The Affiliate's Guide To Hiring - Local vs Remote (4)
03-12-2017 12:30 PM
#1
manu_adefy (Veteran Member)
The Affiliate's Guide To Hiring - Local vs Remote
The Affiliate's Guide To Hiring - Local vs Remote
LOCAL VS REMOTE
Affiliate marketing, and most work that has to do with digital products, allows for remote work much better than other jobs and team structures. In this part, I want to touch on the pros and cons of local vs remote teams, and then give you my suggestions as to what I prefer and why.
COMPANY CULTURE
Local - when you work with a local team, your communication should be better. It has been well researched that body language and facial expressions is a big part of communication; you can make yourself understood by your team better and you can also get feedback much quicker. If you do have a local team or would like to know more about non-verbal communication, I recommend reading “Emotions Revealed” by Paul Ekman.
A big pro for local teams: you can drive the team spirit. When times are tough, positive energy and optimism can be quite contagious. If you are a person capable of instilling positivity into others, you will have a much better ROI on this skill with a local team.
Remote - heaps of progress made in team communication tools (Slack FTW!). You can have very good quality video calls from many places around the world. That said, many things get lost, and you won’t have video calls that often - you end up not using the advantages of remote work if you spend all your time on video. You also don’t know how the other is reacting to your message. You can also run into issues of availability - something you consider urgent is not considered as important by the other party and you wait 10 mins for a reply, when you think it should have been instant.
Funny tip: It’s hard to communicate certain nuances through text. Honestly, although it seems “unprofessional”, I do like throwing gifs around in Slack talks. A picture is worth a thousand words… Imagine how much a gif can say!
ACCESS TO TALENT
Local - you are quite limited in the talent pool, depending on your area, or your ability to convince people to relocate. You also compete with all the biggest companies in your area. You generally have a worst supply of talent.
Remote - You can hire from anywhere in the world; a clear example for my situation - I live in Vienna, Austria, where there’s somewhat of a shortage of coding talent, or better said, there’s always very high demand. This ratio gets worse as you go more in Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, like Romania, Bulgaria for example, programming is considered one of the best occupations by the youth. There’s also very little competition for the best talent. A small business in Western Europe can generally afford to pay someone from Eastern Europe a very nice salary and get an extremely talented and hard working programmer.
Overall, when you can choose your team members from anywhere in the world, you are much more likely to discover future rockstars.
WORKFLOW
Local - It’s a known workflow for most employees - come to the job for a certain amount of time, and leave when you are done, disconnecting almost completely from the job. They have to think less about how to organize their time since the office hours means they have fewer options to get stressed out by. You may not have heard this but there is such a thing as having too many options.
Remote - Employees have more freedom but also more responsibility. You usually need a different personality than your standard 9-5 worker. You also have less control over their day to day activities during “work hours”... but you also have fewer chances to micromanage them.
COSTS
Local - You have to pay at or above market salaries for your area… If you live in a cheap place, that is probably a pro. If you live in a more expensive city, you might not be able to afford to hire anyone locally.
Remote - Generally cheaper, unless you live in a very cheap city already. You also can have freelance contracts instead of paying a regular full time employment. This means less work on the administrative side for you because the employee has to pay their insurance and taxes themselves. Costs also get lower if you don’t have an office.
FLEXIBILITY
Local - You usually have an office and have to commit to it for a certain amount of time. Coworking spaces can come in handy here.
You are also less flexible yourself since you have to be a minimum amount of time in the office. In general, a local team is a more rigid structure.
Remote - Total opposite, the most flexible and with least commitment. It can grow to be chaotic though if everyone is a nomad and there are not enough SOPs in place.
MY PREFERRED APPROACH
It doesn’t have to be black or white actually. One very good approach is to try and build a hybrid where you try to take as many pros from each side while minimizing the cons.
I like the flexibility of a remote team. I know if someone would tell me to be in an office 9-5, 5/7, I would not be able to do it. I prefer to get things done when they have to get done, and also to have the option to take time off whenever nothing vital needs to be done. That’s why my hybrid system is more remote.
To solve the cons in company culture, you should meet at least the key team members a few times a year, and if possible at least once a month. The closer you work together and the more important their roles, the more you should have in person interaction. That is, at least to begin with. Someone who you’ve worked with for many years probably already knows what you are thinking, you don’t need to meet that often.
When it comes to talent, compare everywhere, and hire locally where better for you. Key position, better qualifications needed, less search time… Whatever criteria is important for you, decide without thinking local or remote first - always ROI.
Whether local or remote, I prefer a more “remote like” workflow, without fixed office hours unless 100% necessary. Most interaction would also be kept online, to aid this flexibility. People should be used to working a certain way without “the boss” looking over their shoulder.
We are currently a mostly remote team; 3 of us are based in Vienna. We don’t have an office. Other team members are in Austria, Romania, Philippines. The 3 of us are the key people and we meet twice a week at least. Everyone travels wherever they want, nobody is stuck in their location. Work gets done through Slack and Asana. If our team would grow significantly (~3x in size or more), it’s highly likely that at least a part of the team would have a local office.
Once you grow and you have people who have to work closer together on certain aspects of the company, a delay of 1 day because of timezone or miscommunication can delay a project for days. The compounding effect of small misunderstandings is greater when you are bigger, so at that point you should think of creating some local hubs for the part of the operations that require it. Going back to the team structure, you want a local office for the units that work together the most.
You can then plan with certain things being available at exact hours. It’s sometimes possible to keep this part remote but it’s very tricky. I think a hybrid that adds more local characteristics are better than forcing remote work.
Great post.
Trying to get people physically in the same place as you even if they're remote workers is a great tip, and one I'd almost always try to arrange unless I was just hiring someone for a one-off contract.
Both when I've been consulting and when I've been hiring other people, having at least some face time has massively improved the chances of success in a remote arrangement.
As a side note on tools, I'd heartily recommend video calls over voice calls if you can manage it, at least for small two or three person conversations. As Manu says, humans work on body and facial language a lot - problems get a lot smaller and communication a lot tighter if you can see the other participants' faces.
However, on larger group calls, voice is the only practical thing.
(As a side-side note, if someone key on your team has a crap mic or headphones, buying them a decent headset will be amongst the highest ROI investments you ever make. 
)
Oh for sure - good headset, and even a good laptop if needed, it makes sense.
Overall, one should not get stuck into thinking that if something is useful for the person privately as well (not just for their job) you shouldn't be the one buying it as an employer. The focus should be on the ROI of it on the business, and if it helps the employee privately too, all the better.
I'll try to touch on all this in a future part, after dealing with the hiring process. Keeping employees is just as important as hiring, if not more
Originally Posted by manu_adefy
MY PREFERRED APPROACH
Whether local or remote, I prefer a more “remote like” workflow, without fixed office hours unless 100% necessary. Most interaction would also be kept online, to aid this flexibility. People should be used to working a certain way without “the boss” looking over their shoulder.
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