“My team is going to quit on me.”
Why do you say that?
“I have an executive mandate to build an offshore engineering team.”
Why is that a problem?
“I manage a team of onshore engineers. My team has a low opinion of offshoring.”
Offshore engineering is a standard business practice. Your boss gave you a directive to build an offshore team. Like it or not, you have to deliver.
“That sounds cold.”
Nah.
More like grounded in reality.
Offshoring engineering is a controversial topic in the West. Lots of negative feelings about it. I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of offshoring. To reiterate, offshoring is a reality. Being in an engineering leadership position, we get asked to drive unpopular initiatives at times. This is one of those times.
“We’re building a global capability center. The new offshore team will be an extension of our onshore engineering team. You’re right. I have to deliver the offshore team. But I don’t even know where to begin. I feel overwhelmed.”
You can do this! I have 10 years of experience building and running offshore engineering teams for a global capability center. I’ll show you the way.
Strange magic
Building and running an offshore engineering team is:
A. Difficult
B. Challenging
C. Hard
D. Frustrating
E. All of the above and then some
The correct answer is E.
Sounds bad?
Yeah.
No amount of toxic positivity or corporate platitudes is going to help us. We have many obstacles to overcome. We can rely on magic to get the job done.
Say what?
Yes.
Magic.
Dr. Stephen Strange has interesting powers. The Sorcerer Supreme can do everything from casting spells to manipulating matter to opening portals across the Marvel Multiverse. We have our own special powers, giving us the ability to build and deliver a productive offshore team.
In this time and in this hour, I call upon our people leadership and people management powers.
You do have people powers.
Right?
At the very least, people skills?
If not, I recommend this guy’s blog.
Let’s get to work.
Issues and people powers
Watch your step.
You’ll face many pitfalls while building and running an offshore engineering team for a global capability center. To alleviate the pain, your people powers will be essential. I’ll review the common issues with offshore team management, offering tips on how your people leadership and people management skills can help you to overcome them.
Onshore team biases
Earlier in this post, our exasperated fictitious manager mentioned that onshore teams have a low opinion of offshoring. Let’s be blunt: Many onshore engineers loathe offshoring as a business practice. Some view offshoring as a threat to their jobs. Others believe they can do the offshored job faster by themselves. As the leader of an offshore team building initiative, you have to contend with these biases, including the repercussions, such as quiet quitting.
Tip: Solidify your relationship with your onshore team. When you announce the offshore team initiative, your onshore team will think, “Uh-oh. There goes my job.” To allay the concern, show your onshore team where they fit in the big picture, clarifying the roles of the onshore and offshore teams in your global capability center. Listen to your onshore team members. Take action to address any additional concerns. Be open about the challenges of running an offshore team. Assure them that you’ll band together to overcome the hardships. Back up your words with actions. Trust is super critical here. You need your onshore team to fight this team building battle with you, not against you.
Hiring
Hiring isn’t easy. Period. Now, you have an added complication, hiring for roles across geographical regions and time zones. For instance, offshore interview fraud is a thing. Time for that remote interview with offshore candidate Joe. Joe La Forge shows up for the round one interview, but Joe-Luc Picard shows up for the second round! Or let’s say we have an interview scheduled with a promising offshore candidate. Members of your uneasy onshore team decide to play hardball with interview questions, grilling the offshore candidate on arcane subjects, disqualifying the candidate and dragging out the hiring process.
Tip: Establish a rock-solid working relationship with your offshore team business partner. This is imperative. The relationship with your offshore team business partner will be crucial to the overall success of your offshore team initiative. Align with your business partner on the recruiting, screening and hiring processes. Your onshore team has a major stake in the hiring process. Work with your onshore team to develop the interviewing rubric for open offshore team roles. Also, lead your onshore team to document the hiring SOP, providing the team with a standard hiring and interviewing process.
Onboarding
You’ve overcome the hiring hurdle. Now, your onshore team needs to onboard your new offshore team members. Of course, time zone and cultural differences will be factors. Also, your onshore team will need to reallocate their work time to the onboarding sessions, putting their daily operational work and project timelines at risk. The onshore team may feel pressured to catch up on their regular work, potentially burning out from working extra hours. When onboarding goes sideways – and it will – anti-offshoring sentiments will rise, hurting morale on your onshore team.
Tip: Collaborate with your onshore team on the development of the onboarding process. Document your onboarding SOP. As part of your SOP, include regular check-ins with the onshore team, giving team members a safe space to vent frustrations and recommend improvements. Set achievable onboarding milestones and goals. To mitigate onboarding burnout among onshore team members, create an onboarding session rotation, sharing the responsibilities among the team. Set and reset expectations for delivering the onshore team’s task work and projects. If your onshore team lacks the bandwidth, support the team by pushing back on new work requests.
