How to Build a Remote-First Team: Key CEO Strategies
June 12, 2025
If you’re a founder building something fast, chances are you’ve already felt the limits of hiring only within your own city. At some point, you look around and realize the best people for your next stage of growth may be nowhere near your HQ, if you even have one.
Remote teams have become one of the biggest strategic advantages available to founders today. But leading a distributed team isn’t simply “letting people work from home.” It’s a shift in how you think, how you communicate, and how you build your company. It’s leadership, redesigned.
This guide breaks down what actually works, based on what fast-growing companies do, what remote-first teams have learned the hard way, and what we’ve seen through our work at Fronted helping startups hire and operate globally.
Once you hire beyond your local area, you realize how much talent you were missing.
Access to talent
You’re no longer limited to who lives within 30 minutes of your office. You get the best person, not the closest person. In our article on hiring specialized talent, we talked about how high-skill roles often live outside traditional tech hubs. Remote hiring solves this problem instantly.
Access to speed
Being able to hire across regions, languages, and time zones lets you scale faster than your competitors, who are still limited to local markets.
Access to cost efficiency
Office leases, overhead, and “forced presence” culture are expensive. Redirecting that capital into product, hiring, and growth often produces better results.
Access to a better employee experience
Remote teams report more autonomy, less commuting stress, and, in many cases, higher productivity. But that doesn’t happen automatically. It happens when founders build the right systems.
A remote team only works when people know exactly how things work.
At Fronted, we focus on documentation:
Good structure gives your team space to actually do their best work. Clear expectations remove friction, and friction kills remote teams faster than anything else.
This is where many founders get it wrong.
A candidate can be brilliant and still fail in a remote environment if they lack:
During interviews, ask questions like:
Skills get someone in the door.
Remote-readiness determines whether they thrive.
3. Focus on how your team talks to each other
Most founders think communication = tools.
Slack. Zoom. Notion. Loom.
But tools don’t create alignment. Habits do.
High-performing remote teams create communication rules of engagement, including:
If you don’t define these expectations, everyone invents their own and collaboration collapses.
Remote teams succeed when communication is intentional, not accidental.
4. Create culture through how you work, not what you offer
Culture isn’t trivia nights or virtual happy hours (though those help).
Culture is:
In remote teams, culture is not “caught”, it’s built.
This is why remote culture appears repeatedly in our remote-work and hiring guides: it’s the center of everything. A strong remote culture makes distributed teams feel connected, seen, and trusted even miles apart.
Remote work fails when founders manage presence instead of performance.
Great remote leaders:
People don’t need to be watched. They need clarity and autonomy.
Remote onboarding is more than paperwork.
A great onboarding program includes:
The first 10 days shape whether someone feels connected or lost.
Founders who invest in onboarding build teams that stay longer, ramp faster, and perform more confidently.
Remote burnout is real. Not from working less—but from working all the time.
Founders should set the tone by:
Healthy teams perform better. Burned-out teams eventually leave.
The Mistakes Founders Make (And How to Avoid Them)
Mistake 1: Treating remote like office work but online
Remote work requires rewriting how work happens, not copy-pasting in-person habits.
Mistake 2: Ignoring asynchronous communication If everything needs a meeting or real-time conversation, burnout is guaranteed.
Mistake 3: Hiring people who aren’t remote-ready
Skills aren’t enough. They need independence and communication mastery.
Mistake 4: Not integrating remote employees with in-office employees
Hybrid must be intentional. Otherwise, remote employees become the “other team.”
Mistake 5: Underestimating compliance
Hiring internationally without support is risky. This is why many founders use an Employer of Record, like Fronted, to stay compliant while growing across borders.
Fast-growing companies often partner with Fronted because remote hiring creates two challenges:
Fronted solves both, by acting as an EOR, helping founders hire, onboard, pay, and support international employees quickly and safely.
We often say this: Remote hiring works when compliance doesn’t get in the way of great talent.
Fronted exists to remove that friction.
Look for:
If those are increasing, your remote systems are paying off.
If not, it’s a signal to revisit expectations, communication, or culture.
Remote work isn’t just a trend, it’s a structural shift in how companies grow.
Founders who embrace remote work proactively:
Remote success doesn’t happen by accident.
It’s built through clarity, trust, systems, and leadership.
If you want help building a global remote team that actually works, Fronted can support you with compliant hiring in countries where you don’t yet have a presence, so you can hire the best, not just the closest.
Fronted helps founders hire, onboard, and support remote employees worldwide, without opening entities or taking on unnecessary risk. Reach out to learn more.
