I can visualize it – your early-stage startup is picking up steam, and the time has come to start hiring a development team.
Or is it? Do you already have a solid MVP? Do you know what kind of product you are creating and what stack you’ll need? If not, well… that’s why we’re here! I’d recommend bookmarking this article for later and start with this article from our CEO and Co-Founder Daniel.
If indeed it’s time to start hiring folks and expanding from your initial team let’s carry on, shall we?
Starting with the basics – if you’re reading this, you’re at least entertaining the idea of hiring remotely. You most likely understand that there can be a lot of benefits from not limiting yourself to your city, or the area around it, or your country, or maybe even your part of the world. Or maybe it’s not too clear for you, but that’s why you and I are going over this. Worry not.
Contents
Your Narrative
A company is this living, pulsating organism that is way more than the sum of its parts. What defines it? What’s your company story, and how does it shape your recruitment efforts? Is your product or service breaking barriers and shrinking distances? In that case, shouldn’t your team be a reflection of that?
Is it something so local that remote work is unnecessary or even counterproductive? Or are your customers global?
Understanding your scope, your customers’ scope and how your company interacts with the world will allow you to confirm how wide should you cast your recruiting net.
If your market is very limited sure, stick to local. I mean, if your product is (and will always be) focused on the inhabitants of your city, hire locally. Otherwise, there are a ton of reasons to prefer a remote team, and we’ll go over them in a bit. Before, though, we need to align on what ‘remote’ means.
What Does ‘Remote’ Mean, Anyway?
Just to make sure we’re on the same page, let’s list different ways to define “remote work”:
- “Anywhere in the world remote” – basically the entire planet. I would exclude countries that the USA sanctions (even if your company is not US-based, many of the tools you use are) and areas where, due to conflict or bleak economic outlook, it would be hard to maintain a regular work connection. This option is perfect if you’re hoping to have customers all over the world and plan to offer 24/7 support.
- “Close timezones” remote – let’s say you’re in EMEA, and so are your customers, and you don’t plan to expand to other regions of the world. “Remote” here means close to your time zone, say -2 to +2 hours. For example: your company is legally registered in Germany and your clients are all over EMEA. There’s no need for 24/7 support because your company is B2B and your service/product is typically used only during office hours. You can hire from the Azores (Portugal) to Türkiye and no one would be working crazy hours. This means all of Europe, all of Africa, and part of the Middle East.
- “My region” remote – Your company is based in – say – Colombia. Your product or service and your market are LatAm-focused, so it makes sense to hire just in the region and, to save money, not look for prospects (or be open to candidates) in the US and Canada, as these would be close, timezone-wise, but much more expensive.
- “My country” remote – Even if what you offer is not country-bound, data shows that your clients prefer if you have a geographically tight team. In this case, “remote” would mean “anywhere in our country”, but it’s becoming a bit less “remote”, isn’t it?
- “My city’s wider area” remote – OK, now we’re really stretching the definition, aren’t we? I mean, that’s basically “not in the office, but you gotta live 1 hour away or so”. Do you need this? If so, why?
Consider how tight or wide your net should be and take it from there. To help you come to a decision, let’s now look at several key elements, starting with time coverage.
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Time Coverage
Think about it – your company’s product or service will hopefully help potentially thousands, nay, millions of people, right? Would you like to have a drowsy, I-must-stay-awake SRE Engineer look into logs at 4 AM their time, barely functioning and grumpy because they’re on-call, and it sucks? Now imagine it’s actually 4 PM their time, they’re wide awake and alert and fully ready to tackle the issue.
Unless your company is focused on a narrow band of this tiny blue dot we call Earth, it makes sense to have a widely distributed team. You never know when someone will have to fix something, and if your team covers a wide range of the 24 hours of the day, that will make your company more responsive, putting you ahead of your slow competitors.
There’s another reason why time is of the essence, and that is…
Redefining Work Hours
Look, my brain does not function properly before 10 AM. I can work before that, sure, but sticking to tasks that are neither creative nor asking for decisions, as I’m not quite there yet. Sometimes, it’s midnight and my brain is jumping up and down, saying “Hey, let’s do stuff!”. Our colleague Patrick (one of our fullstack devs), on the other hand, starts working at 6 AM, fresh as a baby’s smile, fully focused and productive. The horror!
What I mean to say is that starting time, ending time and breaks should be defined by the worker’s natural rhythm, not by a strict timetable.
