Five fronts that People must organize when the remote team starts to expand, and who to resolve them with in LATAM.
A work team of ten people in the same city solves almost everything without anyone planning it. Informal balance works at the beginning. But most startups when they start to grow need to incorporate new talent, regardless of where those people live.
Hiring remotely offers many possibilities but also brings major challenges when the team grows in different countries. The team ceases to have a physical center and starts to have structure, distributed people, and processes that used to rely on being close. People takes charge of tasks that did not exist as such before.
At First Plug we handle part of that journey, the hardware, and that is why we see it up close. The laptop is the most visible part, but it is rarely the only one that gets complicated.
What changes when a team grows beyond an office or a city?
When a team grows beyond an office or a city, five fronts that were previously resolved by proximity change: the formalization of hiring, payment, work equipment, space, and benefits. None is new, but they all go from being an informal procedure to needing a process, a responsible person, and, often, external help.
Front | When everyone is in one city | When the team is distributed | Who usually takes charge |
|---|---|---|---|
Formalization | A single legal and tax framework | A different framework for each country | People, Legal, or Finance |
Payment | Local transfer in one currency | Multiple currencies, means, and commissions | Finance |
Equipment | Delivered by hand | Purchase, import, shipping, and tracking | IT, People, or the founders |
Space | The office | Home, coworking, or a combination | People |
Benefits | Those provided by the office: lunches, events, the space itself | They must be replaced with something that reaches everyone | People |
What do you do with the office when the team no longer lives nearby?
If most people work from home but some need a place to focus or meet, a fixed lease no longer makes sense. Desky proposes another path: a network of coworkings in LATAM that are booked based on usage (day pass, meeting rooms, or private offices), with a budget per person or per team and centralized billing.
How do you offer benefits to a distributed team?
What an office used to provide without a second thought doesn't reach someone working thousands of miles away, and setting up a different program for each country doesn't scale. Maslow solves this with credits: the company loads them for each person (for tenure, birthdays, or recognition) and everyone uses them in a catalog of discounts and benefits available in 25 countries. This way, someone in Bogotá and someone in Montevideo receive the same treatment without People having to design two programs.
How do you get paid and make payments in multiple countries?
When there are clients, suppliers, and teams in different markets, every movement of money has its own complexity: currencies, methods, fees, times. Payoneer offers accounts to receive payments in multiple currencies, with local bank details to share with clients and marketplaces, and allows you to pay collaborators and suppliers from that same balance or withdraw to a bank account.
How are legal and accounting matters resolved when operating with a US entity?
Raising capital in dollars usually involves establishing an entity in the US, and with it comes accounting, taxes, and compliance. Lazo takes care of that back office remotely: incorporation, EIN, address and registered agent, accounting and taxes, and a data room to have documents ready when an investor appears. It is always advisable to validate the rules of each country with local advisory.
How is hardware managed for a team spread across multiple countries?
With a distributed workforce, the laptop stops being just "the computer that everyone uses." A Wednesday hire starting on Monday pops up, and someone has to validate budget and vendor, coordinate an international shipment, configure the machine and enroll it, with customs and potential delays in the process. Then come inventory, support, replacements, and offboardings: the laptop of the person leaving must be returned, securely wiped, and reassigned or decommissioned.
Resolving this with an in-house IT department means adding people solely for that purpose. At First Plug, we manage the complete hardware lifecycle for remote teams with our own operation: our own infrastructure, warehouses, and staff in the countries where we deliver. Today, we reach more than 170 countries, with over 3,500 devices delivered and more than 2,000 employees equipped. To get started, you can quote equipment and shipping at quotes.firstplug.co and receive the total cost within 24 hours. You can see how we do it in our IT onboarding guide for HR and OPS.
Conclusion
A distributed team is not improvised from an office setup, but it almost always starts that way. What used to work by proximity needs processes, designated owners, and external help when people are in different cities and countries, and People teams are usually the ones carrying that transition without anyone having planned it.
The important thing is to look at all five fronts together from the beginning, rather than one by one as problems arise. For each one, there are startups in the region that are already doing it well, and knowing who to talk to saves time.
This article is inspired by what Paisanos and Desky have already shared about the partner stack for LATAM startups. Thank you for opening the conversation.
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