Outsourcing is a must in our line of work, and the outsourcing site you choose to use can make a huge difference. Right now, one of my favourite services is Odesk. There are a number of reasons Odesk stands out among so many of these services.

First, it allows a much greater degree of oversight. You can create teams, review work diaries, see exact hours of your team members, and generate data about your project in real time. You can even receive screenshots throughout the day to see how your team is working and review their progress.

So, to help you get started with Odesk, here are some of my favourite tips.

1. Starting New Projects – Make sure, when you post your first projects, that the descriptions are very clear, and you list all tasks needed to complete the project. Don’t describe what the project is, as you don’t want people learning too much about your efforts.

But, always discuss specific technology and expertise, as well as the actual things the contractor will need to do when they work with you. Additionally, as you get applicants filter them down, making sure you get only English skills of 5 and a feedback score of 4.5 or higher.

2. Find Affiliated Providers – Odesk has two types of providers – individuals and those working with a larger provider. You want an affiliated provider as they are often managed by someone who can provide additional assistance and they will never change projects or drop off on you at the last minute.

3. Hourly Limits – Always know exactly what you’ll be paying for a project before anything gets started. I recommend starting with a single, small project and then working your way up from there. Also, don’t allow billing of “off-odesk” hours with any new providers.

If you get lax on how much you spend per day, you can quickly start paying more than you’re making. Eventually, this will be much easier to keep track of.

4. Don’t Hire with Your Own Money – Don’t outsource projects to people unless you have a source of income you can use to cover their expenses. Paying an Odesk bill out of your own pocket can quickly ruin your efforts.

5. Manage Your Team with ClockingIT – Whenever someone joins your team, have them sign up for your ClockingIT account. This allows you to maintain the entire project in one place, with all your files and assignments. Billing is done on Odesk, but everything else is done here.

6. Be Very Specific – When you start a project, the description might be very general with only a few detailed aspects of it. However, as you move along and your provider gets started, break it down into small, easy to follow tasks.

7. Hiring a Project Manager – If you push your efforts to a larger scale and hire someone to manage your projects, make sure they have outstanding communications skills from the start. They should ideally be able to report to your daily without bringing problems or issues to your desk.

8. Mobile App – Yes, Odesk has an iPhone App (who doesn’t?). That’s a good thing for you, because you can actually check the slideshow for any work done by your team overnight, quickly easily and on your phone.

Odesk has already started changing how thousands of marketers get work done every day. If you’re not one of those thousands, I wholly recommend you get over to Odesk and sign up for your account immediately.

The options you’ll gain, the freedom you’ll enjoy, and the profit potential that presents itself will all make it very much worth your while.

Do you like to learn more?

Then you might want to sign up to receive my FREE Ebook called “How To Make Super Affiliate Commission.” (Only few copies available) All you have to do is go to How To Make Money Online Fast and sign up!

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A good oDesk worker will generally have positive feedback comments from satisfactory completion of projects. Each employer is allowed to rate a contractor with both a star rating of 1-5 and a brief written assessment of work quality. A one star feedback is low, while a five star feedback is the best. Feedback comments are important, but the best way to find great contractors on oDesk is to review those who have solid work histories.

Find a good oDesk contractor with a well-developed work experience

There is a section on the oDesk contractor’s profile where work history or experience can be filled in. This is an especially important area when employers are trying to find oDesk contractors with an industry specific skillset. When an employer posts a project, he or she can then search for contractors to invite, by selecting skill wanted. For example, if a certain style of coding is required, employers can select niche skillsets such as Java or HTML. All the contractors who indicate those skills in their profiles will be presented. Then employers can narrow choice of contractors to very specific skills.

Contractors who have work histories that are relevant and industry specific are good choices when selecting interview candidates. When reviewing a contractor’s work profile, employers should notice two specifics: training and verifiable references. Industry specific training promotes hiring confidence and a verified reference establishes the contractor as a professional. A good oDesk worker should not only have a solid work history, but also a portfolio that has relevant work samples.

Portfolios can often seal the deal.

