Remote Development Team Productivity Tips During Coronavirus

The Coronavirus has brought on a time of uncertainty and most of us have never faced anything like it. We have been ordered to keep a safe distance from others and work from home. While many of us are lucky to be able to continue to work, even from home, it can be a difficult task ensuring that remote development teams remain productive during these times. 

While it is difficult to know what everyone on your team is doing, there are some ways you can maintain productivity during this time of remote work. By keeping your team on the same page and making sure they know what to do, your remote development team will remain productive and focused during the time of Coronavirus. 

Here are some tips to ensure productivity for your remote development team:

1. Give specific direction

This is a very important part of keeping your team productive during “work from home”. Because you cannot all be together and working in the office, some members of the team may feel a bit thrown off or uncertain about their duties. This can be avoided if everyone on the team has specific guidance and direction. This may be the team leader’s call, or perhaps you and your team can decide together what everyone’s role and duties will be during this time. Either way, the directions should be simple and easy to follow and should be updated when someone completes a task. Creating an agenda can also help with this!

2. Hold daily or weekly meetings

Depending on how much support your team needs, you may decide to conduct daily standup meetings or, if they need a bit less support, perhaps each week is enough. Checking in with your team is incredibly important. Why? Well, it is imperative to know what they have accomplished, what questions they have, whether or not there are any issues that need to be addressed or anything that is working well that should continue, etc. If your team is working on group projects, it might be best to meet more than once a week, but if everyone has their own individual assignments and workload, then checking in once each week should be enough.
Also running Sprint Retrospectives, including Remote Retrospectives is a good idea, to get everyone on the same page, assessing the previous sprints wins, what’s coming up, and what can be improved. 

3. Have an open line of communication‍

This is one of the most important tips to keeping productivity flowing during the times of remote work. We cannot stress it enough. When your team is able to communicate with one another at all times, they are much more likely to be successful. Keeping everyone in the loop, being able to answer questions as they come up, and simply being there for support are incredibly important to ensure success and productivity within your remote development team.

If your team is working from home, then be sure that you are doing these three things to keep them working well. Communication and support are the keys to making a team run successfully. Your team will not only be a united front, but they will typically go above and beyond to ensure team success.