The First 90 Days of a Remote Job in Nigeria | Sydicom
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The Nigerian Remote Worker's First 90 Days
Foreign employers commonly treat your first three months as a trial, whether or not anyone calls it probation. In that window you are judged less on talent than on whether you are easy to work with across a time zone, and on whether silence follows a power cut. Here is what those 90 days look like from a Nigerian desk, and how to come out of them still holding the job.
Getting the offer is the part everyone celebrates. The next three months are the part that decides whether your life actually changes, and almost nobody prepares for them.
It is common for a foreign employer to put a new hire on some kind of trial. It might be called probation, an initial term, a 90-day review, or nothing at all while everyone treats the first quarter that way anyway. Probation just means a fixed stretch at the start where either side can end the arrangement on short notice. It is normal, it is not an insult, and it cuts both ways. Whatever they call it, the same thing is happening underneath: they are deciding whether to keep you, and you are deciding whether this job is what the interview promised.
The onboarding document they send you was written for somebody whose electricity does not go, and it will not mention one thing on this page.
What actually happens in the first 90 days of a remote job?
The three months are not one long stretch. They break into three phases, and each one is judged on something different.
Window
What the company is quietly deciding
What you should be doing
Days 1 to 14
Are you real, reachable, and set up?
Get access to everything, learn names, ask the beginner questions now while they are still free
Days 15 to 45
Can you own something without being chased?
Take one small piece of work from first step to last, with nobody finishing it for you
Days 46 to 90
Do we keep paying for this?
Build a record of finished work and raise the conversion conversation yourself
One word in that table needs unpacking, because it will come up in every conversation about your future there. Converting means the moment they turn a trial into an ongoing arrangement. That is the decision the whole 90 days is pointed at.
Nobody will tell you which phase you are in. Managers often do not mention a review until it is nearly on top of you. If you wait to be told, you spend the first six weeks being pleasant and available and produce nothing anyone can point at in the meeting where your contract gets decided.
One way to hold it: in month one you cost them money and produce very little, which everybody expects and nobody minds. By month two your manager is fielding quiet questions from somebody above them about whether the hire worked. Month three is when one of them has to answer.
Why do the first two weeks matter more for a Nigerian hire?
Every remote employer, hiring anywhere, is asking one question in the first fortnight: will this person be where they said they would be. A manager in Toronto asks it about a hire in Toronto too. What is different in your case is that they have no reference point for how your setup works, so they cannot tell an ordinary bad morning apart from a pattern. That is a gap in their information rather than a verdict on you, and you close it the way any professional does, by being the one who says what is happening before anybody has to ask.
Which means most people here prepare for the wrong risk. The outage is not the problem. Everyone has outages, including your manager. The problem is the stretch of hours where nobody hears from you, because a colleague who logs on and sees nothing from you all through their morning will fill that silence with the worst version of it. The same colleague who finds one line saying the power is out, you are on your phone, and you will be back on the laptop by noon files it under normal life and forgets it happened.
Whichever of those two people you are by week three is what your manager will say about you in the review.
What should you sort out before day one?
Do not spend your first week discovering problems that your first payment has not arrived to solve yet. Most of this can be arranged in the gap between signing and starting.
What to sort
Why it matters in a remote job
The version that actually works
Power
A dead laptop mid-call is the failure they remember
An inverter sized for your desk rather than your house. A laptop, a router and a phone draw very little, so a small one that could not run a fridge will still keep you working for hours. A generator covers you between calls but not during them, because the noise carries down every headset
Internet
Your main line will fail on the day it matters
A second SIM on a different network, topped up and tested. Outages are usually one operator in one area, so the second line is the whole point. Buy it now, not during the outage
Data budget
Video calls eat a plan fast
Buy a monthly bundle rather than weekly top-ups, and keep a separate bundle on the backup SIM that you never touch except in an emergency. Running out of data mid-quarter is an avoidable way to look unreliable
A place to sit
Background noise reads as disorganisation
One corner, one plain wall, decent light on your face, and an agreement with the household about the door before your first call, not after it
Headset
Bad audio makes people stop asking your opinion
A basic wired headset with a mic beats laptop speakers every time
Documents
Onboarding stalls on paperwork you do not have
Clean scans of your identification and proof of address. Proof of address is where Nigerians usually stall, because the bill is in a landlord's or a parent's name. A recent bank statement showing your address normally clears it, so request one before you need it
Payment setup
The first payment is the one most likely to go wrong
Ask which route they use, because it decides what you have to open before day one. Then check that the name they will pay matches your account name letter for letter
On documents: employers hiring internationally usually work through an intermediary, and that intermediary verifies your identity and address before it can pay anybody. Exactly what they ask for varies by company and by country. Have it ready so you are not hunting for a bank statement on the day payroll closes.