To hire an oDesk freelancer with the best skillset, it is recommended that their portfolios have relevant examples. The keyword here is relevant. The portfolio can have a variety of examples, but to determine suitability, there should be 3-5 job specific examples. They should have been completed within the past year.

There are some questions to keep in mind as a sort of check list, as each candidate’s portfolio is surveyed. Are the samples original work? Is the sample part of work completed for a verified source? And finally, do the samples appear professional? By answering these questions, employers will be better equipped to find a good oDesk contractor who meets their requirements.

Employers want to find the best possible oDesk employee for their posted projects. Sometimes the employer will have a project manager view potential candidates. The most practical way to hire an oDesk freelancer would be for the employer to actually select the candidates. If the employer is responsible for final hire, then he or she will be better suited to identify contractors whose skillset match job requirements.

Photo credit: 4nitsirk on Flickr

The following post will offer you a few guidelines on how to create a great profile if you are an programmer working on oDesk.

Build a Great Programmer Portfolio to Showcase Your Accomplishments

Programmers usually find it difficult to showcase their work, especially if they experience is built around offline projects or private projects. For example, how do you show off your work on an interface between a back office application and a web-facing closed-access site?

The portfolio system used by oDesk allows you to specify the type of work you have done as a developer, with the following sub-categories:

• Desktop Application
• Game Development
• Scripts and Utilities
• Software Plug-ins
• Mobile Apps
• Application Interface Design
• Software Project Management
• Software QA
• VOIP
• Others

You can add an image to the portfolio entry, which is great if you’re an interface designer or desktop application programmer, but less useful for specialties such as quality assurance or project management.

One useful feature of your oDesk programmer profile is the Project URL, where you can add a link to your work. Especially for web developers, live websites can make great addition to your showcase.

Spice Up Your oDesk Developer Profile

One important section of your oDesk profile is the resume. Here, you should give a brief overview of the most important skills that you possess and are relevant to your line of work. You can mention for example your experience in programming for the web with PHP or your C# skills.

Be honest about your skills; there is no point in filling up your resume with fictitious skills – sooner or later, the lies in your resume will come back to haunt you.

Another important section to complete is the employment history. Make sure to describe the responsibilities that you had at your various workplaces, highlighting the skills and qualities that you acquired over the time.

Top oDesk Programmer Profiles Examples

Here are a few examples of great developer profiles that you can use as a starting point. Good luck and happy job hunting!

https://www.odesk.com/users/~~1fca0ee426dd8fba

https://www.odesk.com/users/~~a4d87ceabbaf2f2f

https://www.odesk.com/users/~~3f3483604f24a02c

https://www.odesk.com/users/~~16c503f9b2d1317d

 
Photo credit: Alex Barth/Flickr

oDesk is a wonderful tool for both contractors and employers, allowing people from across the world to collaborate, share and create value. For employers, oDesk delivers affordable, quality workforce, while contractors benefit from excellent working opportunities that would otherwise not be able to get. Nevertheless, in some cases, things don’t go as planned. In this post, we will cover one specific situation that has the potential to cause lots of headaches to employers: the oDesk contractor doesn’t complete the job.

We will talk about how to stay away from unreliable freelancers and how to hire and pay contractors in the safest way. We will also see how you can compel your contractor to finish work and complete your project.

Stay away from contractors who have a history of not finishing work

It’s a cliché to say that prevention is better than cure, but this old saying applies perfectly to freelance work. If you want to make sure that you will receive a finished project, the first step is to find an oDesk contractor that is professional and reliable.
Finding the right contractor is not always easy, especially if you have very specific needs or a difficult project to tackle. No matter what skills or experience you are looking for, stay away from contractors with spotty feedback. oDesk feedback tends to be biased anyway, as most employers and contractors give the full 5 star rating by default, just to keep good relationships. So, if you find that a contractor has several bad ratings, it should be a real alarm signal.

Skim over the comments of previous employers, if there are any. Also, have a look at the portfolio, resume, and tests taken by the freelancer. Keep your eyes open for any inconsistencis.

