Hiring Remote Developers Creates Solid and Diverse Teams

Gimena Aguerreberry
April 4, 2021

When companies are serious about their diversity efforts, remote work has the potential to dramatically expand talent pools. Without the restriction of location, companies can recruit talent from nearly anywhere.

Most leaders have realized the benefits that a diverse workforce brings to the success of their organization.

For many technology and non-technology companies, it’s still hard to create solid and stable engineering teams. The demand for remote developers has increased quickly all over the world, so building a remote team of software engineers working from home can be a great alternative.

You can build a diverse team of developers with different knowledge, and avoid major challenges. The remote work approach opens up the possibilities of creating great teams while taking advantage of the many benefits of teleworking.

Of course, you should first determine if the project you are going to work on allows you to hire dedicated developers from an IT staff augmentation company or if you rather hire developers independently.

In this article, we will discuss how remote workers can help you build strong, diverse, and productive teams.

Advantages of hiring remote developers

When talent comes from different places, you’ll get a variety of skills and specialized knowledge that will contribute to having a new perspective on your objectives.

Remote recruitment is ideal if you are seeking to increase the number of developers working in your company and looking for the opportunity of finding the best talent. Plus, you’ll avoid the long and tiresome hiring process and save time and money.

Recruiting team members as remote developers through IT staff augmentation partners offers several advantages. Staff augmentation is ideal to get the right talent that meets all your requirements.

Increase in productivity

One of the main concerns of having a remote team is productivity, but when objectives are clearly defined and goals are constantly being measured, then productivity is no longer an issue.

Trust is important. When developers feel trusted and have a healthy work-life balance and a secure work environment, there’s no need to constantly monitor their productivity.

Results are often better when people are allowed to set their own pace, working in the place that suits them best and feels more comfortable.

In 2019 Airtasker carried a survey, and they found that working from home not only benefits employees by eliminating their daily commutes, it also increases productivity and leads to healthier lifestyles.

They found that remote employees were healthier, the benefits of having a healthy workforce are obvious, from taking fewer sick days to maintaining concentration. But the key difference between working from home and working full time at the office is that remote employees work more.

On average, remote employees worked 1.4 more days every month, and while remote workers did take more time for breaks than office employees, evidence shows that taking breaks actually leads to higher rates of productivity.

Differences in the ability to concentrate or finding focus in and out of the office were minimal, the real impact, however, occurred with micromanagement.

So, trusting your employees is critical. For some people working in the same location every day is the best way to stay productive, for others, regular breaks are necessary, so you need to trust that your employees will set their own conditions to stay productive.

Better services

When your company has a wide variety of outlooks, team members can offer you many ways of solving problems.

This is especially true when you outsource to different countries that speak different languages. Likely, they’ll know how a product could be used in a specific part of the world, which can be a great asset when it comes to launching products in new markets.

That kind of knowledge that only comes from diverse developers teams, can help you avoid blind spots when building your projects.

If you manage to have a diverse group of people, you can also build up a much better service offer. A good example of this is when your developers speak a second language.

According to physiological studies, the cognitive process of people that speak two or more languages is better. From improving decision-making and communication skills to creativity, the benefits of bilingual employees are countless.

In “The relation of bilingualism to intelligence”, authors Peal and Lambert found that people who are at least conversationally fluent in more than one language consistently beat monolinguals on tests of verbal and nonverbal intelligence.

So remote is not a magic wand, but as more organizations embrace the potential of transitioning to an office-optional setup, new opportunities arise.

Remote working enables diversity, but as with other aspects of managing the transition, a change in perspective is valuable as a team becomes less homogeneous. Continual learning and openness to new ideas are essential for growth.

Team leaders will have to get on board with, in order to truly embrace all that a distributed and flexible workforce has to offer.

"Hiring Remote Developers Creates Solid and Diverse Teams" by Gimena Aguerreberry is licensed under CC BY SA. Source code examples are licensed under MIT.

Photo by Chris Montgomery.

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