In-Office v/s Remote Workers Or Virtual Assistants - An Open Debate
In today’s digitally connected environment, where operations teams can be more digitally connected as ever before, a debate still rages ahead – In-Office v/s
Remote Workers. While the old school ideology still warrants and believes in-office employees always deliver better results as compared to their peers who work remotely, the recent change in trend which is slowly tilting towards allowing employees the ability to work from home (WFH) or even work from anywhere (WFA) is a step in the right direction.
As an organization that has been helping budding businesses establish themselves by providing skilled and multifaceted virtual assistants for the past 14 years, we truly believe work from home (WFH) or work from anywhere (WFA) is the next stage of evolution in staffing and talent management.
The founder of the company and some of its core team has previously worked in organizations that did not offer remote working options and have seen themselves adapting and eventually promoting the following aspects –
1. The fact that the virtual assistants they manage are working from virtual (remote) locations ensures that they are making an effort to reach out to them at least once in 2 days to check on them and discuss any issues that they may be facing
2. They have also seen themselves adopting, utilizing & to a certain extent mastering the usage of tools such as video conferencing, instant messaging, google suite applications which as per us puts them at an advantageous position when compared to leaders working from the in-office environment.
3. Specialized tasks which need people working on deadlines may not need microscopic supervision, however, tasks which are number-driven (posting advertisements, making marketing/sales calls) definitely need closer supervision and may need the virtual assistance vendor to staff the executors (a term preferred over employees) at a central location making monitoring of performance as similar to having people working from an office.
4. People working as virtual assistants coming from a similar geographic cluster are beneficial leverage for the employers as the investment for arranging for their meeting at least once a month and preferably twice in a month, fosters learning through an exchange of ideas as well as allows for better interactions amongst the team allowing them to work as a cohesive unit.
5. The team here has observed that inclination towards up-skilling themselves is far higher in teams in WFH or WFA set up as they want to remain relevant to the organization that they are working for & at the same time remain abreast with the developments in their niches and also open to avenues for growth by learning other niches.
Now, there could still be arguments stating managing remote teams will always remain a challenge. We believe building a team of virtual assistants can end up being one of the best decisions that any organization can take for the following reasons –
1. Virtual assistants will be more productive as they are self-motivated, have the flexibility of managing their schedule, do not end up being distracted by their co-workers.
2. Virtual assistants open up a large talent pool that is available to the company as it has an option to tap into talent not just from its home country but also countries like India which offer a rich talent pool for managing easier projects like customer support to more knowledge-intensive projects like IT services (web development & maintenance, app development, cloud services) accounting, data analysis, etc.
3. From a cost perspective, virtual assistants are a step in the right direction as the company does not need to invest in real estate to keep the operation under one roof.
To end this write-up, we’d like to sight some statistics which have been published by smallbizgenius in one of their articles which suggests the next evolution of staffing businesses is Virtual Assistance-
1. The number of people who work from home has increased by 140% since 2005
2. 16% of companies exclusively hire remote workers.
3. 18% of people work remotely full-time.
4. 75% of people who work remotely do so because there are fewer distractions.
5. 76% of workers would be more willing to stay with their current employer if they could work flexible hours.
6. 86% of people feel that working remotely reduces stress.
7. 69% of millennials would give up other work benefits for a more flexible working space.
Contact us at info@outsourcinghelpers.com or drop us a message +1(415) 234-3314 & we will reach out to you and help you hire a virtual assistant or a dedicated team of remote workers that can help you meet your key business goals and make this a mutually rewarding journey for us.