HR for Global Teams: The Things You Can't Google

If you're hiring across borders for the first time, you'll discover that the easy part is finding the people. The hard part is everything that comes after.

This is a short, honest list of the things you cannot just look up — because they're decisions, not facts.

Payroll: no, you cannot just "pay them through Stripe"

The three real options for paying someone in a country where you don't have a legal entity:

1. Contractor. They're self-employed; you send invoices. Fast and cheap. But: in most EU countries, if the worker is doing employee-shaped work (fixed hours, reports to a manager, exclusive arrangement), the tax authority can reclassify them as a misclassified employee — and back-charge you payroll taxes, social contributions, and penalties going back 2–5 years.
2. Employer of Record (EOR). A third party (Deel, Remote, Velocity Global, Workium for the markets we cover) hires them as an employee in their country, on your behalf. You pay the EOR a flat per-employee fee on top of the salary. Compliant, fast to set up, expensive at scale.
3. Establish a local entity. You incorporate in the country and run payroll yourself. Cheapest at scale, slowest to set up, biggest compliance burden.

The right answer depends on volume. < 5 employees in a market: EOR. > 20: entity. 5–20: it's a coin toss, but EOR usually wins for the speed and the lower management overhead.

Performance reviews work, but only if you do them properly

The biggest performance-review mistake is treating them as annual write-ups. They aren't. They are forcing functions that make sure managers actually have the difficult conversations they would otherwise avoid.

What actually works:

• Quarterly cadence, not annual. Annual lets too many problems calcify.
• Goals set at the start of the quarter, reviewed at the end. Not "performance" in the abstract — specific outcomes, on a 1–4 scale.
• Manager rates the work; employee rates the experience. Two-way. The single-direction review is theatre.
• Mandatory written feedback both ways. Verbal-only reviews are forgotten by next quarter.
• Calibration across managers. One manager's "exceeds" should mean the same as another manager's "exceeds". Without calibration sessions, you grade on the manager, not the work.

The "I don't know if I'm an employee or a contractor" trap

If someone joined as a contractor, kept working with you for 18 months, attends your team meetings, has a workium.co.uk email, and reports to a manager — they are an employee in the eyes of every European labour court, regardless of what the contract says.

Audit your contractor pool quarterly. For each one ask:

• Could they fire me as a client and lose < 30% of their income? (If no → employee.)
• Do they set their own hours and methods? (If no → employee.)
• Do they have other clients? (If no → employee.)
• Do they use your equipment / accounts? (If yes → employee.)

If three or four of those flag, convert them via EOR before the local tax authority does it for you.

What "remote-first" actually costs

The savings narrative is real but smaller than people think. Office costs are roughly 8–15% of headcount cost for typical knowledge workers. Going fully remote saves most of that — but introduces:

• Co-working stipends (€100–200 / employee / month is normal).
• Equipment refresh budgets (laptops, monitors, ergonomic chairs).
• Annual or biannual offsite costs (you have to bring people together physically — those who skip this lose cohesion within 18 months).
• Time-zone overhead. This is the biggest hidden cost. A team spread across UTC-5 to UTC+8 cannot have synchronous all-hands without somebody losing sleep.

Net? Remote-first is cheaper than office-based, but only by ~20–30%, not the 50–70% the early enthusiasts claimed. Don't budget on the wrong number.

The unglamorous tooling stack that actually works

Run a global team on:

• Shared docs (Google Workspace or Notion). Pick one.
• Async-first chat (Slack/Teams). Async by default. No notifications for non-urgent threads after 6pm local.
• Project tracker (Linear / Jira / ClickUp). One. Not "Linear for engineering and a Google Sheet for design".
• Calendar that shows everyone's working hours. Google Calendar working-hours settings cost zero and save dozens of meetings booked at someone's midnight.
• HRIS that handles multi-country payroll (BambooHR, Personio, Workium HR). Stop running it in Excel.

There is no clever trick to running a global team. There is just: pick a process, run it for a year, and improve it once you have actual data instead of opinions.