Due to the stress and demand for finding amazing talents to work with, many companies today have begun to employ nearshore development. This allows them to outsource tasks to workers in neighboring countries to reduce costs.
Top companies like Microsoft, HP, and IBM use this model to significantly boost their productivity. While this is true, challenges often arise when using this development, ranging from communication issues to cultural differences. This article will explore several tips to overcome these nearshore development challenges.
How Does Nearshore Development Work?
As we’ve previously said, nearshore development basically involves outsourcing tasks to experts, teams, or IT agencies in neighboring nations. For example, a company in United States can hire workers in Mexico or Colombia. This boils down to the fact that countries should have the same time zone. This will help boost teamwork and real-time communication; therefore, it’s a calculated decision that balances convenience, cost, and control.
Tips to Overcome Challenges in Nearshore Development
There are many benefits to using nearshore development, including the same time zone and, if necessary, cheaper travel logistics. However, it’s hard not to consider the challenges associated with this model. This section will cover tips for overcoming these issues.
Emphasis on Data Security
Maintaining the privacy of your sensitive information should be the number one priority when outsourcing tasks to nearshore development teams. Choose partners who have strong security protocols in place first, like using strong VPNs for mobile and computer devices to protect their network from third parties. To increase security, you can also create non-disclosure agreements and encrypted communication channels.
Pick a Common Language
Communication is an important part of any business, usually determining its success or failure. Teams working in nearshore development may be closer in terms of region than those working offshore. Nonetheless, they often face communication issues due to their language differences, sometimes leading to misinterpretation. The best way to solve this is to pick a common language (often English) that all members understand and can speak. Ensure this is the spoken language during regular work communication through video calls, instant messaging, and tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Understand the Cultural Differences
Despite staying just a country or two away from each other, nearshore development teams often have different cultural norms and work ethics. If these are not respected, it often leads to misunderstandings or conflicts if not properly managed. Invest time in understanding the cultural background, including their work habits, holidays, and communication styles. This builds a sense of cultural awareness and can enhance mutual respect between the teams. Organize an exercise where teams or workers can talk and exchange facts about that culture, which builds the team and helps them understand each other better.
Set the Quality Standard
There might be an inconsistency in the quality of the tasks that nearshore development teams provide. This can be due to the distance or the different practices in the country; therefore, the project will begin to suffer. To overcome this, set clear quality standards from the beginning and make sure all team members understand and adhere to them.
Provide regular reviews, testing, and continuous support to ensure high quality. For example, to manage software developers in neighboring countries, a manager needs to create shared repositories with coding standards and design guidelines available for all team members. Don’t forget to have frequent feedback sessions to discuss potential problems and identify them early.
Create a Detailed Budget
While it’s true that nearshore development is usually cheaper than onshore or offshore options, managing the cost can still be an issue. Hidden costs such as travel, communication, or project overruns can eat through the budget.
The best way to control this is to develop a detailed budget that accounts for all potential costs, including travel, tools and emergencies. Monitor expenses closely throughout the project and adjust the budget as needed to stay on track. There are management tools that help monitor expenses in real time to help identify any areas of overspending.
Consider International Laws
Managing a business between two or more countries can be challenging, especially when complying with legal issues. Each country has its own Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), data protection laws, minimum wage, and labour regulations, which can vary from one region to another.
It’s advisable to work with lawyers who understand both the regulatory environment where the business is based and the nearshore team development location. Make sure that all contracts, agreements and practices comply with local laws and international standards.
Scale According to the Business Needs
Managing nearshore teams effectively requires scaling and adjusting them. It involves adapting the team’s members and skills to the project’s demands. This may guarantee project delivery on schedule, maximize resources, and increase efficiency.
It also makes it possible to react flexibly to changes in the needs or scope of the project. Nearshore teams can constantly learn and grow to adapt to the shifting market trends and tech advancements.
How to Choose the Right Nearshore Development Team
Here are a few factors to consider when choosing a nearshore development team:
Technical Skills: Make sure the team has a range of skills to offer and is familiar with the technologies related to your project or business.
Communication: To ensure effective teamwork, make sure everyone speaks English fluently and has good communication skills.
Cultural Fit: To minimize conflict, select a team that shares your values and business culture.
High-Quality Results: Verify the team’s certificates and their quality assurance procedures.
