> 1) Managing time zones for your remote employees
A good rule of thumb is no more than nine time zone span across the company. Anything more than that becomes unbearably difficult to manage.
> Your remote employees may experience severe loneliness
One way my fully remote team tries to solve this is that each meeting starts with each person getting a chance to talk about something not work related. It takes up time, but it's worth it. It can be anything, like a TV show they just saw, or asking for advice on how to fix their broken car.
Each one-on-one starts with asking what they did over the weekend or since the last one-on-one. If the answer I hear is "worked the whole weekend", I made a point of encouraging them to do something other than work. I also try to set a good example by always having something that I did that wasn't work.
> Thank you, Texas, for $2000 in late fees for a business tax I had no way of knowing even existed.
Yep, I feel that one. We got hit at one point with a $5,000 fine from the State of New York for not getting insurance that we didn't know we had to get. Luckily we were able to prove that it wasn't necessary since our employee in NY was a co-founder, and the rule didn't apply to business owners.
Because if you want to have a meeting during working hours, the work day is about 9 hours long. So at worst someone may have to stay an hour longer than usual or come in an hour early. Anything beyond that means that someone is working well outside normal working hours.
It's a rule of thumb, not a hard limit. If you have someone in a time zone 12 hours away who likes to work at odd hours all the time, then great, go for it!
It has nothing to do with SF. The rule applies just as well if you are based in Eastern Europe. You can work with the US East Coast and you can work with India and South/East Asia, but don't expect to have people in the US West Coast and Australia at the same time.
In my experience you want overlap - don't go over 5 timezone spans if you want people to be able to communicate with each other in any synchronous form (e.g. Slack)
A good rule of thumb is no more than nine time zone span across the company. Anything more than that becomes unbearably difficult to manage.
> Your remote employees may experience severe loneliness
One way my fully remote team tries to solve this is that each meeting starts with each person getting a chance to talk about something not work related. It takes up time, but it's worth it. It can be anything, like a TV show they just saw, or asking for advice on how to fix their broken car.
Each one-on-one starts with asking what they did over the weekend or since the last one-on-one. If the answer I hear is "worked the whole weekend", I made a point of encouraging them to do something other than work. I also try to set a good example by always having something that I did that wasn't work.
> Thank you, Texas, for $2000 in late fees for a business tax I had no way of knowing even existed.
Yep, I feel that one. We got hit at one point with a $5,000 fine from the State of New York for not getting insurance that we didn't know we had to get. Luckily we were able to prove that it wasn't necessary since our employee in NY was a co-founder, and the rule didn't apply to business owners.