Very important – conduct a real interview, preferably via voice or chat. Ask questions that demand well thought answers and see how the contractor behaves. Real time communication is always a good indicator of reliability and professionalism.

Hire smart and monitor your employees

It’s a good idea to hire oDesk contractors on fixed fee jobs, as opposed to hourly. Avoid upfront payments, as you risk being placed last on the contractor’s priority list, or even becoming a target for a scam. Instead, set some milestones payments; for example, pay 20% of the value of the project when your website’s structure is ready, or 50% when the first draft of your ebook is finished.

Milestone payments are beneficial because they give you more control over your money and over how the project flows. At the same time, it contributes to establishing a trust relationship between you and the contractor. The freelance worker will know that his payment will arrive as he completes the job, and will be more motivate to complete the work.

Always monitor the progress made! Ask questions, get facts, and check the deliverables yourself. Even if you trust the contractor to the fullest, it’s a good idea to follow the progress of your project in order to ensure that it goes the way you want. If you don’t have the skills to follow the project, hire a professional. The money spent on a couple of hours of auditing can turn out to be a great investment.

The oDesk contractor doesn’t finish work. What to do?

When things go wrong, the potential losses can be huge. Let’s consider a scenario, which is unfortunately fairly common with freelance work.

Let’s say your web developer left you stranded, with a website that is 80% complete. You didn’t hear from him in days. What can you do in this situation?

• No threats – Threatening your contractor is not recommended. In many cases, it’s inefficient and it only creates a bad tension between you two.

• Communicate – make time to communicate directly with the contractor, preferably in real time. Ask what the problems are, as it may help you decide the best course of action. Does the oDesk contractor lack motivation, time, or skills? Once you know the answer to this question, you can think about how to rescue your project.

• Motivate – explain why the project it’s important to you. In many situations, a direct appeal may unblock your project.

• Prepare to change contractors – find another freelancer that has the ability to finish your project. You can hire an oDesk contractor for a short professional review of what’s done and what still needs to be done. Once you know that, you can estimate the costs and time needed to complete the job, and decide if it’s better to stick with your current worker or switch contractors.

• Give an ultimatum. Once you are positive that you are ready to let the contractor go, give him an ultimatum, a final chance to finish work. Keep it civil and professional. It’s always better to leave room for hello.

To learn what to do if an oDesk contractor didn’t complete the work and left you with a half-finished mess, read our post.

Photo Credit: Garrette (Flickr)

On oDesk, you can outsource any type of service, from writing content for blogs and news sites, to developing web applications or search engine optimization. But it’s not always easy to find a suitable contractor that can deliver quality services without charging you a fortune. The truth is oDesk (as well as the other freelancing sites) is full of low-quality contractors who can barely write in English, yet claim that they can provide a quality writing service, or people with minimal programming skills that insist that they can revamp your website.

So how can you use oDesk to find a great contractor that delivers the services that you need at prices you can afford?

Create great job postings that attract quality oDesk contractors

The simplest way to find great contractors on oDesk is to post a compelling job posting that attracts the right kind of people. Here’s how to do it:

Step 1 – Decide what services you need and create an accurate description

It should go without saying, but quality specifications attract quality applications. Think thoroughly about your necessities and put them down in a simple yet complete form. Make sure to include your requirements and a prospective deadline.

Step 2 – Insert a small test to weed out the spammers

Especially with low-level writing (writing short articles for example) and other simple jobs, you will receive applications from people that apply in bulk, sometimes without even reading your job posting. To weed them out, you can insert a small test in the posting – for example, ask them to answer a simple question in a couple of phrases. It should be enough to separate the spammers from the genuine appliers.

Step 3 – Attach some conditions to the job posting

On oDesk, you can set some specific conditions for the applications, to better filter the candidates. For example, you can require the contractor to have at least 100 hours of experience on oDesk, or a minimum feedback of four stars. These conditions will not stop candidates that don’t you’re your requirements, but they will at least discourage the less competent ones.

