I am working on a project that will be needing more helping hands in a couple of months and so I will be building a remote team. Nothing big, I am thinking 1-3 people before the year is over. I was wondering if folks that went through this on the employer side, if they could give me some advice on how to approach it? Technical aspect, managerial, administrative...literally any input is welcome. For context I am building a SaaS/PaaS.
Respect people's character (introversion, ambition, flexible hours, prefers async), don't cheap out on hardware, spend some time and have pauses together - not so fond of the "team spirit" myself, but sometimes you lose the non-verbal and a more deep knowledge of the people. Onboarding is harder remotely: tool yourself, write documentation.
What you save on the physical office, spend on services for administration and management. Coworking places emphasize the distributed way of work. Instead of re-creating a physical office, build on the remote work strengths: hiring anywhere with competitive salaries, value objectives and not hours, get independent people with good command of language. Teambuilding has to turn from "sport activities" or "dinner together" to videogaming if people fancy, or book reading. On the other spending brief holidays together attending, or learning experiences. Employees may be super-fast learning 23 years olds, or 52 years old parents with lots of different connections and experiences. Your job is to enable them to do their best for you.
Ah, and be brave! What you're doing is a frontier experiment. Be very proud of what you do.