Cost-Effectiveness: Consider the cost to work with them and compare it with onshore development.
Conclusion
Nearshore development is an important tool for any business looking to get talents to work with them. It also allows them to access skills and work within the same time zones. While the benefits can be quite attractive, there are certain strategies or tips needed to make it work. Consider factors like clear communication, cultural understanding, and strong project management. With these in place, then nearshore development can be a powerful tool to boost your business to the next level.
At this point, the adoption of remote work has become normalized, to the point of (almost) becoming standard in many sectors of the software industry; all said, the option to work away from an office is now a pretty popular perk among developers and engineers all over the world.
However, even if we understand the benefits of this model of collaboration, it doesn’t mean we have completely mastered it yet, and plenty of discussion about the best integration of people beyond the office space is still happening. Mainly, there’s been a lot of talk about the benefits of both remote and distributed work, and while there are certainly some similarities between the two, there are also some important differences that we should know about.
Namely, that one of them is way more inclusive and equitable than the other.
But what do we mean by this? Remote work, as the name suggests, simply involves working from a remote location — usually your home. Distributed work, on the other hand, involves working with a team that is spread out across multiple locations, cultures, and languages. Nearshore development, for example, is a type of distributed work where team members are based in different countries within the same time zone, which allows for esaier collaboration and inclusion, as everyone can participate in meetings and discussions in real-time.
“Distributed work, on the other hand, means that people on the team are decentralized. It means the company has made a conscious decision not to have a “center” that’s more important than any other location. In other words, remote work builds back from the real estate (we have an office, let’s fill it up) whereas distributed work builds forward from the humans doing the work.”
And why is this important? Because nearshore development models are much more inclusive and allow for a greater diversity of voices and perspectives. In an increasingly globalized world, it’s more important than ever that we find ways to work together that are respectful of different cultures and traditions. Nearshore development helps to make this possible.
The importance of diverse perspectives
There are a lot of reasons why diversity and inclusion are important in software development. For one, it helps to create a more collaborative environment, because people who come from different backgrounds, and have different experiences, can share unique perspectives and skill sets to make a more innovative and effective software development; after all, if you’re developing software with the help of a diverse group of people, the end result will be more inclusive for a vast range of people using, making it stronger and potentially more successful.
Additionally, diversity and inclusion help create a more positive work environment, as an employee that feels respected and valued is more likely to be engaged and productive, as well as attract and retain top talent. When employers manage to shift their way of conceptualizing the traditional office and look for talent beyond this setup, they can discover that the best talent doesn’t necessarily have to be in a specific place; by creating an inclusive environment, they signal that they are committed to attracting diverse candidates, which can include the best and brightest from any backgrounds.
Ultimately, diversity and inclusion lead to better software development, and a more positive work environment.
“The collaboration that Nearshore development creates between businesses and software developers, taking place in countries that are geographically close to one another, has many benefits, but one of the most important is that it helps to promote inclusion by breaking down barriers”, says Luis Aburto, CEO, and Co-Founder of Scio, an organization based around collaboration all over LATAM.
So naturally, a more distributed workplace that can reach this variety of voices is the best approach to ensure that inclusion and diversity flourish within an organization. The problem, however, comes when the structure of an organization becomes purely remote instead of distributed, and the advantages of diversity and inclusion start to become diluted. In the words of Jensen Harris, CTO at the software platform Textio:
“When there’s a center — a headquarters or physical office with just some team members who are remote — there’s a power differential. […] Some employees can work with them in person, while others are “just remote.” The result? Employees working at headquarters see their leadership more. They’ll get noticed more, run into a VP in the kitchen and when it’s time for a promotion, the VP feels like she knows the guy she’s seen in person better than the remote staff. It’s just human nature.”
In Scio’s experience, though, a strong enough culture can ease many of these issues in regards to visibility and working relationships, promoting in-house activities that encourage an understanding that goes beyond the workplace: video-call meetups and activities, for example, can bring a team closer and build the rapport necessary to keep everyone on the same page, and thus ensure a seamless collaboration during any development cycle.