Yes, there are time-bound tasks and yes, coverage means nothing is dropped, but with a nicely distributed team, you can have the best of both worlds – someone available every time it’s needed, everyone working at the time that best suits them. This topic comes hand in hand with another one, named…
Output, Not Time
Each one of your workers is hired to fulfil a need. There are tasks to be performed, decisions to be made, and strategies to be thought of, tested, and implemented. That’s why you hire them, right? Then why should you (or their direct manager) be focused on how many hours they work (and what specific hours of the day they work)?
Mandatory meetings aside (and consider if they are really necessary in the first place), why does it matter when are they working? Unlike life itself, at work, it’s the destination that counts, not the path.
But how do you ensure that everything runs smoothly? Easy peasy:
- Define clear outputs, with actionable items and reasonable deadlines
- Ask the worker what is it they need to do their job
- Assure them you’re a message away from helping them, if and when needed
- Go away and let them work
If they are the mature professional you need, all will be good. If not… well, that’s what the probation period is for.
Enough talking about time. Let’s also consider…
Immaterial Coverage
We humans are a funny lot. We’re a bag of bones, muscle and anxiety, but we’re also language, culture, knowledge.
We connect with others via these immaterial things that, collectively, some people call souls. Having a geographically dispersed, culturally diverse team, the sum of all that knowledge, of all those experiences, will bring a tremendous benefit to your company (and convert directly into profit).
A frontend developer in India will point out that the emoji your marketing team wants to use will be offensive in some parts of Asia; a backend one, in Finland, will tell you that the new feature’s name sounds ridiculous in Finnish. A QA engineer from Brazil will suggest some test procedures that are common in their country but unheard of in yours; a DevOps in Canada knows enough about the law there to point out that something your product is doing breaks local privacy laws. You get the picture.
If your service/product wants to be global, it has to feel global, and the best way to ensure that is to have a global team.
What’s that I’m hearing? Fine, I get why it would make sense, but I’ve got doubts! Heard ya! Let’s clear them.
How to Hire & Pay Remote People?
That would probably warrant a whole article but the main take is this – don’t do it alone, get help.
Team members in countries other than your own can be hired as either independent contractors or employees. In order to be able to hire, pay, offer benefits and eventually fire them if needed, it’s best to work with a company that does that for you. In general terms, those companies are either EORs (Employer of Record) or PEOs (Professional Employer Organization).
This article from the US Chamber of Commerce explains the difference in detail. The long and short however is: go with an EOR. They will be able to hire people on your behalf in many countries, either because they have a legal entity there or because they have partnered with a local company.
They take care of all the HR stuff so you don’t have to worry about it, be it hiring, paying, ensuring compliance, or offering locally-suited benefits (healthcare, meal allowance, etc.). There are a bunch of them, like Deel, Remofirst, Velocity Global, etc. Shop around!
How Do You Get Them the Hardware They Need?
The fancy term for that is device procurement (and then when someone leaves, you need to think about device retrieval).
As with hiring and paying, best to leave it in the hands of those who set up that type of service and have a wide network of local partners to purchase hardware locally, on your behalf, avoiding customs, import taxes, lost packages, and wasted time.
They are usually also able to retrieve and securely wipe computers and keep the hardware safely warehoused until you rehire again in that country. There are a lot of IT equipment management companies out there, like Hofy, Quipteams, Workwize, etc.
Document Everything
The biggest asset your company has is knowledge. If it’s siloed, if it’s not shared, then it’s useless. If it’s dispersed (same information in different places, but updated in different degrees) it can be catastrophic.
Having a single source of truth (SSOT), a centralised place for all information, be it Google Drive, Notion, Confluence, internal wiki, etc., is a smart decision, as you prevent having folks looking for information (and having to update it) in different places.
If there’s a need for a piece of information in two different apps, place it on the SSOT and have a link to in on the other app. Sorted!
A culture of documentation allows for independence. Why would you need to interrupt someone who’s doing deep work, or worst still interrupt them when it’s not their work hours, just to ask them for information?
If that information is already in your SSOT you just have to find it. This way, it doesn’t matter if it’s 4 AM in your expert’s location. Their expertise has been shared already, and there’s no need to wake them up. Now you’re an expert too!
Define a Company Timezone (and work async)
I’ve worked in a couple of global companies. In one of them, there was no default timezone set, so we ended up having to write, on Slack, sentences like this one:
“Ok, so, the interview is all set! [name of interviewer 1], it’s at 9 AM your time, [name of interviewer 2] noon yours, and 5 PM for the candidate”
Or even worse:
Person A: “hey, let’s schedule some time to talk about this. Can you do it tomorrow at 3 PM?”
