Challenges you are facing as a remote team manager.

When you are sitting in a cubicle in the office, you are involved in the atmosphere of creativity. Smells, snippets of conversation, the mood of the colleagues, the natural ability to get a consultation from them all, that elusive spirit of creativity; all that factors are created very specific conditions that motivate you and raise your efficiency. You are involved in the group’s creative process, and it is priceless. All of this is absent when you are working alone in the home office. Here we get various effects which badly influence on working process. As a manager, you suspect that your team having a good time and is not involved in the job as deep as you want. As a team member, you are lack of small talks with colleagues, and you can lose a lot of tiny details that make your job productive. It may turn into a total disaster. Experience shows that a Fully Distributed Team is a sweet dream in Fata Morgana Valley.

First, you have to make the right employee selection. It is a key and very complex issue. There are two options, or you find a genius HR manager or you are the genii head hunter yourself. It would be better to pay special attention to the following employee's characteristics such as self-discipline, ability to work independently, coordinate himself, and daily routine. Also, the successful candidate must have the ability to speak clearly. He must be able to express himself compactly both orally and in writing. He must be friendly and keep polite, constructive contacts with other team members. For the team, in general, you should establish:

• the convenient and reliable communication channels, which provides distribution and perceptions of all relevant information in a well-structured way;
• the time tracking system to estimate how much an employee works;
• the system of team building.

For the latter purpose, you have to develop a system of trainings, conferences that employees have to attend in person. It will be a compelling, motivating factor. The remote employee will be able to contact with colleagues face to face, exchange opinions, ideas. On these meetings, you can create the structure of the cooperation, the direct relationship of the developer with the company/team, which makes, in turn, the induction easier. The primary purpose of this type of meeting is to create an understanding of the project as a whole, to develop a detailed description of the project, and to develop team spirit. The other type of meeting is a daily meeting via Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc.. With their help, you can gathering team daily, determine tasks, solve current issues, and show your sensitive and careful management.

Obviously, it can raise expenses dramatically if you take each of your remote developers to the headquarter even one time. If your Distributed Team is big and its members are living from the different parts of the world, expenses can stab you in the back.

• you don't have to recruit each of developer personally;
• all of your team members are living in the same geographical place;
• as a rule, the communication systems are already established, tested and familiar for the employees;
• as a rule, all of them know each other well and have already established strong personal ties, which helps to avoid possible misunderstanding;
• you can come into the real office and meet all of your developers personally in the same place, which is cutting expenses of organizing meetings at the head office;
• you are getting a loyal assistant represented by an in-country manager.

Thus, Ukraine is a country, where you'll find a fantastic job location for your remote team in close proximity to the countries of Western Europe.