Daily operations
Too bad onboarding isn’t like magic. In an ideal world, the newly onboarded offshore team hits the ground running, getting things done. We don’t live in that reality. Early stage offshore teams require lots of hand holding from the onshore team. The onshore team can expect many repetitive questions about processes and tasks. And no questions. That’s a great source of frustration. Due to cultural differences, offshore team members may not speak up to ask questions. Expect mistakes from your new offshore team. In turn, expect complaints from your onshore team. Having fun yet?
Tip: Create detailed SOPs and runbooks to document your global team’s common tasks. Many repetitive questions and rookie mistakes can be mitigated with proper documentation. When mistakes happen, discourage blame. Encourage collaboration and improvement. If your offshore team is providing oncall coverage, create SOPs to guide your offshore engineers on the proper responses for typical oncall issues.
Along with documentation, consistent engagement with your onshore and offshore team members is important. Uncover your team’s operational pain points through your engagement. Identify gaps and inefficiencies in processes. Find out what’s not going well. Collaborate with your team to implement continuous improvements. There’s a reason for using the adjective continuous to describe the word improvements. We’re not talking one-off fixes here. Not for the long run. Some operational process breaks? We improve it. Rinse, later, repeat. To be successful at running offshore operations, leaders need to be resolute about identifying operational deficiencies and driving continuous improvements.
Cultural clashes
Why don’t offshore team members speak up? Many offshore teams are located in the East. In Eastern culture, employees are taught to follow a strict top-down hierarchy, deferring to authority figures to speak for the team. Speaking up is considered to be disrespectful. Relatedly, don’t expect offshore teams to offer their ideas for improvements. Most onshore teams are located in the West. Onshore team members tend to be outspoken and direct. Expect onshore team members to complain about the reticence of the offshore team. So we have a clash of cultures. That’s a problem. We need our global team working together, not against each other.
Tip: Unite your onshore and offshore teams. Prevent “us” and “them” silos from exacerbating the cultural divide. To do that, build a team culture of mutual respect, leading both teams to operate as a single global team. Conduct regular 1:1 meetings with offshore team members. As relationships develop, some offshore team members will start to speak their minds. But you have to be consistent with your engagement, encouraging openness and building trust. Also, rely on your relationship with your offshore business partner to navigate the cultural divide.
Lastly, invest your T&E budget in team building exercises. Send your onshore team members overseas to cross-train their global teammates. Meeting in real life has the added benefit of helping both teams to build relationships and overcome cultural biases.
Skills and knowledge gaps
Expect to go through dozens, maybe hundreds, of offshore candidates before you find the right people to hire. As with any role, you’ll target a baseline set of skills. During interviews, some candidates from Eastern cultures will appear to possess masterful knowledge about technical subjects, sounding well-versed on the subject matter. Hired! A few months later, your onshore team complains about the subpar technical abilities of the new hire. What happened? Rote learning, a common practice in Eastern countries, made our candidate sound like a subject matter expert during their interview. Work assignments and fire fighting exposed the inability of the candidate to apply the memorized subject matter to the job.
Tip: Harden your offshore interviewing rubric to screen out the pseudo expert-level candidates. During interviews, screen for critical thinking and problem solving skills, going beyond the textbook definition of technical subjects. Take the candidate through problem solving scenarios to assess their true capabilities. As a bonus, your onshore team will appreciate the extra effort to screen out the pseudo experts, a plus for team morale.
Attrition
After a number of misses, you’ve finally develop several top-notch engineers on your offshore team. They demonstrate the ability to independently get their work done and show potential for growth. Guess what? Our stellar offshore engineer leaves for a role with another company, a common move for high performers on offshore teams. And you have to start the hiring process all over again! Or one of your top onshore engineers gets frustrated by operational issues and resigns. Ouch.
Tip: Promote learning and growth opportunities to reduce the risk of attrition. Did you build the offshore team to supplement your onshore team? Great! Redeploy your onshore team to work on more complex technologies and projects, giving them an incentive to stick around. Develop learning programs for your offshore team, giving top performers an opportunity to learn new technologies. Also, stretch projects are a great incentive for personal growth and potential promotions.
Conclusion
Offshore team management is fraught with challenges. Leaders need top-notch people skills to build and run productive offshore engineering teams. Some days are gonna be tough. Don’t give up. Establish trust. Build relationships. Maintain consistent engagement. Identify inefficiencies. Discourage blame. Keep improving your operations. Realize the magic of your people powers!