The challenge of diversity in distributed teams
However, this doesn’t mean that a distributed workplace isn’t without challenges. When it comes to Nearshore development, where both the teams and the clients share a time zone but are still spread geographically, one of the biggest barriers to inclusion is language. When businesses and developers are working in different countries, there is a potential for misunderstanding and miscommunication that can lead to frustration on both sides and ultimately make it difficult to get work done. Nearshore development helps to reduce the risk of this happening by allowing businesses and developers to work in the same language, which in the case of Scio, is easy to achieve thanks to the proximity of the US (from where most of our clients hail) to the rest of LATAM, especially Mexico.
Still, beyond language, a challenge to inclusion is culture. When businesses and developers are from very different cultures, there can be a lack of understanding and respect for each other’s traditions, which can again lead to frustration and difficulty getting work done. Nearshore collaboration helps to reduce the risk of this happening by bringing businesses and developers from similar cultures together; for example, with LATAM being very close to the US, there are shared traditions and knowledge of each other’s cultures that benefit any collaboration between these territories.
There are many other benefits of nearshore collaboration, but these two are some of the most important when it comes to promoting inclusion. By breaking down barriers like language and culture, nearshore collaboration helps to create an environment where everyone can feel respected and valued. And that’s something we can all get behind.
Evolving our understanding of remote work
The way people work is changing, and companies are starting to catch on. There is a growing movement of companies that are ditching the traditional 9-5 in favor of a more distributed model, where employees can work from anywhere in the world.
“Before the COVID-19 crisis, a survey of office workers by 451 Research showed that two-thirds of people worked from home at least some of the time but only 13% did so all of the time”, cites the Dropbox blog Work In Progress. “For these companies, the social contract for employment is not about showing up physically, but showing up mentally and engaging fully from wherever you are. The employees commit to being part of the team and doing the work, and the employer commits to making both possible.”
There are a lot of benefits to this model. For one, it allows companies to tap into a global talent pool. It also gives employees a lot more freedom and flexibility when it comes to their work-life balance, but there are also a few challenges that come with this model. One of the biggest is making sure that everyone feels included, no matter where they are located. After all, as the quoted Work In Progress blog concludes: “companies that merely tolerate remote workers rarely expend the effort to make them part of the daily rhythms and incidental interactions at HQ”, and will rarely keep their remote top talent.
So understanding both the advantages and limits of a distributed workplace, where “remote” means more than just having someone with a computer connected from far away, is the next step for the new landscape of collaboration that is changing our approach to software development. As a Nearshore company, we understand the value that diversity and inclusion can have in every successful project we collaborate on.
The Key Takeaways
Working away from the office is an increasingly popular model of collaboration that the software industry is starting to adopt openly.
However, there’s a challenge in understanding the difference between mere remote work, and a distributed organization, which can be crucial for the success of an organization.
While “remote work” works well with collaborators that are still local (to a point) or with hybrid models, a distributed workforce with people permanently far away requires a different approach.
A strong culture that builds connections between clients and teammates beyond work is better equipped to deal with challenges and obstacles.
And more importantly, a distributed workplace tends to be more inclusive and diverse, which enriches the software development environment and leads to better solutions for everyone.
Scio is an established Nearshore software development company based in Mexico that specializes in providing high-quality, cost-effective technologies to help you reach new heights. We have been developing since 2003 and our experience gives us access not only to the knowledge but also the expertise needed when tackling any project. Get started today by contacting us about your project needs – we’ll be happy to help you achieve your business goals.
“Are you an office person, or a home person?” might have been a weird question to ask in a job interview a couple of years ago, but as our relationship with jobs evolves, we begin to understand the different ways people see work, which have an immense weight in the ways we relate and engage with a particular organization.
Let’s think back for a second and ask ourselves: since the pandemic began, what was the biggest difference we felt working from home? It’s not difficult to imagine that everyone had a different reaction to this change: some found themselves missing the interactions of the office, while others found that working from home was an ideal arrangement, and a third group looked for a middle ground working at the office some days, and from home the others. So the question is: do you have a preference? Does that impact your work?
“The equilibrium between productivity and presence is one of the hardest to master in business”, mentions this Forbes article analyzing this situation. “We often think of ourselves separate from the environment, the system, the culture, the work. In reality, there is very deep interconnectedness to our being.”
In other words, the environment in which we collaborate affects the results we have and is clear that people, as individuals, have personal preferences in the ways they work. And if that conclusion might seem obvious, it seemed to need the upheaval of a pandemic for many companies to start harnessing this newfound approach.
