Last updated on June 26th, 2025 at 04:50 am
Fully distributed companies may become the norm in the foreseeable future.
This setup enables business owners to save money on office space, tap into the global talent pool, and attract great employees by offering them an opportunity to work remotely.
However, the flipside is hiring the right people, managing them effectively, and creating a healthy company culture when everyone works from the exact location is much easier.
If you have never managed a distributed workforce, you may underestimate how challenging it can be.
That’s why we want to share some advice on avoiding pitfalls when building a remote team…
- Offer Competitive Compensation
- Adopt “Equal Pay for Equal Work” Approach
- Decide What Kind of Company Culture You Want to Create
- Look for People Who Can Manage Themselves
- Add Several “Tripwires” to Your Hiring Process
- Use OSINT to Do Background Checks on All Candidates
- Understand the Distinction Between the Maker’s Schedule and the Manager’s Schedule
- Set Clear Expectations Regarding Responsiveness
- Use Project Management Software
Offer Competitive Compensation
Entrepreneurs often make the mistake of sourcing freelancers and employees in developing countries, paying them a few bucks an hour and expecting them to do great work for this paltry amount of money. There are several problems with this approach.
First of all, it significantly limits your pool of potential candidates. Now that people can seek opportunities outside of their local area, talented individuals have more options than ever. That remains true even if they are based in a developing country.
Secondly, it will almost certainly lead to employee retention problems, especially when retaining top performers.
You could attract young people just starting, older people who want to switch careers and desperate people who will take any job to pay the bills. However, they will leave the moment a better opportunity presents itself. And if they are any good at what they do, there will be many such opportunities!
Finally, the entire world is connected via the Internet, so it’s not like people in developing countries cannot look up the salary range for the same role in the country where your company is based.
Sure, they probably don’t expect to get paid the same amount, but if it’s 10x less than what you would have to pay someone in your own country, this discrepancy will likely lead to resentment.
If your employees resent you, they won’t put in any discretionary effort and will only do the bare minimum that they need to do to get paid. Needless to say, this is not conducive to delighting your customers!
That’s why we recommend paying people as much as you can afford to, not as little as you can get away with. It will give you an edge over your penny-wise but pound-foolish competitors regarding remote worker compensation!
Adopt “Equal Pay for Equal Work” Approach
It’s common for fully remote companies to consider a person’s location when calculating their compensation.
One of the most notable exceptions to this is ConvertKit, an email marketing company founded by Nathan Barry.
ConvertKit has standardized salaries for each role. For example, a software engineer living in Slovenia has the same salary as a software engineer living in New York.
We recommend adopting the same “equal pay for equal work” approach. You may not be able to pay your employees as much as ConvertKit does, but you can still create standardized salaries for each role.
After all, if the software engineer in Slovenia is doing the same work as the software engineer in New York, the former will not be happy if the latter gets paid several times more for it. This is a recipe for resentment.
Additionally, standardized salaries can help you avoid many other problems, such as unintentionally punishing people who are bad at negotiating, paying new hires more than early hires, all kinds of wage gaps, etc. Consider reading Nathan Barry’s Twitter thread if you want to learn more!
Decide What Kind of Company Culture You Want to Create
When it comes to company culture, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.
Some companies expect their employees to be obsessed with the company’s mission, be super responsible, and prioritize work above all else. This can work well for startups that have an innovative product or service and are pursuing explosive growth.
In other companies, employees only work 35-40 hours a week, aren’t expected to respond to emails and Slack messages immediately, and are encouraged to prioritize work-life balance. This can work well if you follow a proven business model and pursue slow but consistent growth.
You need to clarify what kind of company culture you want to create. That will make it much easier for you to find job candidates who fit what you have in mind!
Look for People Who Can Manage Themselves
Remote work isn’t for everyone.
Throwing shade on regular 9 to 5 office jobs has become fashionable, but that setup provides structure that employees often need to perform at their best.
Many people out there are good at what they do, have all the proper credentials, and look great “on paper” but would make terrible hires for a fully distributed company because they cannot manage themselves.
This ability to manage oneself is the most important trait you must look for in job candidates. You want to design your entire hiring process to select for it!
Add Several “Tripwires” to Your Hiring Process
One of the easiest ways to weed out unsuitable candidates is to add several “tripwires” to your hiring process:
- Have an application deadline – Post ads on popular job boards on the first day of the month and set the last day as an application deadline. Only consider applications that were submitted on time.
- Ask applicants to include a random word or phrase in their email subject line (e.g., “potato pancakes”) – Mention this requirement somewhere in the middle of your ad. Only consider applications that meet it.
- Give applicants a paid trial project – It should be something simple that can be done in a single evening (e.g., if hiring a writer, ask them to write a 500-word article). Provide them with instructions and give them a week to complete this project. Only the applicants who turn it in on time should pass to the next stage.
