How a PEO can help you manage a remote team

The rise of remote work, both during and post-pandemic, has provided many advantages to employers, including access to a bigger talent pool, cost savings, increased productivity, and the ability to offer flexible work arrangements. Organizations that are thriving are able to do so because they’ve adapted their business practices to suit a distributed workforce. While this comes with many benefits, it also creates some new challenges—namely, for HR teams.

A professional employer organization, or PEO, can help your human resources team overcome the obstacles of managing remote employees. PEOs specialize in HR management, payroll, benefits, and compliance services. They take over administrative tasks like onboarding new hires and running payroll so companies can focus on more strategic activities. 

In this guide, we’ll explore the challenges remote work has posed for HR teams and detail the ways in which a PEO can help your team overcome these obstacles.

The challenges of remote work for HR teams

HR departments manage many important, complex tasks, ranging from putting together competitive benefits packages that meet employee expectations to fielding questions about health insurance and company policies to onboarding new hires. The rise of remote work has created more complexity for HR teams and made performing these responsibilities even more challenging. 

Below, we’ll discuss three major ways remote work has affected HR professionals and how PEOs can be a potential solution.

Onboarding a distributed workforce

The rise of remote work has given employers access to a wider talent pool, allowing them to hire candidates from other states and even other countries. While expanding a company across state and international borders offers many advantages to business owners, it has also created challenges for HR teams in terms of onboarding.

Unfortunately, the tools that used to work for in-person onboarding aren’t especially useful when the employee can’t come into the office. So, HR teams have had to find new solutions to coordinate virtual onboarding across different time zones. Communicating effectively with a remote team is already a tough task. When you add factors like different time zones causing delayed responses into the mix, it makes getting things done even harder. 

Additionally, HR professionals are now often responsible for remote device management, which means ensuring team members in other states or countries have the right tools to perform their jobs, often requiring complex logistics—for example, shipping a company laptop to a country where it needs to clear customs.

Compliance with local laws

Another issue when you’re hiring a remote workforce in other states and different countries? You need to comply with a whole new set of labor laws. 

Each country and state has its own laws concerning pay transparency, minimum wage, overtime, meal breaks, and paid leave. 

Below is a short list of the major areas of compliance HR professionals must adhere to when hiring workers from different states and nations:

• Federal and state labor and employment laws, especially laws concerning pay transparency, minimum wage, overtime, meal and rest periods, and paid leave
• Workers’ compensation insurance
• Unemployment insurance
• Registrations, licenses, and certifications to operate in a different state or country and, in some cases, licenses to work from home, especially for freelance or part-time workers
• Federal and local taxes, including income tax and differing rates for employee and employer tax contributions
• Employment eligibility verification, including differing requirements for proving the right to work, depending on where the employee and employer are located
• Employment law posters and digitally delivering the right ones to employees based on where they live and work

Company policy updates

Creating and maintaining company policies is a crucial HR function. HR policies and procedures help shape company culture, ensure the business remains compliant with federal and state laws, and define employees' and managers' rights, responsibilities, and expectations. 

Writing and updating your company policy for a remote workforce—especially when everyone previously worked on-site—requires a lot from HR professionals. The best policies take into account factors like opportunities and risks in a business’s external and internal environments, how HR policies at the company could be strengthened, the legal and regulatory requirements a business needs to follow in their industry and location (or locations), and best practices for a remote workforce. HR managers often spend months conducting analyses and benchmarking exercises to create company policies. 

And updating policies also requires effective communication: You not only need to tell employees about the changes but ensure they see the email or attend the relevant meeting and understand the messaging. Effective communication can be challenging when meetings aren’t taking place in person and when you take different laws, time zones, and even languages into account.

How a PEO can make managing a remote workforce easier

Post-pandemic, PEOs have been instrumental in helping small and medium-sized businesses, as well as startups, adapt to the remote work age, including offering new tools for managing remote employees. By outsourcing some of your company's administrative tasks to a PEO, you can relieve some of the pressures and challenges of managing a distributed workforce—and free up your in-house HR team to focus on more strategic work. Here’s how.

Onboard remote hires quickly 

A PEO can help you seamlessly and quickly onboard remote hires virtually by giving you a centralized location to store and access key documents for work eligibility, taxes, benefits enrollment, and more. This makes it easy for HR teams and remote employees alike to find what they need, speeding up the enrollment process and simplifying communication.

Furthermore, a select few PEOs can handle remote device management for you, taking care of everything from shipping devices to different states and overseas to troubleshooting problems. Top PEOs go even further by addressing your IT needs with app management, letting you add the apps and platforms your company uses to a centralized hub so you can easily connect them to new employees’ devices.

Effortlessly comply with local taxes and laws

PEOs make it easy to comply with federal, state, and local tax requirements and varying employment laws. 

When you work with a PEO, it handles registering for and maintaining your state and local payroll tax accounts. Modern PEOs also calculate everything from hours worked to tax deductions when running payroll—meaning your HR department won’t need to spend time on these calculations. Plus, your team will have the peace of mind that you’re complying with all the necessary regulations for the tax jurisdictions you’re operating in. 

PEO services also include developing and managing benefits packages for a remote team, with benefit plans built to support the needs of people living and working in different states. Moreover, the range of options they provide ensures you’re not only able to offer benefits that will attract top talent to your company, but that you comply with workers’ compensation laws that vary by state, the ACA employer mandate for health insurance, and other regulations.

Dedicated HR support

As your team adapts to the changing ways of doing business and your company policies are tailored to better manage remote employees, you may have questions about everything from creating a positive work environment to managing health plans across state lines. 

That’s why it’s helpful to have external HR professionals available to answer your questions and provide the information and support you need to successfully run your business. With Rippling PEO, you’ll have access to a team of HR advisors—experts who can give you advice on managing challenging personnel issues, handling claims, and much more.

The first to run on modern software, Rippling PEO makes it a breeze to seamlessly manage a distributed team. You’ll get access to big-company benefits for less, have your critical compliance tasks taken care of for you, and work faster and smarter by automating time-consuming administrative work.

Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for tax, legal, or accounting advice. You should consult your own tax, legal, and accounting advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.