Seek out the best oDesk contractors yourself

The other option to find great oDesk contractors is to seek them out yourself and don’t rely on the lottery of job postings. oDesk offers several ways to search for contractors.

Basic Search

The most basic method of searching for good oDesk contractors is to use the Search by Keyword box in the oDesk Find Contractors page. Note that this search will return all contractors profiles that include your search term. For example, a search for “writing” will return programmers and virtual assistants, besides writers. For this reason, the basic search is a limited tool and you should go instead for the advanced search tool.

Advanced Search

The Advanced Search module lets you filter down the contractor profiles returned by your search. There are numerous filters available, including Job Category, Location, Feedback Score, and Hourly Rate. By using the Advanced Search you can obtain highly-targeted results that help you find the right contractors for your needs. Experiment a little with the oDesk advanced search, and you will find it easy to find the best contractors available.

Browse Contractors by Category or by Skill

The third method of finding great oDesk contractors is using the Browse by Skill and Browse by Category module. This method is useful when you want go through the contractors that deliver a specific service or posses a specific skill. You can quickly find Mobile Apps developers, Phone Support specialists or Article Writers by using the Category browsing. The Skill search is a little biased on programming skills, most of the listed skill being related to development.

Once you find a contractor that matches your requirements and budget, just contact him on her and you’re set. oDesk even allows you to contact several contractors at the same time, making it easy for you to build a pool of quality oDesk contractors.

What are you waiting for? Get started on oDesk right now! 

Building a virtual team is an easy task with oDesk or Elance. Just sign up for an account and post a job. It only takes a few minutes. Nevertheless, freelancing sites (or bidding sites as they are sometimes called) do have their pitfalls. The truth is oDesk is not the best choice for everyone. Read on to learn the essential things you should know about oDesk before hiring.

Are you a control freak? Hiring on oDesk is not for you

Some people love to have a strong control over everything related to their business. Tight control and close supervision have some advantages. The most important is the fact that you know exactly what happens with your business, day by day.

The problem is, freelancing, and especially online freelancing, implies by definition an amount of responsibility delegation.  Of course, oDesk has a monitoring system in place that lets you see in real-time what the contractor is doing. But with bidding sites, surprises happen all the time. No matter how easy it is to supervise your workers on oDesk, you still have to accept the fact that you can’t control everything. If you’re not ready to handle this risk, maybe online hiring is not for you.

Working on oDesk takes time and effort

Some people think that with oDesk, Elance or other freelance sites, you don’t have to invest any time or effort. You just post a job, hire someone suitable and provide the requirements to the contractor. Unfortunately, things are not always that simple. Communication with the contractor can take a lot of time, especially when you have complicated or large projects, where need to work closely with the contractor to ensure that everything goes smoothly.

You also need to go through the various reports generated by oDesk or Elance, such as time logs and activity reports. It’s a tedious job, but it’s essential if you want to complete your projects successfully. If you don’t have the time, energy or knowledge required to lead a virtual team on oDesk, you risk losing precious time and money.

Profit from the competition on oDesk

On oDesk, there are hundreds of thousands of contractors that compete for jobs. For each job posting you make you can receive dozens of applications from contractors. Many of these applications are junk – run-of-the-mill, obviously not suitable or simply spam. But in most cases, you will find genuine professionals that offer valuable services for a fraction of the cost that you would pay by hiring through a traditional method.

Make sure to check out each candidate’s profile and work history. Be thorough and you will find some real gems.

What are you waiting for? Go to oDesk and build a great virtual team!

Freelance writing is a business like any other. To succeed in freelance writing, you need talent, hard work, and dedication (proportions may vary). But you also need some management skills, a knack for PR and of course, a bit of marketing know-how. In the freelancing business, marketing is especially important, because freelance writers don’t have the luxury of relying on someone else to bring in business opportunities. We have to do it all on our own.

When doing freelance writing online (either via oDesk, Elance and the others or simply by using an online portfolio) it’s vital that you get an accurate picture of what’s going on around you. Twitter and Facebook have changed for good the way we interact in our private or professional lives. They make it easy to get news about our partners or competitors, to improve our skills and knowledge, or simply to feel the pulse of the freelance writing market. But when we make full use of social media, managing all the flux of information can become difficult. Enter Netvani.