If you are still serving. NYSC and a 90-day trial overlap badly, because clearance and community development day both fall inside hours your manager expects you online. Decide before day one which hours you can genuinely offer, put them to your manager in week one as a fixed schedule rather than as an apology, and do not try to explain the scheme to them. "I am unavailable on Thursday mornings until November and I make those hours up the same evening" is a sentence any manager anywhere understands. Sort it in week one, not at the first clash. We went through the wider question in NYSC and remote work.
Two definitions are worth having before your contract arrives, because they change everything about how money reaches you.
Employer of Record (EOR). A third party company that legally employs you in your own country on behalf of the foreign business. You sign with the EOR, the EOR pays you, and the foreign company pays the EOR. You are an employee, often with something resembling benefits, and deductions may be handled for you. Employer of record is the term to search when your contract names a company you have never heard of.
Contractor. You are a supplier, not staff. You invoice, you get paid, and everything else, including whatever you owe in Nigeria, is yours to manage. Plenty of the remote roles offered to Nigerians are contractor arrangements rather than employment. That is not a red flag by itself. It means nobody is handling the admin for you.
How do you handle power cuts and network failures without losing the job?
Build the ladder before you need it, and go down it in order.
Your inverter, sized to your desk rather than your house. If you are on a generator instead, start it before the call rather than during it.
Your phone hotspot on your main network.
The second SIM on a different network. People skip this one and it is the one that saves the day.
Somewhere else, and only if you can reach it inside about half an hour. In Lagos or Abuja traffic, a backup location an hour away is not a backup, it is a missed afternoon. Test the journey once on an ordinary weekday before you ever need it. If there is nowhere close enough, then the inverter is not optional.
Write the messages now, while nothing is wrong, so you are not composing them on four percent battery. Each one carries two things: what is happening, and when you will be back.
At the start of the problem: "Power is out on my end, I am on mobile data for now. Still on for the 2pm. Will flag if that changes."
If it is going to eat real hours: "Network is down in my area, I am moving to a backup location. Expect me online by 1pm WAT. The one piece of work due today is the only thing at risk and I will have it before end of day."
When you are back: "Back on properly. Today's work is done and in review. Nothing else slipped."
Notice what those three leave out. None of them explains the Nigerian power situation to a stranger, and none apologises more than once. Foreign managers do not want the context, they want to know what to expect and when. Long explanations read as excuses even when they are completely true, and they invite the exact conversation you are trying to avoid.
One more rule. Never let a bad day arrive as a surprise. If you know at 9am that today is going to be rough, say so at 9am. Say it at 9am and you are doing your job. Say it at 6pm and it looks like you were hoping it would fix itself.
What does good communication look like on a foreign remote team?
Most of the friction in month one is not about the work. It is about a working culture nobody explains, because everyone already inside it assumes it is obvious.
Async. Short for asynchronous. Work that does not need both people online at once. You write the full question, with context and what you already tried, and the other person answers when they get to it. The office habit of sending "Hi" and waiting for "Hi" back before asking anything burns a whole day when the other person is six hours behind you.
Standup. A short daily check in, often written rather than spoken. What you did, what you are doing, what is blocking you. Three lines, not a report.
A one to one. A recurring private meeting with your manager. This is where you raise problems, ask how you are doing, and eventually ask about conversion. It is not small talk, and walking in with nothing to say wastes the one meeting that is actually about you.
A ticket, or an issue. One tracked piece of work with a description and an owner. On many teams, work that is not in a ticket does not officially exist, which means nobody can see that you did it.
Blocked. You cannot continue until someone else does something. Saying you are blocked early is good practice, not weakness. Sitting blocked and quiet for two days is what gets noticed, badly.
Then there is the time zone arithmetic, worth learning once rather than recalculating every week. Nigeria runs on West Africa Time, one hour ahead of UTC, and does not shift for daylight saving.
Where the team sits
Roughly, against Lagos
What it means in practice
New York, Toronto
Five to six hours behind you
Their morning is your afternoon. You get quiet mornings, they get quiet evenings
San Francisco, Seattle
Eight to nine hours behind you
Almost no natural overlap. These roles are genuinely async, or they are painful
London
The same as you in British summer, one hour behind in winter
Effectively a normal shared workday
Berlin, Amsterdam
The same as you in winter, one hour ahead in summer
The same working day as you, give or take an hour
India
About four and a half hours ahead of you
Their afternoon is your morning
The practical version: on a US team, your best uninterrupted hours happen before their day starts, so protect them. On a European team you are effectively in the room with everyone, so responsiveness matters more and long stretches with nobody interrupting you are harder to find. Know which one you signed up for, because the habits that work on one are wrong on the other.
