At the hiring phase: Check their LinkedIn and public social media closely. If they have a recent startup or freelancing business listed on LinkedIn, ask them for details about it and how they ended it. For freelancers, I directly ask if they plan to continue freelancing and how they plan to separate the work.

As with all hiring, references are key. There's an art to getting an honest reference out of remote employee referrals, though. Don't neglect to follow up on reference checks. Be polite and professional, but don't hesitate to ask hard questions or ask for more appropriate references if they try to give you softball answers. Also have your hiring department follow up with the previous employer to confirm start and end dates. It's tempting for remote workers to stay on with their old employer for a few extra months, double-dipping both paychecks while they can.

Ask people why they want a remote position. There are many valid reasons to work remote, but having other obligations during the day is not one of them. For example, if someone wants a remote job so they can stay home and watch their toddler during the workday to save on daycare costs (actual answer from someone I interviewed) then they aren't going to be very productive. Make sure they can allocate a proper amount of time for focused work.

After hiring: Proper performance management is key. The important thing here is to treat on-site and remote employees the same with regards to performance management. Technically, there's no reason an employee down the hall couldn't also be sandbagging their performance while they work on a side hustle for 75% of the work week.

The biggest pitfall with remote employee performance management is the idea that people have a finite amount of work that can be finished early. Specifically, it's difficult when people get attached to the idea that the number of hours worked shouldn't matter as long as they get their work done. The flaw in this argument is that if your employees are running out of work before the end of the work week, you're not managing your backlog and roadmap effectively, or you're grossly overstaffed. Set the expectation that if someone finishes their sprint work by day 7 of a 10 day sprint, they need to spend those last 3 days taking on additional tickets or helping coworkers.

Watch out for people padding estimates, sandbagging, and playing other games to minimize their hours worked. Your job as an engineering manager is to make sure they're not worked too hard, but also ensure they're not sandbagging. Again, this isn't unique to remote employees, but in my experience remote employees have far more temptations to sandbag a little bit here and there that most people just can't resist. Don't nag, but let them know you're watching closely.

Most of all: You need to build mutual trust with the remote employees. Without watercooler conversations, shared lunch breaks, and other office mingling you need to make an effort to get to know people. I've found that the more you build a healthy personal connection with remote employees, the less likely they are to try to abuse the system. Be wary of anyone who insists on purely transactional communication arrangements with odd working hours that suspiciously never line up with anyone else's working hours. Also be wary of anyone who always has excuses for why they couldn't finish their work each week, but always rushes to be the heroic person saving the day when something goes wrong. The remote work abusers are always trying to make themselves look indispensable at key moments while dragging the team down on average. Don't let heroism overshadow underlying problems with someone's performance.