I started working with offshore teams 18 years ago and it has been part of every role I’ve had since then. Along the way, I’ve jotted down a few rules that have helped me manage global teams. This is not an attempt to convince you or your company to expand globally and start working with offshore teams. That is something you will have to decide if it is right for your business. However, if you plan to do so in the near future or have already made the investment, these are the rules I have found to be most successful with my offshore engagements.

Rule #1: Start with success in mind

You must have a belief that you will be successful with your offshore team engagement. If you do not believe it will work for you or your company, you may not be the right person to work with the offshore team. You might as well stop reading further. None of the other rules below, no matter how well you implement them, will have any semblance of a successful outcome. Even if unintentional, the little nuances of how you work with offshore team members, how you speak with them, how you react to both their successes and failures will be heard in your voice. It will be evident in your body language during video conference calls or when you’re face-to-face. And, they will notice!

You must have a belief that you will be successful with your offshore team engagement.

Nothing drives down motivation and in turn productivity than expressing, even subconsciously, a lack of desire to collaborate. It robs the team any chance of feeling that they belong. It is in bad faith to believe an offshore team is a bad idea, halfheartedly manage the team, and say later, “I told you so!” It was self-fulfilling and that belief contributed to the failure. However, if you believe, or have at least hope that your engagement will be successful, read on.

Rule #2: Select offshore team members with the same scrutiny as local team members

“I want 12 developers consisting of 3 Senior UI/UX engineers, 5 Backend Java engineers, a DevOps engineer, and 3 test automation engineers. Oh, and add a software architect and project manager while you’re at it.” Selecting an offshore team is not the same as ordering a dozen donuts. You need to apply the same process, the same level of assessment, and the same standards of hiring someone local when you hire the offshore team members.

Red Scott’s “Hire Smart or Manage Tough!” philosophy equally applies when hiring offshore talent.

You either spend the time once to hire the right person or you spend every day after that managing that person. This is one of the first mistakes teams make when expanding their presence globally. There is a tendency to either disengage in the hiring process or lower qualification standards.

When making a decision to move forward with someone, ask yourself, “Would I have made the same decision whether to move forward if this person was local?” If you answer is “no”, review your decision and the actions you took leading up to it. As a rule of thumb, you should be making the exact same decisions or performing the exact same actions with respect to the hiring process regardless if a candidate is local or offshore.

If you are working with a 3rd party supplier and your recruitment process makes it prohibitively impractical to implement for offshore candidates, at minimum establish a Right of First Refusal. In this scenario, you allow your 3rd party to perform the bulk of the recruiting process, but you still have a final interview prior to the accepting a candidate onto the team. If you decline, provide your supplier with feedback to re-align them on what you’re looking for.

Rule #3: Meet face-to-face

With the pandemic, this advice may be limited to video conferences. But, as travel restrictions are lifted, definitely make your way to meet your team members face-to-face. There are things you and your offshore team learn from each other when co-located that you may not have discovered by any other means. I visited a team of 12 engineers a few years ago and one of the first things I realized was they were sharing a 512 kilobit per second internet connection. They never complained about it because as they explained, “it was normal”.

I learned many other things on that trip and paid close attention to our behaviors and interactions. I observed their working habits as they did mine. They were more open to voice concerns or suggest improvements in our collaboration. What brought the most value though was the camaraderie and mutual respect that we developed. They started to feel they belonged to a larger team.

Your management may balk at the idea though of spending $5,000 to $10,000 or even higher on the travel expenses. But consider this, you will ultimately incur that cost regardless if you meet face-to-face or not. It may come in the form of lost time when 12 team members are waiting for daily downloads of the latest work packages. Or the reluctance to voice concerns that leads to rework. Or the lack of motivation that reduces productivity by half. The loss may come in different other forms. It may be immeasurable and not so evident, but it usually costs more than the price of airfare, lodging and food.

You may spend thousands on airfare, lodging and food, but that cost will ultimately be incurred anyway on rework or reduced productivity if you don’t meet face-to-face.