What are you actually being measured on?
Almost never brilliance, which is the thing new hires spend the most energy worrying about. In the first quarter, managers are watching five fairly ordinary things.
Do you finish, first of all. One small piece of work carried all the way to done beats three impressive things left sitting at ninety percent, because ninety percent is worth nothing to the person who has to pick it up after you.
Then there is chasing. The moment your manager has to ask twice about the same item, a note gets made somewhere, and it is not a good note. Send the update before it is asked for, including the weeks when the update is that it is still not done.
Asking early matters more than people expect. New hires stay stuck for two days out of pride and then deliver the wrong thing. A question on day one costs you nothing at all. The same question in week six, about something you should have raised in week one, costs a great deal more, because by then everybody assumes you understood.
Predictability is the quiet one. Being online when you said you would be matters more than the number of hours you put in. A colleague who is reliably at the desk from 10 to 6 is worth more to a manager than one who occasionally works until 2am and then cannot be found on a Tuesday afternoon.
The last one is writing, and it is the one Nigerians tend to underrate because we are used to being judged in person. Nobody on that team has met you. Your messages are the only evidence they have about how you think, and a first impression built on them is surprisingly hard to shift later.
None of that is about how good you are at the actual job. They already believe you can do the work, which is why they hired you. The trial is about the rest of it.
When does the first payment land, and what should you do about it?
Later than you think, and the reason is structural rather than sinister. Two things stack up. Your identity verification has to clear before payroll will touch your file at all, and most companies pay in arrears, meaning they pay you after the work rather than before it, on a fixed monthly cycle. Start in the middle of a month and your first payment usually covers a part month and arrives at the end of the next one. So the gap between your first day and your first cleared naira is routinely longer than a month, even when nothing goes wrong.
Get three dates in writing in week one: the invoice cutoff, the pay date, and when verification is expected to clear. A cutoff is the date after which nothing new gets paid until the following month, however small the amount. Miss it by a day and you wait for the next cycle. Then assume the first payment slips anyway, and do not plan rent around it.
If you are a contractor, also find out who approves the invoice and send it in a form they can actually pay. That means an invoice number you increment each month, the date, the period the work covers, one line per item, the total in the currency of your contract, your payment details exactly as they appear on the account, and a due date. Nigerian contractors get held up on one thing more than any other: the name on the invoice not matching the name on the receiving account, letter for letter. If you are on an EOR, find the payroll date and treat it as the earliest day money moves rather than a promise.
Then there is the stretch between their payment and your naira, which decides how much of the salary survives, how long it takes, and whether anything gets held for review. We went through the options in getting paid from abroad, and the account most remote workers end up needing in how to open and use a domiciliary account. Read both before your first payday rather than during it.
Two things to do the month the money lands, neither of them exciting.
Do not commit the whole figure to anything yet. Not rent, not a car, not a relative's project. You are three months away from knowing whether this renews, and converting an amount at whatever rate a single day gives you is not the same as knowing what you earn. Watch two or three cycles before you plan around a number.
And take the tax question seriously early. Income from a foreign company can still create an obligation in Nigeria, and the answer depends on your contract, your residency, and how you are engaged. This is not tax or financial advice, and a stranger on the internet is the wrong person to take it from. Talk to an accountant who has handled a remote contractor before, in your first month, while the sums are small enough that fixing anything is easy.
What does the 90-day review look like, and how do you prepare for it?
Sometimes it is a formal meeting with a document. Sometimes it is a manager saying "so, how is it going" and quietly making a decision while you answer. Prepare as though it is the first.
Keep a wins log from week one. One line per finished thing, with the date and the outcome. Two minutes every Friday. By week twelve you have a list, and a list is the difference between "it has been going well" and "I closed the migration, cleared the pile of unanswered support requests we inherited, and wrote the onboarding document the last two hires used." Nobody remembers month one by month three. Your notes do.
Bring a problem, not only results. A new hire who says everything is perfect sounds like someone not paying attention. One honest observation about something that could work better, offered without complaint, reads as ownership.
Ask the direct question, early. Near the end of month two, not the end of month three: "What would make you comfortable converting this to something longer term?" That gives them room to tell you what is missing while there is still time to fix it. Waiting for the review means hearing the answer after the decision.
Ask how you are being measured, if nobody has said. Plenty of small companies never define it, and the manager is going on feel. A question forces a real answer, and a real answer is something you can work towards.
What if the trial does not convert?