All your social media accounts in one place – and more

Netvani is a social media manager, currently in beta. Its mission is simple: bring all your Facebook and Twitter feeds into one place and make the most out of them. You can have multiple accounts aggregated on Netvani – for example, you can add your work accounts and personal accounts, or the accounts of your company.

Netvani lets you keep track of wall posts and tweets from all the accounts linked to it, in a single stream.  It makes it easy to monitor social feeds, without having to open multiple windows and logging in and out for each account. The magic is made possible by Netvani’s use of the Facebook and Twitter APIs – the application essentially logs into your social media accounts for you, and retrieves all the updates in a single convenient place.

Learn more about your market with Netvani’s keywords monitoring function

Netvani is more than your regular social feeds aggregators. It’s actually a powerful tool for making market research. You can select a number of keywords, for example freelance writing, or freelance on odesk and Netvani will search in real time on Facebook and Twitter for those terms. For example, I found some good job offers, from sources I didn’t know before, by monitoring the social feeds for freelance writer.

Today, virtually everyone is on Facebook and/or Twitter, and the domain of freelance writing is not an exception. With Netvani, you can survey your ecosystem in real time, to get a clear picture of what’s going on, to spot lucrative opportunities or to see what your competitors are up to.

You can create several projects, to improve the efficiency of your monitoring effort. You can set up a Freelance writing project, to look for all the updates on anything related to writing for a living, for example, and another called Freelance sites, to see what’s new on oDesk, Elance or Guru.

Get proactive – make social media updating a breeze

Another nice trick of Netvani is the ability to update your Facebook and Twitter accounts using an RSS feed.  The auto-post feature allows you to automatically and instantly update your wall or Twitter stream, each time you post something on your blog.

Netvani also allows you to publish something at a specific time. Let’s say you want to tweet something next week, or every few days. You can do it quickly and easily with Netvani.

Improve your social awareness and your online charisma

Netvani is a simple way to handle your Facebook and Twitter activity. It makes it easy to post stuff on your profiles, with no hassle and without wasting any precious time. And, for any freelance writer, the ability to feel the buzz of the market is priceless. Netvani allows you to do just that!

Photo credit: Flickr/luc legacy

FreelanceFolder.com is one of the leading websites dedicate to freelancing, offering tips, resources and even a job board. FreelanceFolder is also home to an active community of readers.

Thumbnail photo credit: the trial @ Flickr

Accuracy

Be precise about your skills. Talk about what you know to do, mention your work experience and skill set. oDesk employers prefer “transparent” contractors, so they know what they get  for their money. Don’t lie in your profile!

Concision

People have remarkably low attention spans, and oDesk contractors make no exception. A long-winded contractor profile, stuffed with irrelevant details is hard to follow. Stick to the important stuff and be short about it. Employers just skim it anyway.

Correctness

Even if you are not a professional writer, you can’t afford to make any spelling or grammar mistake in your oDesk profile. It’s sloppy, sloppy, sloppy! For me (and, I hope, for most oDesk employers) broken language is a major alert signal. And no, you are not excused if English is not your native language, or if you never had to write a word for your job.

Persuasion

On oDesk, you sell something everyday – your time, talent and energy. Your oDesk contractor profile should be your sales copy. Now writing compelling copy is an art and science that takes years to master. In the mean time, use power words, be short and direct, highlight the benefits of hiring you, and get on a personal level. (That’s your crash course into sales copy writing, right there.)

Attraction

Even your oDesk contractor profile needs to be attractive, like most things in life. Be smart about it, use words with Style, make your profile lean and mean. You heard me right – a lean, mean, jobs-getting machine. (I couldn’t resist writing that)

With this being said, I wish you good luck and happy job-hunting!

Photo credit: yngrich @Flickr Thanks!

