Employees at WordPress, Gitlab, and TopTal don’t work from the same physical location. Thus, these companies are completely remote – with workers spread across different continents and countries. The trend is rising – some companies have a percentage of their workforce remote, others are trying to go entirely remote. According to a survey by Zapier, 66% of workers in the US believe that physical offices will be obsolete by 2030. The evidence that remote work is gaining grounds is everywhere. One of the most important divisions that will need a complete overhaul to work well with remote teams is the human resource department.
Human resources managers are among the most important people in every organization. Right from talent search and hiring to employee compensation and management, their roles are enormous. Their jobs are complicated as well. They deal with different people from different departments, race, gender, varying personal and work issues, as well as career growth and work-life balance. Of course, they organize meetings in traditional organizations to know employees’ pain points. They consult employees on a one-on-one basis to assess work-life balance. But that is about traditional organizations.
So what happens when the people in your team are located on different continents, with varying time zones? I mean, remote and virtual teams. This pushes the responsibilities of an HR manager even further – with more complexities. Thankfully a lot of tools out there help remote managers and HR professionals deal with teams spread across different parts of the world.
However since remote work hasn’t been around for long, a lot of these digital tools still don’t get it. Some tools have solutions for time tracking, without a way to handle compensation, onboarding, employee management, and payroll. Others have built payroll applications without including onboarding, employee management, or any other thing else. The end result is that a typical remote company would need close to 10 tools to manage a small team. Apart from the complexities, a lot of time is wasted trying to get people on the same page.
These issues changed how we approach remote HR tools at RemoteTeam Inc. We’ve built a comprehensive remote team HR tool that handles payroll, employee management, onboarding, and compensation.
The many aspects of a remote HR tool
To solve all the HR problems of a remote team, HR tools need to come with triple or more edged swords, including:
- Employee compensation and payroll
- Productivity management
- Holidays & time off management
- Tax compliance
Employee compensation and payroll
One of the biggest issues remote teams face is how to deal with compensation and payroll. Beyond the time wasted every month trying to find the best way to pay remote teams, salaries moving from one platform to the other leads to unnecessary bank and interest rate charges. In the end, both the company and the employee suffers. Aside from payments, remote teams need to manage data of employee earnings and deductions, which all have to go hand in hand with local laws of the employees.
Remote Team Inc. has a complete payroll system to solve these problems for remote companies and remote hr managers. The platform is integrated with TransferWise to make sure that remote teams have access to a borderless bank account for salaries. Also, the payroll app handles employee pay records, deductions, local benefits, and more.
Managing productivity
It’s not easy to monitor remote employees to know if they’re working or spending time doing something else. That’s why we’ve integrated our platform with the time management app DeskTime. With this, employers can track their teams’ time and gauge productivity, which is needed to define an employee’s compensation.
Time off management
An important part of managing remote teams is handling their holidays and time offs. To do this, you need to have clear policies defining when employees can take time offs and whether time offs are paid or unpaid. Also, you need to make sure that each policy suites the remote employee in question. After all, they’re people located in different places with different time zones and seasons.
Tax compliance
As a remote employer, you can’t take one employment law and apply it everywhere. You’ll need information that helps you identify the local employment laws of your employees. Also, you’ll have to identify the laws that apply to any company that engages the services of an employee of the country and what you need to do to stay safe – which streamlines taxation and employee compensation.
What next for remote companies
If you’re looking to build a remote company, then Remote Team Inc. is a complete tool that will help you manage onboarding, payments, payroll, productivity, and time offs.
