If you’re a business considering hiring remote workers from around the world, you’re right to feel a little apprehensive. Even the most inexperienced entrepreneur can foresee that it’s an undertaking that comes with a number of challenges. Yet, every day, scores of businesses rely on remote workers abroad to fill key roles.
Platform analytics from 2024 show that 43% of new cross-border hires were located in Europe, with North America and Asia also significant sources of international remote talent. Unsurprisingly, information technology took the top spot, with sales/marketing coming second and office/administrative support coming in at third.
That means it’s still worth the challenges that come with it. Today, let’s learn about some of them and also how to tackle remote worker challenges more effectively.
The Conflict With Labor Laws Can Be Frustrating
This tends to be one of the biggest challenges that comes with hiring in other countries. You may have set ideas when it comes to company culture and how you operate. However, you’ll often find these getting checked by labor laws depending on which country you’re hiring in.
You might think that culturally similar countries like Canada would be a good fit, but that isn’t always the case. As Remote, a global HR and payroll platform, notes, Canadian workers need to be informed about shift changes at least four days in advance.
A Canada employer of record (EOR) service can guide you on what’s possible and what’s not, but sometimes the law is the law. This can be extremely frustrating if you’re in one of those ‘fast-paced’ environments that juggle work between workers a lot. To make matters more complex, trying to bypass these laws is also risky.
Research shows that while many HR leaders claim confidence in their knowledge of international laws, 74% have still faced compliance issues, each costing an average of about $42,000 due to fines, back pay, or related penalties. As any good lawyer would tell you, that’s not a road you want to go down.
How Can You Work Around Labor Laws?
Your best option involves creating a culture where workers are motivated to prevent issues from happening in the first place. Educate them on how the remote work system creates challenges and incentivize ways within the law to keep operations running efficiently.
Distributed Leadership Is Always a Little Messy
Even in conventional office setups, leaders have to be on their A-game to bring out the best from their teams. When you decide to hire internationally, and your only interaction occurs via messages or video calls, that makes leadership way trickier.
Those decisions that could be made with a quick jump into the conference room now involve scheduling an online meeting. It may be nighttime for them, so you end up waiting 12 hours to deal with something that could have taken 5 minutes.
If you try to tighten things up and stress the importance of everyone being involved, then that can trigger other issues. If your remote employees are from places like Sweden or Norway, the culture clash with American corporate expectations can be huge.
What Can You Do To Improve Messy Remote Team Dynamics?
Sometimes, the best way to create a more conducive team culture would be to bring in a third party. Yes, you’d like to handle things in-house, but if you’ve already tried tightening things up, you probably need external help. There are many consultancy firms that can create a 180-degree change to a sluggish team, remote or otherwise, with a custom workflow for your business.
Intellectual Property Risks Are Real
While this challenge isn’t as common, it can be disastrous to your business when it occurs. For many businesses, their IP is the only X-factor that makes them unique and brings them customers. Thus, IP theft is often a business-killer when it happens.
What’s more, as Remote explains, IP protection strategies that typically work in your home country may not work in another. You’ll often have to make tough decisions in this regard.
For instance, would you be willing to pay an expensive cybersecurity company that claims they have great IP protection measures? Do you take the risk and hope no one notices the value of your IP?
What Can You Do To Protect Your IP?
While investing in good security is the definitive way to protect IP, there are other steps you can also take. For instance, one study found that switching to service-based revenue streams appears to help reduce the risk of IP theft. Apparently, even an increase of one standard deviation toward service-based options reduced revenue risk by around 24%.
Ultimately, hiring international workers is always going to come with some challenges, no matter how beneficial it is. As a business owner, you need to do it strategically to maximize the benefits. Any entrepreneur thinking of going this route should understand this. After all, you cannot expect to enjoy the benefits that it brings without seeing some minor hitches, can you?
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