It’s the difference between having a bunch of individuals making separate contributions to a project and a team working together collaboratively.
It starts with instilling the values and mission of the company, then adopting the processes and systems before working side by side with colleagues wherever they are located. All of this requires the facilitation of experts who look out for the well-being and development of each employee.
Shared vision and goals
Culture starts with everyone understanding why you are in business and what you are seeking to achieve.
One of the reasons for the bad reputation many hold on offshoring is from low-quality outsourcing partners who do a project to the letter. Sometimes that’s fine, but more often there are unspoken assumptions on each side.
When we have the same overriding vision and goal, it means engineers can be more critical of requests and come up with solutions that not only close the ticket but contribute to the whole.
For offshore teams, this means more than just a one-off presentation about the company and product. It’s working directly with leads in London, New York, Paris, or wherever to bring up concerns and propose solutions.
The benefits? Solutions with lower tech debt and dependencies as well as greater value to the users.
Clear communication
The number one cause of development problems is communication failures.
- Not communicating clearly
- Not being understood even when we do
- And thinking we’ve been understood when we haven’t
Cultural differences between countries can add to these challenges but these can be overcome with a clear, inclusive corporate culture.
Having processes and guidelines can establish effective methods to communicate, and awareness of cultural differences can present clashes. But crucially, a good culture leads to colleagues being willing to talk to each other.
How we helped a fitness manufacturing company accelerated its delivery with an offshore team
DOWNLOAD CASE STUDYHaving a clear corporate standard for communication doesn’t just help cross-cultural communication, it also helps people from the same cultural background to communicate whether they’re offshore or local.
As Simon Sinek says, “A culture is strong when people work with each other for each other. A culture is weak when people work against each other for themselves.”
Increased innovation
The best ideas can come from anyone, but that only happens when anyone can share an idea.
Too many companies treat their offshore teams as automatons to close tickets without a word exchange between them. When everyone works as one team, with offshore developers treated as valuable experts whose insights are welcomed, we get more diverse ideas and illuminate our blindspots.
This isn’t just about developing new features but improving functionality along the way.
Greater productivity
When engineers enjoy their work, they produce more.
A recent study by the University of Oxford Business School found happy employees were 13% more productive. More impressive still, they did it without working extra hours.
This boost in productivity means critical issues are fixed faster and teams deliver new updates faster — a win for everyone.
Plus a Harvard Business Review report showed companies with a strong corporate culture showed a fourfold increase in revenue compared to those with a weak culture.
While this mindset is common when dealing with in-country and in-house development teams, it’s shockingly absent in offshore teams. By treating offshore employees like their Western counterparts, making regular visits, and organizing workations, CTOs can create the same strong team culture across borders leading to similar performance results.
Reduced turnover
A report from Deloitte showed companies with strong learning cultures have 30-50% higher retention rates (in addition to other benefits).
Turnover is the bane of most software development teams. Recruiting drains time and focus from development and constantly changing employees leads to brain drain which often makes tech debt worse.
Can’t find the skills you need at home? Stop searching and start scaling
LEARN MOREInvesting in culture can save dollars and hours that can be invested into high-return activities. And that’s not even mentioning the associated benefits such as increasing internal knowledge, upskilling, and higher quality code.
Ending the local vs offshore divide
The way to get offshore teams that work the same way as an in-house team is to treat them the same as an in-house team.
It’s the key difference I hear from every partner who’s joined us from a competitor. Luckily, more and more companies are moving away from low-quality outsourcing to models that put developers first.
If you’d like help setting up a world-class offshore team with a people-first culture, send us a message. One of our experts will respond promptly and answer any questions you have about our unique model.
