11–20 of 137 posts
If the person in charge doesn't know what he's doing the rest doesn't matter.
Regarding your options:
1. Hardly any different than on site. 2. Not an issue at all. 3. Huh? 4. For some.
Trying to figure it out on your own is irresponsible at best, so it boils down to hiring a local CPA or tax attorney in each state/city you hire in to go over the implications of bringing someone on in that city.
If the person is right, it's worth the cost, but it's a large, unexpected time-suck.
Communication! Communication! Communication!
If any part of your product requires people to communicate with each other, then the team members lying on vastly different time zones will have low efficiency because information round trip time will be larger than those of the local (or time zone near) ones.
Payroll is the biggest issue. You have to pay taxes in any state your employee is working. This gets expensive and time intensive as you start filing annual reports and paying taxes in 4 or 5 states.
We are a pure remote company but Tax/employment-law is for us the biggest issue. Or to be more precise, it's the biggest issue for potential co-workers. We find that people are super interested in us, but when we tell them they have to do their own tax and basically act as freelancers, most say no to us. The majority simply wants a standard legal employment. Which I understand and I would like to have that too.
Hiring is hard to begin with, and hiring remotely has additional pitfalls. A company like Triplebyte that would perform additional vetting to prove a candidate's ability to work remotely would be quite welcome.
Re 4. VC systems are still awful and both companies and employees aren't willing to invest to the right level, and commit to workflow changes, in order to make it seamless to work remotely. In particular, latency and packet loss is what just kills VC and makes it very apparent that we're not actually in the same room together. The way to solve that is gigabit home-office Internet connections, but $10k to run lines and an additional $500/month, as well as the hassle of using a wired connection at home to take advantage of it, and then a dedicated VC system, is a total non-starter for many, on both sides, employer, and employee.
Throw in a timezone difference, and the wrong remote employees can take more time to manage than they're worth. (That's not to say there aren't some really really good, really solid remote employees, just that there are also the wrong hires - same as goes for in-person.)
Re. 2. On top of payroll, there are also plain cultural differences between countries that make it more challenging than when there is no difference - holiday schedules, vacation policies, etc, and until you've lived it, it's hard to know what to look for in advance.
For example, bots like http://tatsu.io or http://standuply.com help running standup meetings.
I think remote work will become more and more popular in the future despite its challenges.
Timezone is a tough one. For us, finding a scrum time that works for everyone (in a small team it's doable), and sticking to it daily helped to get the team to communicate more openly with each other, and stay in sync.
Finding the right set of tools to manage remote teams is one the biggest challenge when a team is distributed across the world. Traditional task management tools didn't lets us easily ideate, organize, and share task lists together, hence we were inspired to build Taskade (Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder of https://taskade.com). The idea of having the freedom to work together on task lists in real-time, see each other's progress, and collaborate without any distractions.
- International payroll: often impacts tax situation - Adjusting to remote collaboration. e.g. no more walls of sticky notes; can no longer rely on water cooler conversations or "quick meetings" - Timezones
Problems 1-4 only become real problems after the management team feels comfortable with:
5) How are we going to integrate them into our workflow and team?
"Hire remote workers" has become an extended and rebranded form of "offshoring". Folks learned some hard lessons from the offshoring days that you can't just hire remote. Your organizational thinking and processes need to be ready.
My take is, if you're solving 1-4, you're selling to companies who already have some remote workers. If you're focused on companies with few to 0 remote folks, you'll need something to help them solve 5.
Payroll 100%. When we started hiring people remote it was the biggest surprise, and most headache. Trying to figure it out on your own is irresponsible at best, so it boils down to hiring a local CPA or tax attorney in each state/city you hire in to go over the implications of bringing someone on in that city. If the person is right, it's worth the cost, but it's a large, unexpected time-suck.