Signs of a Work Burnout and How to Avoid Them

For many companies remote work has been a necessity during the pandemic. Despite all of this remote work experience a lot of them actually haven’t gotten up to making their first fully remote hire.

This can be quite a stressful experience because it’s a different way of bringing someone onboard and sometimes it’s not clear what you should look for in the interview process.

One of the most important things is to set clear expectations for your candidates about what remote means to you. This is especially important if you’re actually looking for a hybrid candidate because every company’s definition of hybrid is different. This means setting expectations on when you think that they should be in the office whether it’s once a month, a couple of days a week or even once a year to make sure the candidate understands and is willing to do that and avoid all of the later awkwardness if they can’t actually fulfil those expectations.

The second most important thing is making sure that you hire a candidate that aligns with your principles and values. This is different to hiring for cultural fit which can in turn lead to a lot of unconscious bias. Hiring a candidate that believes in what you do and has similar values to you is one of the best ways to make sure that they’ll work successfully and happily in your team.

Another tip is to find candidates with the right qualities whilst a candidate might be a perfect technical fit there are a range of other qualities that will make them a really good remote hire. Some of these qualities include trustworthiness empathy and good communication. A good remote work employee should also value autonomy and self-improvement when hiring remote. It’s also extremely important to consider the impact of time zones. This is particularly obvious when you’re hiring international candidates and you’ve got to think about how that will work with your team.

Do you have the capacity to work asynchronously? Would you expect everyone to work on the same time as your team? How will that help or hinder your customer base?

In some instances it can actually be a positive if you want to give 24-hour service hiring someone in completely the opposite time zone might actually make sense but it’s important that you think through these factors before taking on someone in a different time zone to yours.

Hiring remote can be challenging but as long as you ensure that you know what you’re looking for in a candidate and have the structures to support them it can be extremely rewarding as well.