I suggest to spend at least a week at the offshore team’s site. You can also have some or all of your offshore team members travel to your site. I actually recommend doing both, perhaps alternating every quarter. If the team is large, alternate team members that travel until everyone has made their way to meet the other team members.

Rule #4: Don’t underestimate language gaps

If you’re already following Rule #2, then you should have been able to avoid language and communications problems by performing an interview with the candidate. If you’re having significant difficulty understanding each other during an interview, you shouldn’t assume it will improve as you start working together.

If you’re having significant difficulty understanding each other during an interview, you shouldn’t assume it will improve as you start working together.

Accents are also sometimes a challenge. You both may be speaking the same language but a strong difference in accents is enough to make communication incomprehensible. First, be patient. Remember, to them they sound perfectly clear, so frustration is a natural tendency. Second, ask politely to repeat the word or phrase again, have it said in a different way, or have them write it down. Make sure they know they are free to also make the same request of you. Accent comprehension does get better over time through continued conversation, so create more opportunities to have more discussions with the offshore team even if it isn’t about work.

Avoid using slang or colloquialisms. “Low-hanging fruit” (tasks that are easily done), “Looking pretty thin” (assigned more work than can be handled), and “Herding cats” (managing a group of difficult or disagreeable people) are examples of phrases I needed to explain.

In some scenarios, you may need to work with an offshore team that speaks a different language entirely. This isn’t an ideal situation, but this can be addressed if there are a few people from the offshore team that speak your language or you have a few people locally that speak theirs. Regardless, expect a delay and exercise patience in this situation.

Rule #5: Openly discuss differences in cultural norms

I’m Filipino and there are a couple of things I have to be conscious of in my day-to-day work. First, is a concept called “Colonial Mentality” which is a belief that the cultural values of the colonizer are superior than that of their colony. The Philippines has been a colony of either Spain, Japan, or the United States for nearly 400 years. Nowadays, Filipino’s are a very proud people, but this mentality was still present to some extent when I was growing up. Second, is our utmost respect to our elders or someone of seniority or authority. We’re taught as children never to talk back to our elders. Yes, even when they are wrong!

What does this have to do about managing teams offshore? Well, if you’re managing a team of Filipino engineers, you need to be conscious of the possibility that team members may be reluctant to challenge you on an idea or a decision. They may avoid expressing their thoughts believing your idea is a better one. Subconsciously, both colonial mentality and respect for seniority come into play here. How do you address that? Make sure you create a safe and collaborative environment where team members can open up and make suggestions. Even allow them to challenge you on your decisions without any fear of retribution. This isn’t just a better approach at managing an offshore team, its simply good leadership.

Each team will have some type of cultural norm or culturally influenced work habits that you may not be used to managing. The key is to learn it and adapt. Adapting does go both ways though. Openly discuss your observations and find common ground to mutually address any differences.

Rule #6: Meet daily even if it’s just for 15 minutes

In 2021, remote working has continued to depreciate the need for geographically co-located teams. It’s now impossible to just walk over to your teammate and ask a quick question. We have learned to adapt and rely more heavily on our tools. In this new normal where we can’t meet in person, we have all hopefully scheduled daily meetings to sync-up. In the agile world, we call this a daily scrum or daily stand-up. At my wife’s work, they call it their daily huddles. The purpose and the value of this meeting are the same. It realigns the work of all team members for the day and addresses any issues that is blocking work from proceeding.

As many team members are working from home due to the pandemic, they now rely on video conferencing or other collaboration tool. Most tools today have global reach, from Adobe Connect to Zoom and everything in between. If these tools are our daily interface with other team members, then it matters less where they are. Zoom calls actually do not discriminate based on geographic location; each team member is displayed the same way on screen whether they are 10 miles or 10,000 miles away.

For the times you feel an urge to walk over to chat with your teammate, use your messaging app of choice. It really doesn’t matter which one. There are just two things I make sure are followed by the team. First, we all use the same tool, and second, we’re always online during your entire work day. Also, don’t just have the chat client available where the work hours overlap. Someone may decide to get up really early or stay up really late just to speak with you.