If you just want a summary or you’re too lazy/busy to read the entire thread, here is the original posting and some of the best answers:

stoolpigeon writes

“The department I work in is growing and including new members that live quite far apart. Right now most people are in the same office but new members are in Singapore and South Africa, with more coming from other places. I would be interested in Slashdotters recommendations for software, practices, services and anything else that can help build strong virtual teams.”

Patience, language, and other tips, by zevans

1. UK ENGLISH IS NOT INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH. AMERICAN ENGLISH IS NOT INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH.

Avoid slang and colloquialisms if anyone new is in the conversation. Think HARD about what might be slang or idiom. Be particularly careful to avoid phrases where the meaning is the opposite of the individual words.

Learn what “mistakes” are common in speakers from particular countries and learn how to go around them. Often non-native speakers will use academically correct English which sounds imperative and aggressive to idiomatic speakers. e.g. “I’ll have John look at that” is perfectly natural American English but sounds imperialist even to English English speakers. I’ve noticed Indian staff often do the opposite and what should be “you must, otherwise this project is doomed” becomes “if you don’t mind when you can get around to it if it’s not too much trouble.”

2. Remember cultural references are not universal, despite Coca-Cola Co’s best efforts. Watch out for this when drawing analogies, especially with TV shows, social situations, and personal money.

3. Be patient. It’s not anyone’s fault that you were born 9000 miles apart. If a communication doesn’t make sense or seems offensive on first sight, check.

4. Quick phone meeting every day is essential. Try and find a slot that isn’t the end of day for anyone (can be tough to do that depending what timezones are involved.) And I do mean quick – 15 mins – and have a tight agenda e.g. “UK hotspot/news, India hotspot news, Singapore hotspot/news.” Be careful about what “today” and “tomorrow” means in practice. “End of tomorrow” is probably “first thing the day after tomorrow” for someone on the call.

5. Unified Comms is great if used properly, but do remember it’s not face to face conversation and works on different assumptions. Instant messaging is particularly dangerous because written English and spoken English do not operate on the same set of assumptions; but in IM it’s tempting to mix it up. I ran two similar projects in a bank two years apart; the second time, we had Office Communicator and it made the whole thing a HELL of a lot easier. I was astounded by how useful it was.

6. In a virtual team, it’s very likely that not everyone in the team will be in the team full-time. Be aware of that and don’t assume that “four hours work” means that it will be done the same afternoon. Ask.

7. Notice how far down this list technology is…

10 suggestions: For what it’s worth, by Compaqt

1. Blog your progress. Whatever you did today, blog it. Let people know what you did that worked, or what was faster (Nginx vs. Apache), or what wasn’t (ColdFusion?). Don’t reinvent the wheel, use WordPress [wordpress.org], regardless of whether you like PHP/MySQL or not.

2. Use a subscription/payment management company. You’re just a small group of nerds, not accounts receivable clerks. Fastspring [fastspring.com], Plimus [plimus.com] are free;Chargify [chargify.com], Subsify [subsify.com], Cheddar Getter [cheddargetter.com], BrainTree [braintreep...utions.com], Spreedly [spreedly.com] charge; and Zuora [zuora.com] is expensive.

3. Use Google Docs [google.com] and Slideshare [slideshare.net] to share documents.

4. Chat. Don’t just rely on email. Emails can often read like “this way or the highway”. Be collaborative. You can often accomplish more with 15-30min collaboratively as opposed to composing and responding to long emails. Skype [skype.com], Jabber [jabber.org], SIP [wikipedia.org]

5. Take notes on what you did. Made a server configuration or a setting change in your CMS, your compiler, or whatever? Copy and paste from xterm so you don’t have to guess about those commandline switches next time. Take screenshots and make them available to others. Zim [zim-wiki.org], Projly [projly.com], DokuWiki [dokuwiki.org].

6. Have a phone numbers. If not bog-standard landline phones, take advantage of Google Voice [google.com] and SkypeOut and SkypeIn (people can call your Skype line on a normal phone number). I realize Google Voice might not be available in South Africa yet.

