According to Pew Research Center’s 2017 Mobile Fact Sheet, the percentage of Americans who have smartphones increased to 77% from 35% back in 2011. The same study also shows that Americans have a range of other information devices, such as laptops, computers, and tablet computers. This only shows how much easier it is now to reach audiences from all over the world.

This is an opportunity that businesses, organisations, and even the show business industry have recognised and taken advantage of in the past years. They compete with each other to build and keep a strong online presence. As for businesses and firms, websites are their key to boosting online presence. Websites either strengthen or break a company’s name and reputation, so it’s important to build a team of reliable and skilled individuals to develop and run it.  

Building your dream web team is more than just finding the best developers, managers, or specialists out there. It’s all about finding the right people for your company and for your needs and empowering them to work with you towards your goals.

So, to help you start building your web team dream team today, we’ve compiled a few tips you can try out.

Review how you recruit

Take a look at your job listings and job descriptions. While it’s important to include the necessary skills and qualities that applicants need for the role, make sure you’re not pushing them away with your lengthy job description and a long list of specialised technical skills. You don’t want to be too short, either.

Keep a balance when writing your job ads. Be concise and straight to the point: don’t be too restrictive with your job descriptions, but don’t be too vague either. After reading your job ad, your applicant should have a clear idea of the job and how it is to work for your company.

Explore all available resources

Finding the right people for your team requires that you don’t limit yourself to only one way of finding applicants. Instead, explore all other available resources where you can find the talent you need. FitSmallBusiness lists down 29 creative ways to hire employees according to experts and some of these include giving referral incentives, being visible where candidates are, connecting with local colleges and professors, and looking beyond your location.

With the help of technology, collaboration with other talents from all over the world is now possible. The same can be said with hiring tech talent. Companies are now outsourcing their IT needs and specific functions to offshore teams, enabling them to work with experts from other parts of the world. Outsourcing gives companies a wider pool of skilled talent to choose from at competitive costs.

Build a team and delegate tasks

The key to a highly efficient team is the proper delegation of tasks. Hire people with specialised skills and delegate tasks to them. In web development teams, there are specific roles that each person should take; here are the essential roles and their descriptions as listed by Web Designer Depot:

• Salesperson – helps generate new customers for the business
• Project architect – develops the overall concept of the project (not the design)
• Project manager – manages the project and keeps everything on track
• Site designer – designs the look and functionality of the site
• Back-end developer – creates the framework the site interface will be placed on
• Front-end developer – creates and implements interface components
• Site tester – ideally does everything possible to try and break the site until it can be broken no more.

There are also other supporting roles that you can try to add to the team. However, this doesn’t mean that you need to hire big; you can let a person handle up to two tasks. Ideally, try to make your team as small as you can so you can handle them easier and more efficiently. With a smaller team, communication is faster and easier, and employees get an extra morale boost as they see that they are making a valuable contribution to the work.

Take time in onboarding your team

After you’ve gathered the ideal people for your dream web team, it’s time to properly orient them about the organisation, organisational practices, as well as the aims and goals you’re working towards. According to experts, a good onboarding program increases employee engagement and retention rate. It opens up lines of communication between the new hires and the employer, which will be beneficial for your project in the long run.

A good onboarding program will definitely encourage efficient performance from your web team and make them feel valuable and important to the company and its outputs.

Empower your team

In connection with the previous point, one way of making your developers feel important to the output is by treating them as collaborators rather than order-takers. At John Lewis, employees are called partners—implying the sense of shared responsibility among all employees in creating the best customer experience.

Let your web team be heard and have a say in what they work on; let them feel this shared responsibility. Trulia’s Vice President of Engineering for Consumer Services Jeff McConathy shares a noteworthy advice for this: “Ask teams to focus on specific high-level goals, then let them run with ideas and execution. This is true empowerment, and at the end of the day, we all like to work in an environment where we can make a difference and learn new things.”

Once you treat your developers as collaborators, you empower them to take responsibility and contribute to the growth of your business.

Switch things up every once in a while

Traditional employers generally do not encourage socialising, playing video games, or chatting over coffee as they believe it hinders productivity. Newer generations of companies, however, acknowledge that instead of hindering productivity, recreational activities, in fact, increase it. With your web team most probably working over 40 hours a week, they need to recharge every once in a while to be able to keep the enthusiasm and efficiency at work.

This is more evident in start-ups, where they use recreational activities to build camaraderie, creativity, and cohesion among employees. They do this in creative ways: through arcade games, social nights, adventure trips, and the like. Activities like these can help you gain long-term commitment from the team, and it also builds a happy and positive working atmosphere, which has been proven to increase employees’ performance.

Celebrate Success

Make an effort to recognise your team’s achievements or milestones, whether big or small. After all the hard work and stress, the appreciation will definitely boost their morale and show them that their contributions are valued. Acuity, a financial-services company in Wisconsin, asks all departments to submit lists of their achievements every year. They compiled 100 outstanding achievements in a book they titled, “Acuity World Records” and distributed it to all 831 employees.

You can also hold celebrations for personal events like birthdays, weddings, and new babies, suggests Houston Chronicle. Celebrations like this show that you appreciate your team and take a personal interest in them.

Building a successful and efficient web design team is not an easy task, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to do. It will definitely take time and it will definitely require careful planning and strategic hiring, but at the end of it all, you’ll be happy to find your dream web team working alongside you.

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