As managers, if the Covid pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we need to rely on the strength of the fabric of the relationships we’ve built with our peers, our teams and our clients to keep us going. There is no Zoom or Slack integration/feature out there that can replace this. Building better relationships is at the core of Zemoga’s approach to managing the company and servicing our clients. We can only do as much to keep our team members motivated to deliver quality work, but it also has to be reciprocated on the clients’ end so that there is an environment where trust in each other can lead to true partnerships that generate quality delivery.

There are many offerings out there both in the talent market for our teams as well as in the services industry for our clients that make it very easy for there to lack connection and passion for the work and how it’s carried out. I am a firm believer that the best digital products are created by teams that work together under friendly and open collaboration. These teams care more about crossing the finish line together with the satisfaction of having grown stronger together for the challenges to come, than hyper-focused on each individual’s “sprint” metrics. This is not to say that metrics are disregarded but more that they are a byproduct of planning and executing the work as a unit and not around a “rockstar dev” in the group.

Bringing this into the current times, we see digital development teams that are not collocated and spread all over the world even and at the same time companies hiring/contracting offshore individuals directly (not seeing the need to rely on a service provider like us) as they see no restriction in having to have team members in an office (and in doing so, offering higher than ever salaries). This, in my opinion, only reiterates the importance and need for the relationships between us and our teams to be stronger than ever so they perceive a value to belonging to our organization and to my original point, a responsibility of the client as well to reinforce the importance of generating a working environment that lets team members feel their contribution is valued and that growth is shared, no matter “from which team you are” as the team is just one.

The winds of time will again sway the industry’s priorities in terms of capabilities to offer and restrictions of the environment, but believing in and investing in building better relationships will always be the foundation over which we will continue to overdeliver.