Hire Local

Here’s something that I wish someone had told me when I started hiring employees: Hire local. There’s a lot of things that are different when you go from a one-person company with occasional contractors to a company with employees. Managing them is going to be a lot easier since you can talk to your employee in person and get things done a lot more quickly than playing email tag or trying to coordinate your schedules to meet over iChat, not to mention issues if they’re in another time zone.

Managing people is at its core about communication. While some things like sending out notices can be done through email, and IM works pretty well for updating people through the day, there’s a lot that works best in person. You should be having a weekly one-on-one meeting with each employee, and that works best face-to-face. There’s also giving feedback on work they’ve done, discussing goals and performance, and working out plans and schedules for the future.

I used to prefer communicating virtually, and still do most of the time, because we can have flexible hours and work from anywhere. But there’s still some things that work better in person. I’m still working out a good schedule, but typically once or twice a week is what I find good for in person meetings, if possible.

There’s also a ton of labor laws, insurance, and taxes you have to handle, and if your employee is in another state, it just makes everything twice as hard. This is where I highly recommend using a payroll processing company such as Paychex or ADP. They know this stuff and can point out areas to watch out for, and they’ll do a ton of work such as calculating payroll taxes and filing returns. Even if you think you can do those taxes yourself, the risk of making an error or not keeping up with the changes in the tax codes makes outsourcing this task worth spending about $80 per month.

If you have an employee in another state, you have to comply with that state’s laws on unemployment insurance, disability insurance, workers comp, payroll taxes, and any other laws they decide apply to you as an employer. You have to file taxes in both your home state and the employee’s home state. And also make sure you’re not withholding too much or too little.

If you’ve never had employees before, everything is going to be much easier if you can regularly meet and talk to your employees in person. Not only is the employee having to learn new things and get up to speed, you as a manager have to learn many new things, about not only yourself and about the employee, but also about managing people. When you’re not there in person, it’s too easy for things which need to be addressed to go unnoticed. Even both you and the employee are stellar workers, who can get things done on their own, lack of communication can result in lots of wasted effort because the two of you end up going in different directions.

So hire local people, work with them in person, especially when you’re starting out, have weekly one-on-ones, and keep the lines of communication open.