“It’s a shift away from the one-size-fits-all approach of the past, where the work is designed (complete with open-plan offices, fluoro-lighting, 9:00 am starts and a five-day workweek) and then people are squeezed into it”, says an article published by the news network ABC. “But one size never really fits all.”
This gives us an idea: is it possible to ensure that a collaborator can have more control over the conditions of their work? Yes, and it’s becoming a topic of discussion everywhere, especially in Tech, where disruption of the status quo is the name of the game: Hyperpersonalization.
The rise of Hyperpersonalization
How do you prefer to work? Where? When? Why? Everyone has a different answer to these questions, so collaborating in an environment that takes them into account makes all the difference in our productivity. In software development, for example, this was already a trend before the pandemic, with things like having the option to work from home one day a week or offering different hours depending on personal preference becoming normal.
However, the pandemic came to be one of the final blows at our traditional “office hours”, with a big percentage of people discovering ways to work that they really couldn’t consider before, changing the way many organizations collaborate with employees.
“In the past, workplace strategists were able to assign flexible working ratios based on a team and its primary functions. With the mass-scale adoption of hybrid working, the preferences of employees coming into the office have become hyper-personalized. We can no longer assume an employee or team will be in on specific days due to their job function or demographic”, indicates the blog The Pulse about this trend.
And it’s easy to see how these circumstances might define the outcome of any given project. After all, are your most productive times the same as everybody else’s? Is your home the best place to get things done? Or do you like to be at home, but also have the option of an office for important meetings or access to better infrastructure if you need it?
“Hyper personalization is usually associated with marketing products and services to individual consumers — think about how Netflix builds up a profile of what you like to watch and uses that to suggest content to you or the way Spotify serves up new songs based on what you’ve listened to before — but it can also be applied to the workplace”, continues the ABC article about the topic. “The pandemic gave many workers a chance to dip a toe into the hyper-personalization waters.”
However, what does hyper-personalization actually look like in action? Because we must keep in mind that this concept encompasses lots of different elements, ones that go from the business you are working from, to the individual interests and affinities of each developer and collaborator.
“I’ve been part of some very long projects”, says Carlos Estrada, one of the Lead Developers at Scio. “And one time, after six or seven years with the same client, I told Rodimiro [Scio’s Service Delivery Manager and Co-Founder] that I just felt in a rut, doing the same thing every day. He understood and said he had a couple of projects I could help with during my “dead” hours at Scio. I liked that openness, and it helped me explore other types of tasks that I was interested in.”
As this anecdote shows, “hyper-personalization” doesn’t have to be a complete upheaval in a company; just being listened to and working with an organization open to making changes by offering options for different types of people, can go a long way. To this end, that same ABC article we quoted earlier gives us some questions to consider and discuss hyper-personalization, and define where you want to direct your career:
When and how do you work your best, and in what environment
What you find engaging and meaningful
Where your strengths lie
The ideal place of work and your desired mix of responsibilities
For example, while Scio is a Nearshore company with developers all over Latin America, which are permanent remote collaborators, for those locally in Morelia we plan to implement a “hybrid” model of work, where the week is divided between home and office days. Also, we offer different start and finishing times, in case you prefer something different than the traditional 9 to 6, and three days of PTO in case you need to take time off for any personal reason, among other options aimed at our collaborators as individuals who have different affinities and preferences.
“When it comes to creating the right culture of an organization and/or building an attractive brand, the question actually becomes how do we rethink our existence, policies, and structures so that it can reflect (as authentically as possible) some of our deepest values, ways of connecting and working?”, concludes Forbes.
And this last question is at the heart of it: the ways we connect as individuals with our jobs matter, so choosing an organization that understands, respects, and tries to implement measures to give collaborators some freedom to work as they see fit is invaluable to foster a healthy, engaged culture.
Productivity is among the top-of-mind issues many companies getting into remote work are considering, and there’s a lot of information out there about its benefits and its drawbacks. So we looked closely at some of the myths about remote productivity and found very interesting stuff to discuss. Enjoy!
By Scio Team
It’s very clear now that our way of looking at work has changed, and the future of this relationship is just starting to be clear now. One could argue that remote work was an inevitability, the natural next step in many industries (technology and software especially) that don’t really require people to be on-site to collaborate and work together well.