Rule #7: Be honest and transparent

Sadly I was witness to the following conversation several years ago:

The offshore team: When do we have to deliver to the customer?

My management: In 4 months.

The offshore team: How can that be? Based on the estimates we submitted, we needed around 6 months to deliver on the requirements.

My management: We have to deliver to the customer in 4 months.

The offshore team: Can we limit the scope then of what we have to deliver?

My management: No. We have to deliver to the customer in 4 months.

I looked at the email which had the project schedule. It listed the release date 7 months away. My entire local team received the same email. None of the offshore team members were on copy. I kept my mouth shut. This was earlier in my career when I didn’t have the guts to say something. Did the offshore team deliver in 4 months? Well, sort of. It was half working, if at all. We implemented multiple workarounds. The defect list was growing at a pace faster than they can be fixed.

I’m not going to claim that the project would have been a complete success if management had told the offshore team the same information as we got from the beginning. However, they were never given a chance to succeed here. I’m also not going to claim that the leadership team lied, but I’m not going to excuse them here either. There was a milestone in 4 months for delivery of 80% of the required functionality as a first drop to the customer. What they thought would be an “incentive” to deliver quickly ultimately backfired as it took more time later to fix the problems caused by the quick-and-dirty approach rather than doing the job right the first time.

I’ve found that being completely transparent has been more beneficial for two reasons. First, we develop a mutual trust with the offshore team. Second, the offshore team tends to reciprocate this behavior, also becoming open and transparent about their challenges. We then as a team, help solve each other’s problems, as one team.

Rule #8: Align work hours and use the time zone differences to your advantage

Expect to have meetings at all hours of the day, literally! You just have to be flexible when you have an offshore engagement. Just come in later the following day if you had a 10 pm call the prior night. Or take off work early if you had a 5 am call. If you’re getting squeamish on the though of having a meeting at 5 am or 10 pm, you may want to reconsider working with an offshore team or at least select someone as the point of contact other than yourself.

From California, Kiev has a 10-hour time zone difference, Dubai is 12 hours, Bangalore is 13.5 hours, and Shanghai or Singapore is a whopping 16 hours. One of my managers once joked that the improvement the team needs to focus on is how we can we move Bangalore closer to California. OK, it wasn’t a very good joke, but it does drive the importance of taking into consideration the time zone difference. I can tell you now, there isn’t an easy solution. I’ve utilized a few strategies that may help you.

Shift core hours for the entire team. Mutually agree to shift core hours. For example, if you have a team in Singapore have them come in 1-hour earlier (7:00 am to 3:00pm) and your local team comes in 1-hour later (10:00 am to 6:00 pm PST). That should give around 4 hours of overlap, 4 days a week.

Shift the hours of a couple of people, typically team leadership to overlap with both teams. This is better suited when there is very little overlap even if you shift core hours. Dubai and India (during U.S. Daylight Saving Time) are particularly brutal when working with teams in the U.S. Pacific time zone. There is barely an hour overlap even if you shift 2-hours in any direction.

Schedule the 15-minute daily meeting where all team members can attend, even if it is taking the call outside of core hours. This creates a handoff point between locations. This works well when there is very little inter-dependency between the local and offshore teams. However, expect a delay in answering questions or clarifications.

Re-locate a team member to the other site. This is especially useful at the beginning of an engagement as most of the questions aren’t necessarily project related, but providing training or answer questions on an existing product or domain. If much of that knowledge is found in a team member who is willing to relocate for 3-6 months, that may already address 80% of the questions the offshore team would have asked.

Sometimes a 12-hour difference works to your advantage. I once had a tight deadline, very close to a release date for a software product that failed regression testing with only 1 critical issue. It was unfortunately described as a “rare intermittent failure”. If you know anything about software development, “rare” and “intermittent” is never something you’d like to hear regarding a defect. The issue was severe enough that we couldn’t release the product and we needed to fix it. The local and offshore teams worked on resolving the issue on both sides of the clock. We passed the investigation from one team to the other twice a day. They shared ideas on how to reproduce, root cause and resolve the issue. At the end of the day for the local team, they handed off their findings to the offshore team who was at the beginning of their day. Then at the end of their day, they handed it back to the local team. I recall it took the better part of 3 days to resolve the issue. Had there been only 1 co-located team, those 72 hours of investigation would have been spread across 6 days.