- Set up Zoom interviews – In addition to all the regular job interview questions related to that particular role, ask them about their projects. That can be anything from self-publishing a fiction book, building an app, running a YouTube channel, learning to knit sweaters, and teaching themselves French. Personal projects like that are substantial green flags because they indicate that the individual is self-motivated!
- Hire on a freelance basis first – Invite the most promising applicant to join your remote team as a freelancer so that you can see what it’s like to work with them. You can extend a proper job offer once you are sure they are a good fit for your company.
This hiring process will eliminate most people who cannot manage themselves. However, if someone like that still passes through, the cracks will show immediately.
We are all human. Everyone will run late, miss a deadline, and fail to respond promptly at some point if you work with them long enough. However, there’s a big difference between something like that happening once in a blue moon and a consistent pattern of behavior.
Suppose someone who just joined your team is showing up late to Zoom calls, taking ages to respond, missing deadlines, misunderstanding instructions, and constantly asking for special accommodations. In that case, it will probably not get better anytime soon, and it may be best to let them go!
Use OSINT to do Background Checks on All Candidates
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is gathering information about someone through publicly available sources such as their personal website, social media profiles, government records, etc.
You can learn the basics by watching this free 4.5-hour course on YouTube. Suppose you want to delve deeper into it. In that case, you can check out Jeff Minakata’s 10.5-hour premium course on Udemy and read the latest edition of Michael Bazell’s book “OSINT Techniques: Resources for Uncovering Online Information.”
It’s probably safe to say that most employers google the names of job candidates and look at their public social media profiles early in the hiring process. We recommend going beyond that.
Check if they have a criminal record, see if you can find anonymous burner accounts, and try to verify any factual statements that they made in their application. People who don’t work in IT tend to be terrible at personal operational security (OpSec), so it might only take you 15-30 minutes to uncover all kinds of crazy stuff.
OSINT can help you avoid unwittingly hiring anyone who has a dark past. You have a duty to protect yourself, your employees, and your business!
Understand the Distinction Between the Maker’s Schedule and the Manager’s Schedule
Paul Graham wrote a now-classic essay, “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule,” where he argues that there are two types of schedules:
- Maker’s schedule consists of large, uninterrupted blocks conducive to deep work
- The manager’s schedule consists of one-hour chunks conducive to meetings
According to Graham, people whose primary responsibility is to make things need to adhere to a maker’s schedule to do quality work. Meetings can be disastrous to their productivity because they require not just task switching but also context switching. Even a short meeting can ruin half a day!
This has important implications for business owners. You need to ensure that coders, designers, writers, video editors, and anyone in your company whose primary responsibility is to make things have as much uninterrupted time as possible.
You might feel like you should be scheduling regular meetings with your team members, but is that necessary? Using asynchronous communication channels like email makes more sense because people can respond to messages after deep work.
Of course, sometimes regular meetings are needed to move complex projects forward, but think carefully about whether that’s true or if you are just “checking in” because you feel like you should.
Hire people who are good at what they do, let them focus on deep work, and don’t bother them unnecessarily!
Set Clear Expectations Regarding Responsiveness
Setting clear expectations regarding responsiveness to emails and Slack messages is essential.
Otherwise, if everyone operates based on their assumptions instead of formal guidelines, it will inevitably lead to misunderstandings.
Tell your team that you expect them to respond to emails and Slack messages within 24 hours during the workweek, and don’t expect them to be responsive on the weekends. If someone’s job requires higher responsiveness, discuss that with them separately.
Also, if you find yourself in a crunch time and need people to get back to you and each other faster, it’s okay to change expectations regarding responsiveness temporarily. Just make sure that you communicate that!
Use Project Management Software
Project management software can help you drastically reduce email and Slack back-and-forth.
You want your team members to be able to see who’s working on what, the status of different tasks, and the deadlines for those tasks. Apps like Trello, ClickUp, Notion, Asana, and Airtable can all work well for this.
We also highly recommend hiring a project manager if you can afford to, especially if you aren’t a super organized person. Having someone whose sole job is keeping everyone on track can be a game changer regarding remote team productivity!
Want to Learn How to Build Sales Funnels That CONVERT?
Our co-founder Russell Brunson used sales funnels to take ClickFunnels from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than a decade.
He is now widely considered to be one of the top sales funnel experts in the world. Want to learn from him?
His book “DotCom Secrets” is the best place to start because it covers everything you need to know to build sales funnels that convert.
This book is available on Amazon with over 2,500 global ratings and a 4.7-star overall rating.
But you can also get it directly from us for free…
All we ask is that you pay for shipping!
So what are you waiting for? 🧐
Get “DotCom Secrets” for FREE!
P.S. Here’s What Readers Say About “DotCom Secrets”…
This is another great article! I just love your material & this article teaches us so much about remote teams. Great Job, Stephen
Thanks Thomas – glad you like it!
Bitrix24 is free and WAY better than Podio. Just FYI.