9 Lessons For Hiring and Managing Remote Teams (Part 2)

Remote work is no longer a novelty—it’s a necessity. But how do you create high-performing teams when distance separates your people? In this second part of our three-part series, we explore lessons drawn from Tunga’s experience, offering practical insights on managing remote teams, bridging cultural gaps, and fostering connections. These stories reveal the importance of setting clear expectations, addressing team dynamics early, and leveraging global talent effectively.Key takeaways include maintaining consistent performance through clarity and structure, as seen in coding standards and proactive team management. Embracing cultural and language differences can unlock hidden potential, as shown by Tunga’s success in Africa, supported by soft skills. Finally, building trust through small but meaningful gestures—like branded items or shared bonding moments—ensures remote teams feel connected, fostering resilience and collaboration across borders.Did you miss the first part of the series? Catch up here.

LESSON 4: HIRING AND MANAGING A HIGH-PERFORMING REMOTE TEAM

Q: “What are the best practices to reach high team performance (reliability) when teams can't meet physically?”

 Reliability is number one for our remote internal software development team. So we're not interested in one sprint with super high velocity, and the next three sprints are low. We want to know what we can expect at the end of each cycle.  Clarity is our go-to strategy—ensuring the team knows what it means to be high-performing. When you work remotely, some performance-related challenges could arise, such as inter-team difficulties, team members not pulling their weight, or team members making the wrong decisions. Speaking up or saying something about it may be easier if you are physically together, but in a remote setting, providing clear expectations is essential.One instance we’ve experienced was with our client. This client has three development centers worldwide: one in China, one in Nigeria, and one in Portugal. They also have teams of developers from all these locations who work together for their clients. So, they constantly have to create new teams. They excel at setting down the coding guidelines and technical excellence to a very high degree. So, every developer knows exactly how to code, what is acceptable, and what is not. Their CTO is stringent on that and spends a lot of time guiding developers on what is good code. The lesson here is that the less time you spend discussing your code quality, the more time you can spend on how you will create value together. Another thing is to flesh out some things the team is unhappy about. Having retros is super important. There, you can discuss each team member's work struggles. The forming, storming, norming, and performing stages are significant. Particularly in a team's storming phase, you must be very active, especially when dealing with remote teams. It would help if you tried to keep the peace and everyone as happy as possible.It’s essential to get these little challenges right. One of our clients, a US health-tech company, went through a similar phase during our collaboration. They approached us about four years ago with a request to set up a tech team to build their application. But along the way, they found that the technical environment was changing. If you work in a startup scale-up situation, your technical stack is very different at the beginning than what it looks like at the end. You also need to pivot technically sometimes. There were some frustrations about them being at a different stage as a company. Working with them, we remedied the situation by changing the team composition. One developer was removed, and another was added to the team. This was a situation where we needed to face the music, and in the end, that was the quickest way to resolve it and move forward. 

LESSON 5: DEALING WITH CULTURAL AND LANGUAGE DIFFERENCES IN REMOTE TEAMS

Q: “How do you handle differences in culture and language on remote teams, and how do you get familiar with everyone’s culture?”

 If you are from the Netherlands and work with someone from East Africa, you might have different ways of approaching issues. Others often perceive the Dutch as forceful or too direct in a conversation, while the Dutch see East Africans as too diplomatic to the point of being unproductive. If you have someone on your team whose first language is not English, you might encounter communication challenges. At Tunga, we are often asked, ‘Why Africa?’ seeing how there might be cultural or language barriers. Africa is often the last place most people look when considering hiring high-quality talents, but there are many benefits they are missing out on. The first is that Africa is a very young continent, with an average age of 19.7 years. A large percentage of the population is under 20. However, the most important statistic is over 700,000 African software developers are present on the continent. The leading countries are South Africa, Egypt, and Nigeria, with several software developers at varying seniority levels and most with a wide range of experience. Speaking of cultural differences, English is not a first language in some African countries. Still, you'd be surprised to find that English is spoken at a very high level in many countries in West Africa and East Africa. Many tech talents in these countries have experience working with international colleagues. For example, in the early days of the African tech industry, some Indians and Americans were on the continent working alongside African developers. You'd be surprised that these developers often only need a short integration time when integrating into foreign cultures.In matching cultures, North Africans are similar to the Middle East and Arabs in their conservative nature and personality. However, countries like Nigeria have personality types identical to those of countries like the Netherlands. The same goes for many West and East African countries. All these countries have different nuances.In general, we find that in Africa, a large population speaks fluently in English, and many developers have experience working with people from other regions because, in the early days of the industry, they had many foreign managers leading local projects. One other fascinating answer to the question of ‘Why Africa?’ is Value. Suppose you compare developers from the West to developers in Africa based on the salary range. In that case, you will discover that you can get more value from Africa because, at specific price points, you will get higher seniority levels in Africa versus Europe or the West. This means hiring from Africa can be more cost-effective.With regards to getting familiar with the different cultures on a remote team, there's no silver bullet. We have discovered that there can be huge cultural differences within countries, especially vast countries. Also, in small countries like the Netherlands, there can still be significant cultural differences between the North and the South. So, the best way to handle these differences is to acknowledge them and talk to each other about them. For instance, if people from a different culture use words or terminologies, you don’t understand, the best thing is to ask questions. We also have an academy at Tunga where we provide technical training in software programming and offer soft skill courses. Our developers highly value one of these courses: the assertiveness course. Assertiveness is not the same as rudeness. The point is to focus on understanding what the other person is saying. In this particular course, we’ve gotten feedback from our students on how life-changing it is and how it gives them a new perspective on relating with others. The key to bridging cultures is understanding where the other comes from and not rushing to judgment.

LESSON 6: MEETING IN PERSON BEFORE WORKING REMOTELY

Q: “How important is it to meet people first in person (physically) before working remotely?”

 In an ideal world, starting a project by having everybody physically in a room talking to each other would be an interesting idea. It would generate a lot of energy but also take time—which is the downside. In our experience, this process happens quickly when we onboard remote teams with our clients. Within one or two weeks, our developers are already producing quality code. However, that’s due to the connection that is created at first. Earlier in this article, we discussed having specific meetings with your remote team dedicated to forging that connection.The most important thing is to treat your remote workers the way you would the people you have physically present. An intermediary like Tunga can help facilitate such connections. For instance, if you have merch like laptop sleeves or a mug with the company's name, ensure they also get it. We have also facilitated physical meetups at the locations of the remote teams, like a company dinner where the team can bond. In fostering connections, if you have a Slack or another communication channel where fun stories are shared, nudge your remote colleagues to share their stories. There might be a time lag in responses, but we noticed with our clients that the production level is unaffected. Eventually, everybody will keep up with that time, and the bond will be established.There are no significant differences between remote developers and physical developers over time.

WHAT OUR CLIENT SAID

“We work with Amos (from Uganda), and Amos is a star player. So we don't have anything to remark about that. And I usually don't know what to do with the emails I get from Tunga about his performance because everything is going perfectly.But in the grand scheme of things, when we started with Tunga, I was hesitant about offshoring to other countries. You hear a lot of scary stories about offshoring. However, for us, it's always been perfect with Amos. And we've been working together for a very long time — seven years now.” - Our Client.