Antoine is the cofounder and CEO of Horizons, a global Employer of Record (EOR) that helps companies hire employees in 180+ countries.
People often discuss how remote hiring can benefit your company from an HR or payroll perspective—reducing costs and opening up access to better talent. But less is said about how remote hiring benefits your customer. Drawing on my experience supporting hundreds of companies to hire internationally, I wanted to draw out the “customer wins” for remote companies.
Why Remote Hiring Means Global Hiring
While remote hiring itself is now well-embedded—with the latest stats showing that over one-third of workers are now remote—some companies are still intimidated by overseas remote hires. With an international remote team, you may save on total payroll and talent acquisition costs, and also give yourself the widest possible talent pool for hiring: Wherever you are based, if the best developer who applies for the role is based in Estonia, then you can hire them.
But I’ve also seen how an international remote team can benefit your customers. This is what I want to explore below:
How Remote Hiring Benefits Your Customers
1. Customer Care
Everyone is tired of the one-size-fits-all, script-based, call center: It’s doubly frustrating where a language disconnect leads to miscommunication on either side. Service providers with a globally distributed remote team don’t need to plonk customer support down in just one location. For example, in our own business, having a global remote team means that our South African customers are always supported by a South Africa-based account executive. For any business with international customers, remote hiring makes it easy for you to base your support team where customers need them.
2. Local Market Intel
Are your corporate clients themselves interested in testing their products or services overseas? With a remote team, you can ease the path for your customers through your on-location team members. As an example, if one of our clients asks us whether they can successfully target the India consumer market, our team based just outside Delhi can offer immediate insights into how market entry would work.
3. Around-The-Clock Business Operations
How can a remote team help make your business a 24/7 operation? Around-the-clock customer support is one answer— something rather hard to achieve with your entire team based in the same country and time zone. But the benefits go much further. What about a SaaS startup needing an urgent code fix? Or overnight review of an employment contract? In September, a prominent business commentator suggested that, via remote work, the opposite time zone means that New Zealand could become the overnight professional service base for Europe and North America. The point is clear: Whether you have team members in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore or the Philippines, why not use the time difference to put a rocket under your global ops?
4. Business Continuity
When something goes wrong in one country, a remote workforce can support the business to continue without interruption and loss of efficiency. For example, I’m based in our regional headquarters in Shanghai and extensive Covid lockdowns meant I couldn’t leave the country for extended periods of time to connect with our clients. However, as a remote-first company, management based in Germany and the U.S. could continue to ensure our clients received A+ care. Without a distributed team, your company is vulnerable to any disasters or unexpected events that crop up.
5. Network Expansion
Having team members based in multiple overseas locations opens up your business to new opportunities for networking. For example, our business development team is distributed through the European startup hubs of Berlin, Lisbon and Amsterdam. Through them, we are connected to those specific business communities. This, in turn, makes it easy for us to connect our own customers with potential overseas partners in those entrepreneurial hot spots.
Dealing With The Challenges Of Global Teams
Working with a globally distributed remote team does come with some challenges too of course:
• Language and cultural differences can lead to an occasional misunderstanding.
• Supervision and mentorship of more junior employees may not come as naturally.
• It can be difficult to foster team spirit remotely and over distance and multiple time zones.
Below I offer some best practice tips, based on my own experience, to help you overcome these issues.
Best Practices When Working With A Global Team
If you do go with a global team, here are some suggestions on how you can make that work:
1. Consider adding asynchronous (async) work to the mix.
As mentioned, one of the benefits of global remote teams is having customer support in different time zones. Async work—employees working on their own time, relatively uninterrupted—makes a lot of sense; however, for work that doesn’t require close contact with clients or teammates: The evidence shows that it allows for a degree of focus and depth that is not otherwise achievable.
2. Implement a robust remote onboarding strategy.
Onboarding employees remotely is not the same as doing it in person. You need to have a program in place to make sure that mentorship and team-building translate into a remote setting: Virtual coffee breaks and team-building exercises are a good way of doing this.
3. Don’t neglect the benefit of in-person meetups.
With a global remote team, it is still important to meet up in person from time to time. Now that the pandemic is over, my company meets in person at least once per quarter, whether in Berlin, Shanghai, Singapore or somewhere else. This sets up work relationships well to be further developed in a remote-first context.
The Whole-Of-Business Benefits Of Remote Work
Remote-first isn’t just about reorienting your people/HR function. It’s a change in business philosophy, freeing your enterprise from one physical location and providing new opportunities for you to empower your own clients and customers. Through a remote, globally distributed team, you can support your customers better, no matter where they are based, and no matter where they seek to expand.
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