Person B: “No, sorry, at 3 PM I’ve got a call with someone else.”
Person A: “Oh, but that slot appears free in your calendar…”
Person B: “Really? That’s not what I see.”
(shares screenshot of their calendar)
Person A: “Ah, sorry, I meant 3 PM my time, not yours”
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
All of this can be avoided with choosing one timezone as the company’s timezone, and stick to it always. When someone types or says “Noon”, it’s Noon that timezone. Always and forever. No doubt about it.
What Timezone Should you Choose?
Up to you. I suggest GMT. It doesn’t change with the seasons and it’s not bound to a particular country. Alternatively, it could make sense to use a country’s timezone if, say, the HQ is in that country (and the country has only one timezone) but I would avoid this, as to not make my colleagues in other locations feel like they’re second class.
Then add that timezone as a secondary timezone in Google Calendar and use online tools like WorldTimeBuddy or Time.is. It’ll help you not get lost.
Bear in mind, though, that while having a company’s timezone avoids entropy it should not be a reason to have everyone working the exact same hours (say, 10 AM to 7 PM GMT). There’s no need for this – your company is not a barbershop! – and as we’ve seen before, it’s smart to have wider coverage (if needed, 24/7) and allow people to work at the time that suits them best.
For this to work, everyone needs to embrace an async mentality. The simplest way to explain would be along these lines:
Unmovable and mandatory situations aside, each person works at the time which suits them best, and messages are sent and replied at the time it works best for each person.
Let’s unravel that.
- A worker knows best what are the best periods of the days to work, bearing in mind their self-assessment of attention span, concentration levels, need of the family, the pets and themselves, etc.
- Some things have to be done when they have to be done, so those take precedence. If no one else can do it, the worker has to accommodate that to their schedule (but the company should strive to find alternatives, if possible).
- I send you a message at a time that is good for me. I do not expect an immediate reply, unless it’s something urgent and it’s your work hours. In that case I tag you (let’s say we’re using Slack) but only in this type of situation.
- You reply to my message at a time that is good for you (but if you were tagged, know that it’s urgent and that, if you’re working right now, this should take precedence).
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Think Locally, Act Globally
It’s a big world, isn’t it? Big and diverse. But even if we consider only a country or even just a city, a team is bound to have a wide range of points of view and experiences, right? That is gold, as it gives you an edge compared to competitors who are monolithic in their ways.
Yet that diversity has to be nurtured to thrive. Here are some things you could consider:
- Local holidays – let people have their local holidays as days off (or allow them to work a local holiday they don’t care about and swap it with another day off)
- Avoid being Eurocentric/US-centric/My-country-centric in your decisions and comms. It’s not smart to assume everyone celebrates Christmas, for instance, or that everyone feels there’s any “thanks” to give at “Thanksgiving”.
- At the same time, though, highlight internally local events or holidays, showcasing the diversity of your team. For example, during the (Northern Hemisphere’s) winter season, your team can embrace the celebrations of all the different religious holidays (but also Winter Solstice for the non-religious folk!).
- Actively ask for different points of view. This not only makes your colleagues feel seen and empowered but it also allows your company to adopt better practices, some of which you haven’t even dreamt about.
Hopefully, these tips will have cleared your doubts. In any case, maybe hiring a development team, at the stage your company is in right now, might not be the best option. In some cases, it may even be smarter to never hire a team, and outsource your product creation and maintenance.
But Wait, Do I Even Need to Hire a Remote Development Team?
Perhaps. Maybe it’s not the right time yet, and it can make sense to start by fully outsourcing your MVP to a custom software development company, for example.
Or maybe the work volume right now isn’t enough to justify one full-time person, per area (backend, frontend, mobile, QA, devops, etc.) but you’d like to start creating a team anyway – freelancers are ideal in this situation.
For more advice on that huge decision, I’d start here.
Or you’ve read this entire article (thank you!) and you still prefer to hire locally. That’s ok too! Remember the section above titled “Your narrative”? If you feel like in-office is what makes sense to you, go for it. It’s your company
Conclusion
Hopefully, the information I shared here has given you some food for thought regarding the benefits of hiring a remote-based team, and how to ensure that it is done smoothly.
Ultimately, as long as you never forget that these evolved monkeys we decided to call ‘humans’ are the key to it all, you and your startup will do fine.
