For a growing agency, sometimes it is necessary to outsource some work, either to meet deadlines or to satisfy customers. If you aren’t comfortable with delegating tasks without stress, outsourcing work could prove to be a challenging aspect.
Web designers who prefer to work independently often find it hard to handle the idea of outsourcing even a small component of a project to remote workers and end up worrying themselves sick.
Hence, it is crucial to learn to be comfortable with distributing a few of your responsibilities to others. A proper delegation will definitely help you complete your projects with greater efficiency and will help you meet deadlines.
Fear Of Delegating Tasks?
People often question themselves whether it is prudent to rely on any remote team for assistance. This is where you need a proper self-analysis.
Do you remember how you felt when you first outsourced a part of any project? You probably had many doubts and was constantly having second thoughts when taking this tough decision.
Should I trust remote agencies?
Will they be able to deliver the quality I need?
Will they work seriously and complete the task in time with no mishaps?
These are a few of the questions that we all asked ourselves when we first thought of outsourcing.
In fact, these questions tend to linger around for a while, until we learn to carry out proper delegation and understand its benefits.
Now the main question is, do you still ask yourself those questions when deciding to outsource to a remote team?
If so, then this is something you should really work on.
Let us look at 5 steps to follow, in order to prepare yourself to accept delegation without trust issues.
1. Educate Yourself About Delegation
Delegating tasks is a key factor in growing your business, and you should start finding reasons to get confident about it.
First of all, it is okay to feel a bit insecure when relying on others. It is natural to be concerned about maintaining proper control of the work, and this concern leads to our doubts. As a matter of fact, most successful people have already gone through this.
With time, you will realize that using remote teams to carry out parts of your projects can ramp up your efficiency, reduce your overhead costs and boost ROI.
If you read some case studies about large agencies in your competitive market. You will see that even though these agencies have great expertise, they still have a lot of partners that help them carry out tasks.
They outsource or delegate tasks either when they have excess workload, or when they have a lack of expertise in some field.
I’m sure there have been several times you either rejected clients or failed to deliver due to a lack of manpower or expertise.
But the thing is, you do not need to have expertise in all tasks of a project.
Take on projects, work on the tasks you are good at, and delegate the rest to a remote agency you’ve partnered with.
Eventually, the idea is to understand that relying on remote teams can be more beneficial than you think.
You will see that most successful web developers do not mind taking help from remote teams even though they are completely out of sight.
The ultimate goal is to build your confidence in delegating tasks and to use it wisely.
2. It’s Okay To Feel Uncomfortable When Delegating Tasks
Delegating important work to others is not something that anyone is much comfortable with. We are all used to being held responsible for our work and receiving the appropriate praise or criticism.
Handing off tasks to others is not easy in any aspect. Outsourcing work to a remote team that you can’t even see is even challenging to agree on.
However, guess what, you shouldn’t feel bad about your discomfort with delegating tasks.
In fact, it is the right thing to do. This discomfort is what will encourage you to learn more about the proper delegation. It will drive you to do proper research on any remote team that you are considering to work with.
For example, you will look deep into their portfolio, find out their past work history and talk in details about technical stuff to understand their expertise.
There will be more curiosity in finding out details about the agency you are thinking of partnering with.
You will end up learning proper ways to delegate tasks and will be able to hire the right people to work for you remotely.
Embrace this discomfort as an opportunity to broaden your horizons. Work on learning effective ways of delegating tasks and trust people to help you manage your workload.
3. Delegating Means Putting An End To Micromanagement
Many web developers tend to find it difficult to let go of their responsibilities. They are solution-oriented individuals who look to solve every problem they face on their own and usually don’t consider communicating with others for a solution.
Well, at least the developers who are not well accustomed to delegation are like that.
This is not wise. Being a developer, keep in mind that it is completely okay to take help from others. Whether it’s a colleague or a remote worker, you can consider using their skills in certain areas of web designing that you might not be an expert in.
Alternatively, you can simply focus on certain parts of the project that you are more confident about and let others do the rest to save you time and effort.
If you are the type of person who likes to tweak and manage every aspect of a project, it is time to stand back, delegate some responsibilities and let others help you achieve your goals.
Micromanaging is good to a certain level. However, for a complete web development project, there is only a limited amount of micromanagement that you can carry out.
If you are willing to grow your business, you should understand that micromanagement takes a lot of time and effort.
In one sense, micromanaging can be interpreted as paying close attention to detail. In another sense, micromanaging means taking on extra workload individually and investing time on tasks that can easily be completed by others without your involvement.
Moreover, you will find remote agencies that are experts in what they do; you won’t need to monitor every detail of their activities.
They know what they are doing. You will only need to let them know what you wish to accomplish with their help, and they will find their ways to deliver your requirements.
Therefore, learn to have faith in others, assign duties in a proper manner and you might find that the results exceed your expectations.
4. Communication Is Not An Issue When Delegating Tasks
One reason to question the idea of delegating tasks may be communication preference. It depends on how you wish to communicate with your team.
Is it really mandatory to talk face to face?
Or, are you comfortable with communicating by other means such as e-mails or voice chats?
To realize what you should prefer, you should look at the technologies available today. Yes, it might be true that you cannot communicate face to face with remote workers and that might just throw you off.
However, you should also see that you can still have proper communication and have more benefits through effective delegation by using all the technological facilities that you can use.
You have the basic options to e-mail and chat through instant messages. You can also talk over the phone, or voice chats or even go for video calls through software such as Skype. There are so many options to conduct proper communication.
In return, you are having your tasks distributed, achieving faster completion of tasks and the task will be completed with greater efficiency, since the remote team only had a part of the total project assigned to them.
Most importantly, you will subsequently have less workload to worry about.
5. Accept That There Can Be Better Ways To Perform Tasks
When thinking about delegation or to expand in-house, you should give an extra thought as to what you really are comfortable with when carrying out tasks.
Do you require people to carry out the work through a process that you decide, or do you just need the work done with high efficiency and in less time?
Now, delegation means you are looking for a specific result. But it is not necessary that the outcome has to be achieved by following any process that you enforce.
It is important to trust remote developers to carry out the tasks for you if you want to take on more clients. Thus you should have faith in them that their process will be more efficient and will give the result you seek.
This is actually a big benefit of delegating tasks, that you should look to utilize.
Most successful people always look for the best ways to get results.
It’s not about others doing a certain task exactly how you carry it out. If they have a better way to achieve the same or better result, then why not?
If any remote agency has its own set of rules and processes they use to carry out a task, you can still work with them as long as they make sure you will get the result you seek.
As long as they are not doing anything unethical and giving you proper reports on their activities, you do not need to micromanage them. Only the results will matter.
Consider giving a remote team the chance to perform, and who knows, they might surprise you.
Conclusion
Delegation plays a major role in all successful web development agencies in both saving time and money. And it is equally important to rule out your doubts on remote agencies that can help you.
However, you should do proper research on the team that you are considering delegating tasks to; don’t take this as a hassle; it’s rather a small investment for a greater cause.
We all have the same goal, to increase our ROI; and delegation plays a big part in helping us grow.
Hence go ahead and work on your knowledge about delegation and start growing your business while taking help from remote agencies.
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