Let’s consider a classic scenario: a global company with 250 remote employees raises $40M in a Series B funding round. The team is distributed and needs to expand quickly, and the company must significantly increase its market share
and valuation by the time the Series C round arrives.
I’m starting by emphasizing the importance of scaling your remote team. The lean startup years are behind you; now it’s time for aggressive growth. Someone needs to spearhead this expansion, right?
The obvious solution is to hire 100,500 recruiters from unicorn and FAANG companies, and you’ll be good to go. So, we hired them.
Recruiters have started generating a high volume of candidates, leading to an avalanche of interviews. It became apparent that there are so many interviews that top managers can’t keep up with their regular tasks. Newcomers do not understand what is happening, whom to approach (if the team is distributed situation could get even worse), and what to do. Long-time employees complain that the newcomer’s salaries are significantly higher. Yesterday’s team leader has become a department head and does weird things. A social media scandal erupted over a question asked to a candidate about their personal life. The support team can not keep up with equipment procurement. A contractor threatened to file a lawsuit due to misclassification. Everyone feels a sense of complete chaos and mess. That is the reality of startups and remote teams especially.
In the end, metrics seemed to be growing, but not in proportion to the team’s expansion. Employee engagement dropped, and the employee churn rate more than doubled. It isn’t fatal, but it is far from pleasant. Most importantly, it distracts from the product and customers.
This happened because scaling a team involves much more than hiring recruiters. Hiring is primarily about processes and infrastructure. To scale a company, you need to design basic processes and become accustomed to them on a small scale.
Here are several things you should do while you’re still in the A or late Seed round:
Start budgeting and planning expenses (or say hello to unexpected cash flow gaps).
Design the recruitment process: every person we hire should go through 1–2–3 stages. Here are the 2–3–4 key values we look for, and here’s where we document the results.
Teach managers and seniors how to conduct interviews. Create a simple guide. It might initially seem unnecessary since everyone is an adult, but you’ll soon realize it’s not.
Implement one-on-one meetings between all managers and their subordinates. And make sure these meetings are conducted regularly. It’s a very easy thing to implement, but extremely valuable – remember that in a distributed team newcomers cannot just turn and ask.
Create a knowledge base in Notion or Confluence. A super simple one with sections: a company guide for employees. Who to go to, where, and what the rules are.
Implement an HRIS (like CRM for employees). For 50–100 people, it costs $300–600 per month, but it significantly reduces data chaos, eases the operational burden on managers, and enhances transparency for employees.
Establish a simple process for employee onboarding and offboarding: what the manager and HR need to do a week before the start date, on the first day, on the 30th day, the 60th day, and the 90th day. When someone leaves, we follow steps 1–2–3, and who is responsible.
Conduct a monthly all-hands meeting to share news and answer questions. This will take just a couple of hours per month, but it significantly impacts engagement.
Implement performance evaluation: we set goals for everyone and evaluate them accordingly. It’s a simple coordinate system that helps with team manageability.
Conduct super-short, one-minute surveys: ENPS and engagement. Quarterly, for instance. It can be done using HRIS, Google Forms, or a Slack bot. Setting it up takes an hour. If there’s a deviation from the norm, it’s time to investigate.
Implement processes and automation in advance while you still have 50–100–200 employees. This will help prevent losing focus on your business, reduce errors, and facilitate faster growth.
Eugene, CEO & Founder at Tribune
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