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- what nobody tells you about building a global team
what nobody tells you about building a global team
the mistakes most teams make when they start hiring across borders and what to do instead
👋 Welcome back to All Things Remote: weekly tips for building a better remote team.
There's a version of going global that looks great on paper, you find great talent in another country, the cost is lower, the skills are there, and the time zone works out fine.
Six months later, that hire feels disconnected from the rest of the team, comms are patchy and you're not quite sure how it fell apart (this bit is more common than most founders admit).
In today's send:
✅ What actually matters when your team starts hiring across borders
✅ The management gap 75% of remote leaders have
✅ What keeps global teams together and what quietly pulls them apart
I'd love to know 👇️
Has your remote team hired internationally? |
Top reads this week:
How to manage remote teams effectively.
Building a remote team culture: a practical playbook.
In other news,
Global hiring doesn't come with a playbook. Join Oyster's webinars and events to learn how leading companies are hiring, expanding, and staying compliant across borders.
Here's something that surprises most leaders.
Fully remote workers are actually the most engaged employee group. But Gallup found those same remote workers are the least likely to be thriving, reporting higher rates of stress, loneliness and burnout than hybrid or on-site colleagues.
Engaged but struggling is often the gap that most leaders miss.
In an office, connection happens passively. People notice when someone's having a bad day, grab lunch together, bump into each other between meetings.
In a global remote team, none of that happens by accident and most leaders don't replace it with anything intentional…
The management gap 👇️
The majority of people leading distributed teams are doing it with skills built for offices.
The best remote leaders notice when someone has gone quiet as they create space for conversations that don't naturally happen over Slack.
They build connection deliberately, because it won't happen any other way.
Where most global teams go wrong 👇️
Two things consistently create friction.
The first is onboarding. Remote onboarding done well increases retention by 82%, but done badly, you’ll have people who spend their first weeks figuring out how things work and quietly wondering if they made a mistake.
The second is time zones. 30% of companies have recently switched from offshore to nearshore hiring because they needed real-time collaboration. The cost savings from hiring 10 time zones away is often outweighed by the coordination cost and the burnout of team members asked to work odd hours to cover the gap.