7. Someone mentioned version control. Use git [git-scm.com] if you’re a cool kid. Or svn [tigris.org] if you’re old and busted. Read the RedBean book [red-bean.com]. I’ve had success in having non-tech colleagues using graphical clients like TortoiseSVN [tigris.org] (integrates into Windows Explorer).

8. Write tests. Any member of your team, sitting anyplace, should be able to push a button and run all your tests. Tests document how you’re supposed to use a given method, class, etc., especially valuable when you’re so far flung. Use JUnit [junit.org], PHPUnit [github.com], FooUnit for your language. Write the tests before you develop, and you’re doing Test Driven Development [c2.com].

9. If you’re writing tests, that implies loose coupling [thesoftwar...tional.com], which might require dependency injection [potencier.org]. Can be difficult to climb that mountain, but it’s worth it when you can just run a test and be sure your project works.

10. Development processes: Scrum [wikipedia.org], Extreme Programming [extremeprogramming.org]. UML [uml.org] lets you communicate graphically about objects.

Couple of suggestions, by pamri

A couple of suggestions from someone who has done that over 5 years.
* Do *have* a mailing list. Nothing beats it reach.
* Have a good ticketing system. We used to let people who are online to pick up tickets from any geo and work on it unless it is something that requires hands on , in which case, we used to pass it on to the local contact.
* Use a good text based chatting solution. Video / audio solutions are good, but text is better for a lot of things, like small talk , sharing links or a way to avoid misunderstanding or misinterpretation that could happen in speaking. I generally prefer IRC for group chat. Setup a proxy server for IRC like https://code.google.com/p/dircproxy/ [google.com] or have some form of logging and you could let users catch up with whatever happened on the channel while they are away.
* Arrange their timings, such that atleast one person from each geo will have atleast a hours overlap with a person from the geo closest to him. EG:
* Have video meetings r meetings over the phone atleast once a week.
* Get them to put their pictures, phone nos., and responsibilities on a intranet / address book.
* Have weekly meetings in any medium and if you can’t have everyone to have their say, let one person from each geo each week talk about any issues they have or something good they did that week.
* Other collaborative software that is good to have : wiki , version control, Calendar (egroupware / google / exchange) , pastebin (share code / error snippets).

Communicate. And not just about work!, by Anonymous Coward

I am in the UK, and work with a team in Finland, India, Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania and Sweden… I work with no-one else in the UK. Communicating regularly and often around work topics is a given, both in group meetings and just by following up with IM or a quick call. I make the assumption that you have an appropriate toolkit, such as Office Communicator / Lync, and LiveMeeting or whatever you prefer, but you need something to chat, speak, video call and conference with.

The real challenge is really getting to know someone virtually: by that I mean not just what they do, and what their work strengths and weaknesses are, but also what they enjoy away from work and what their personal situation is. This is the sort of stuff that gets discussed at lunch, making a drink, or whatever, that simply doesn’t often get considered when working virtually.

It’s difficult because you can’t force it, but on the other hand it does pay dividends as you actually do end up building a real camaraderie. I end up just chatting on IM with colleagues to see if they had an interesting weekend, and take it from there.

I also like to be reminded of where the team is, and in what timezone, and what they look like: I have a world map printed on my wall with photos of the team pinned to it. (Well, a powerpoint slide printed!). It helps cement someone in your mind, I find.

One thing that helped put the icing on the cake is a one-off, physical meeting. Yes, this is expensive, and yet it takes a week out of everyone’s schedule practically, but the value in building relationships with colleagues and making friends of colleagues really cannot be over-stated.

Another potential communication issue worth considering is that native English speakers tend to speak fast, and use odd colloquialisms from time to time. Recognise this, slow down, and explain colloquialisms: you’ll find non-native English speaking colleagues greatly appreciate this, and will often start a chat to question word use, constructions, sayings, colloquialisms or whatever which is a great way to build a better relationship, too. It’s also fascinating to find the literal translations in many languages as the expression for ‘you’re pulling my leg’ in Russian translates to English as literally ‘you are hanging noodles off my ears’.

Most of all, have fun, and built a relationship of trust.

Thank you , Slashdotters!