There have been occasions when I was asked to prepare for a meeting the following morning. I look at my watch and its 4:30 p.m. I need some information from my team, but they’re already preparing to leave and this will take a few hours to collect and prepare. I instead request for the information from my offshore team members and like magic, its sitting in my inbox the following morning. That magic works in the other direction too. Sometimes the offshore team needs some direction or decision made and the local team members need a few hours of investigation before we communicate it back. We’re able to provide them guidance at the end of our day which allows them to move forward. This is especially advantageous if the request or impediment happens towards the latter half of the day.

Rule #9: Hold weekly operations and program leadership meetings

As established in Rule #6, the team members from both locations should meet daily and typically for most discussions and activities this is enough. Some topics are outside the realm of what can be discussed in daily stand-ups (even with breakout sessions) or require the decision of higher level management. Establish a weekly meeting that has team leadership from both locations. As with any meeting, establish a clear agenda and inform all participants. Take note of action items, decisions made, and policy changes.

Start out with a weekly 30-minute meeting and reassess that after hosting a few. Increase or decrease the duration or frequency depending on the volume of topics typically discussed. For as long as you have an offshore team, leave it on the calendar. You can always decide to cancel for any particular week if there are no urgent topics to discuss. Based on experience however, there is always something to discuss.

Rule #10: Offshore team members are equal citizens of the team

Local team members must adapt to working with an offshore team as much as the offshore team must adapt to working with you. Remember, in the minds of your offshore team, they are the local team and you are the offshore team. If only the offshore team is asked to adapt in this engagement, then they are considered second-class citizens of the team. There is no sense of belonging. That reduces their motivation to embrace the team’s goals as they don’t feel they are part of it.

If only the offshore team is asked to adapt in this engagement, then they are considered second-class citizens of the team. There is no sense of belonging.

It doesn’t take much to make a team member feel like second-class citizens. I’ve listed a few examples below:

• The overuse of the pronouns “Us” and “Them”. Start using “We” most of the time. This changes your and everyone’s mindset in treating it as one team.
• Asking the offshore team to adjust their hours to match core hours of your local team. Both locations need to adapt.
• Scheduling team meetings where the offshore team has no chance of attending. Try to make accommodations here.
• Providing only limited access to systems or files compared to local team members. Provide equal access to team members with similar roles.
• Keeping the offshore team in the dark on any department or company news and updates. Flow-down information equally across the entire team.
• Lowering your expectations of offshore team members. This may be perceived as undervaluing them. Keep equal expectations for all team members.
• Asking an offshore team to work on a public non-working holiday because it is not a local holiday. Avoid this, but if you ask this, make sure the local team is willing to do the same when needed.
• Lying, regardless how small or being untrustworthy. Stay honest and transparent.
• Treating the offshore team members differently than local team members. Ask yourself if your behavior would be the same if that offshore team member was co-located.
• Being culturally insensitive or being unaware of cultural bias. Have all team members go through cultural bias and sensitivity awareness training.

Final thoughts

Not all offshore engagements are the same. I tried to provide alternatives to several rules, but feel free to use this as a starting point and adapt it to your particular situation. You may find these rules seem like common sense. I questioned whether to even write this article because nothing really felt groundbreaking here, but I did so for two reasons.

First, my experience is that enforcing them has been quite difficult. The overhead of managing an offshore team is difficult in itself, but having a successful engagement does require a one team mentality that not everyone buys into. They may say they do, but actions may say otherwise.

Second, I reframed each of these rules, removed the offshore component, and asked do they apply if I only had a local team? What I found is they do: start with success in mind, hold daily meetings, treat all team members as equal citizens, meet in-person, align work hours, be honest and transparent, address language and cultural gaps, and so on.

The rules apply even if you’re just managing a local team. I guess, it’s really just sound advice for any team. I just so happened to reframe them for working with global teams.