However, as we’ve been discussing through interviews with Scio’s Founder and CEO Luis Aburto, and Senior Project Manager Jesús Magaña, there are a lot of moving parts involved in a successful remote work model, and one of the big questions when this trend picked up steam in 2020 was “would productivity remain the same?”
The answer was yes, and it even increased in many cases, but why? What are the mechanisms behind good productivity when working remotely or from home, what myths and facts get involved with the new normal way to work, and how can we harness its advantages for a modern organization?
Myth #1: Productivity is the only measure of success.
Truth:
One of the most interesting insights we got from our interview with Luis was that “thehealth of a team cannot be measured only in productivity terms”, referring to their emotional well-being and offering the appropriate support, watching out for signs of burnout, and he’s far from the only one to realize this.
Last year, Microsoft published a list of seven trends of remote work, and among them was the insight that “high productivity is masking an exhausted workforce”, which is important to understand why remote work is taking such a foothold, even beyond the pandemic. Workers today are finding out many advantages when working from their homes, and companies are seeing benefits allowing flexibility, because it generally results in a better life balance, and thus mental health.
Now, of course, productivity is important for any industry, and a software company needs to keep a close eye on the team’s progress to make sure a project is hitting its deadlines, but sometimes those requirements have an unrelated cost that can be alleviated with more freedom in the way we chose to work.
A hybrid model, where a collaborator only goes to the office a couple of days a week, or when they need the space for whatever reason (like meeting with clients or having Internet problems at home) works best, as it offers a way to keep up with the organization, while also leaving elbow room to attend your personal life.
Myth #2: Productivity happens continuously for everyone.
Fact:
Around 75% of workers polled by Microsoft mentioned that flexibility in their work hours is one of the top things they are looking for in a new job, and that tracks with the upcoming “Gen Z” entering the workforce during a pandemic.
The explanation behind that is simple: for many people, focus and productivity happen in bursts, and they do not always synchronize with the traditional 9:00 to 5:00, five days a week work schedule. Working remotely gives options, and letting the collaborator choose what suits them best allows for a better application of skills and effort, which is in the best interest of any organization.
Companies like Twitter, which implemented a permanent remote model, or Microsoft, which is experimenting with plenty of options (like working at the office until 3:00 pm to avoid rush hour in traffic), are seeing the benefits of this philosophy, and letting a collaborator adapt according to their bursts and stretches of productivity lends well to an industry that needs creativity and focus as often as software development.
This goes back to achieving a better balance in daily life. Having the ability to adjust to the day depending on the type and volume of work to be done. Do you need to collaborate with others or just get in and get some detailed coding work done? Having more than one check-in/check-out time (like we enjoy at Scio), can make a difference to an individual’s productivity.
Myth #3: Productivity depends entirely on the person.
Fact:
A big negative side-effect of moving away from in-person work at the office was the infrastructure needed to keep productivity moving along. From security measures to VPNs, and other reliable ways to connect to a company’s servers and have all the information you need at your disposal, it certainly resulted in slowdowns while many offices adjusted.
Companies like Scio, which are no strangers to these set-ups and have a lot of experience knowing what works and what doesn’t, know very well the value of selecting the right tools to keep everyone moving forward. In the case of a Nearshore company, for example, it also helps to build teams capable of adapting to the processes of the clients, so you have plenty of experience collaborating in all manners of ecosystems without issue.
What all this means is that there’s an incentive for the Management and IT departments of the world to be selective and careful about the tools they adopt for remote collaborators, which need to be comprehensive and reliable, but without interfering with the work itself.
Easily understandable CRMs that you can teach to someone over a Zoom call, ready access to databases and important files, effective training programs, clear and concise guidelines about Internet activity and cybersecurity, or applications that don’t impact productivity (or at least can be taken into account during a project) are a delicate balance to hit as more and more people choose to work off-site, but well thought off guarantees a successful adoption of remote work.
The Takeaways:
Today, new employees and collaborators will prioritize flexibility, and that trend is only going up, so it’s best to start adapting ways to offer it.
Flexibility results in better productivity, as it gives people the chance to work at their best productivity times.
Choosing the right collaboration tools that doesn’t hinder productivity is going to increase in priority to maintain productivity and minimizing the impact of any measure implemented in an organization.
As of now, a hybrid model is proving to work best, giving plenty of options to keep a cohesive team that also respects personal time.