Sometimes it does not, and often it has nothing to do with you. Budgets get cut mid quarter, or the manager who fought to hire you leaves two months in and takes their plans with them. It happens to strong performers everywhere, and it happens in remote work too.
Do three things, in this order.
Ask for a written reference or a short public recommendation while the goodwill is still fresh. Two weeks later everyone is busy with someone else.
Ask what would have made the difference. Some managers dodge it. The ones who answer honestly are handing you the thing you need for the next role.
Then move quickly, because your CV has never been stronger than it is in that exact week. You have foreign remote experience, a real reference, and proof you can work across a time zone, which is the profile the next employer is filtering for. It fades if you spend four months feeling bad first. Rewrite the CV around what you actually did in those three months, tailored per role instead of sent out as one generic file, which is the job our Custom CV tool does, and start looking on Sydicom the same week.
Which mistakes end a good remote hire early?
The mistake
What it looks like from their side
Do this instead
Going quiet during an outage
Unreliable, possibly not serious
One line at the start, one when you are back
Waiting to be told what to do
Needs managing, expensive
Pick the smallest unfinished thing and finish it
Saying yes to everything
Overcommitted, then late
Say what you will drop in order to take the new thing on
Hiding a mistake
The problem, plus a trust problem
Flag it yourself, with what you are doing about it
Never turning the camera on
Disengaged, or hiding something
Camera on for the meetings that matter, background sorted
Long apologetic messages
Anxious, hard to manage
One line of fact, one time you will be back
Sir and Ma
Formal to the point of distance, and a little odd to them
Use their first name from day one, even if they are twenty years older and run the company. "Well noted, sir" reads to a foreign manager as somebody who will never tell them when they are wrong
Quitting the local job on day one
Nothing yet, but a real risk to you
Wait until the money has landed at least twice
That last row deserves its own paragraph. An offer letter can be withdrawn. Money that has cleared into your account twice cannot. If your current employer allows any overlap at all, or you can take leave, take it. The gap between signing and the first cleared payment is the most financially exposed anyone gets in this entire process, and it is almost entirely avoidable.
So what does a good week one actually look like?
Concretely: get access to every system and say so once you have it, publish the hours you will be at your desk, send a written update on day two whether or not anybody asked for one, book the one to one yourself if your manager has not, and finish one small thing by Friday. That is the whole of it.
Nobody expects you to know their systems in week two. They expect you to be reachable and to say something when things go wrong, which is a lower bar than the one in your head, and one you clear by being organised rather than by being exceptional.
If the offer has not landed yet, that is the earlier stretch of this road and we wrote it up in how to get your first remote job in Nigeria. If you have an offer but the pay conversation is still open, read negotiating a dollar salary before you sign. Either way, create a free profile and let the matching run in the background. Browsing, searching and CV matching cost nothing, and the worst place to be three months from now is a trial that did not convert with no pipeline behind it. How the rest of it works is on our FAQ page, and the current openings are on Sydicom.
Frequently asked questions
How long is probation on a foreign remote job?
Three months is the usual shape, though one month and six months both turn up. Plenty of small companies never write one into the contract and still treat the first quarter as a trial. Ask directly in week one what the review point is and what happens at it, because a manager who cannot answer that is telling you something useful too.
Should I tell my employer about power cuts in Nigeria?
Tell them what is happening and when you will be back, not why the grid works the way it does. One line at the start of an outage and one when you return is enough. Long explanations read as excuses even when they are completely true, and the silence is what actually damages you, not the outage.
Can I keep my Nigerian job while I do the remote trial?
If your current employer allows overlap or you can take leave, do it. An offer letter is not income and the first payment from a foreign company is the one most likely to be late. Waiting until money has cleared at least twice before resigning removes the single most financially exposed stretch of the whole process.
What should I do if my first payment is late?
Check the mechanics before you assume anything is wrong. Confirm the invoice cutoff date, whether your invoice was approved, and whether identity verification has cleared. A first payment often stalls simply because a new file is passing through a new system, not because anyone is cheating you. Ask once, politely, in writing, with the invoice number attached.
Do I pay tax in Nigeria on a salary from a foreign company?
Income from a foreign employer can still create an obligation in Nigeria, and the answer depends on your contract, your residency and whether you are engaged as an employee or a contractor. This is not tax advice. Speak to an accountant who has handled a remote contractor before, in your first month, while the amounts are still small.
What happens if my remote trial does not convert?
Ask for a written reference while the goodwill is fresh, ask what would have made the difference, and start applying that same week. Three months of foreign remote experience and a real reference is the exact profile the next employer filters for, and it fades if you wait months before looking again.
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