A virtual employee is someone who works online and performs tasks remotely, away from your company’s physical location.
However, a virtual employee does not necessarily mean someone working from home. On the contrary, a virtual employee or remote resource can work from a co-working space, home, or any remote location with internet access to help them complete projects, perform tasks, and communicate with others.
Here are some jobs virtual staffs perform:
How to Hire Virtual Employees?
Hiring employees from different geographies offers a lot of benefits, which we will discuss later. But before that, let’s talk about the different modes of hiring employees abroad.
Set Up Foreign Entities
You can hire virtual employees in a foreign country by setting up legal entities in that target market. By establishing a legal entity, you can directly handle employment logistics and local hiring.
However, setting up a legal entity in a foreign country involves significant investment. Moreover, you must be aware of the employment laws, payroll regulations, and other corporate requirements of that country. Hence, setting up an entity in another country makes sense only if you plan to hire a large team and establish a long-term presence in that market.
Hire Freelancers
Another alternative to help you work with virtual employees from another country is by hiring freelancers. The advantage of freelancers is that they charge much lower rates than on-site employees. Moreover, you can hire them when you have work and let them go during lean periods.
However, as with outsourcing, you won’t have control over the output quality or oversight of the process. Additionally, freelancers often take on multiple projects simultaneously and may not dedicate their full attention to your project.
Partner With a Virtual Staffing Agency
The third and most viable alternative is partnering with virtual staffing companies. Virtual resources hired through a partner company charge much less compared to local talent. Moreover, the remote staffing organization you partner with takes care of all the overheads.
Unlike freelancers, the remote talent you hire is like an extension of your in-house team and works exclusively for your team. This ensures superior quality work from top talent at a fraction of the cost.
What are the Benefits of Hiring Virtual Employees?
The concept of hiring virtual staff has been around for quite some time. However, it gained significant popularity post-COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic pushed businesses to work online/remotely and highlighted the numerous benefits this mode of working offers. Here are some advantages of hiring virtual employees:
Reduced Costs
One of the primary benefits of hiring virtual employees is cost reduction. By partnering with virtual staffing companies from India, you can hire talented resources at a fraction of local hiring costs. This is mainly due to the lower cost of living in India compared to the USA/Europe/other Western nations. Additionally, the virtual staffing agency you work with takes care of fixed expenses and operating overheads.
These factors combine to offer a significant cost advantage. For instance, many CEOs report saving over 50% in costs by hiring virtual employees from India.
Global Talent Pool
By opting to hire virtual employees, you gain access to a global talent pool. When you hire candidates who work only from your physical location, you limit your talent pool. However, by partnering with a company offering virtual employee services, you expand your reach to a worldwide pool of skilled professionals.
By opening your doors to virtual staff, you increase your chances of finding the right talent. Moreover, you can also access specialized, niche talent by choosing to hire virtual employees.
Reduced Time-to-Market
Another advantage of partnering with virtual staffing companies from India is the reduction in hiring time. Research shows that it takes around 44 days to fill a vacancy in the U.S., and 76% of recruiters struggle to attract top talent. This challenge is even greater for small and medium businesses.
If you have a new product idea targeting a market gap, slower hiring cycles could cause you to lose the first-mover advantage. However, by partnering with a company offering virtual employee services, you can speed up the hiring process. This allows for faster product or service launches, reducing your time-to-market.
Ease of Scaling
The fourth advantage of hiring virtual employees is the ease of scaling. Companies offering virtual employee services have a ready pool of pre-vetted talent, allowing you to easily scale by hiring additional resources as needed. Furthermore, when you hire through such a company, you avoid the legal complexities of hiring or retrenching employees, making scaling more seamless.
Ease of Hiring and Retention
Small businesses often struggle to attract top talent, as top-tier candidates tend to prefer working with large multinational companies. As a result, small businesses may be forced to offer higher salaries to compete for talent, only to risk losing them once they gain sufficient experience.
However, opting for virtual staffing addresses both these challenges. By partnering with a third-party company to hire virtual employees you offload the responsibility of sourcing and attracting the right talent for your business. Moreover, the third-party business partner also takes care of employee retention.
Thus, by opting for remote staffing, you can focus more on strategic business decisions while the virtual staffing agency manages the attraction, hiring, and retention of top talent. This process offers you a distinctive competitive advantage over those still hiring locally.
Diversity
By opening the doors to virtual employees from diverse cultures, nationalities, and religious backgrounds, you introduce diversity into your team. Increased diversity brings a wider range of ideas, and such a workforce is often more productive, innovative, and engaged.
Hedging against Business Continuity Risks
Hiring virtual employees also provides a hedge against business continuity risks. In today’s uncertain environment, factors like political unrest, economic crises, and natural calamities can threaten your business’s continuity.
However, by partnering with a virtual staffing agency based in another country, you can significantly reduce this risk. If political, economic, or natural disruptions occur in your home country, your virtual employees in another region can continue operating. Thus, while your in-house team may face disruptions, your business continuity remains intact.
Increased Core-Competency Focus
By hiring virtual staff to handle non-core activities, you have more time and resources to focus on core competencies. This helps you excel at both core and non-core activities, resulting in a distinct competitive advantage. For example, by hiring remote staff to handle tasks like content writing, Hire web developers, etc., you can focus your attention on customer service, sales, strategizing, etc.
Increased Productivity
Your virtual staffing partner will allow you to hire virtual employees in your preferred time zone. By carefully selecting the time periods during which your in-house team and remote resources work, you can get double the work done in a day. This arrangement can boost productivity and help you gain an edge over the competition.
Reduced Stress
If you are a solopreneur, you know the stress of trying to handle everything on your own. Burnout is a reality most entrepreneurs experience regularly. The solution is to hire a virtual assistant from India to handle certain tasks and help you stay organized. Virtual assistants from India can organize your calendar, schedule your meetings, generate leads, and handle other mundane tasks while you concentrate your efforts on more strategic activities. This will help reduce stress while boosting your productivity simultaneously.
What are the Challenges of Hiring and Managing Virtual Employees?
While there are several benefits to hiring and managing virtual employees, there are also associated challenges. Here is a list of some of the challenges in hiring and managing virtual employees:
Poor Talent Engagement
Without clear communication channels that foster engagement, virtual employees may feel isolated and become less committed to their work/team.
Management Difficulties
Onboarding new team members, motivating them, and building cohesion within your team can be challenging in a remote setting. Special training and tools are required to effectively manage remote employees. Additionally, it’s important to hire individuals who are self-motivated, comfortable working independently, and communicative.
Cultural Challenges
Hiring employees from different locations across the globe presents unique cultural challenges. Communication can be difficult if team members speak different languages and follow different work norms. Cultural nuances can also lead to miscommunication and translation issues in a virtual environment.
Collaboration issues
Team members working in different time zones can find it challenging to collaborate and coordinate. This is especially difficult when teams from various geographical locations are working on the same project. Moreover, these challenges can increase if the team lacks the proper tools for effective communication and remote collaboration.
How to Overcome the Challenges of Hiring and Managing Virtual Employees?
In the above sections, we have discussed the benefits and challenges of working with virtual staff. Now we will offer a 7-step framework that will help you overcome these challenges:
Step 1. Strategize
Do not jump on the remote hiring bandwagon just because everyone else is doing it. While it might seem fashionable, the move may not make business sense. Therefore, before hiring virtual employees, it is important to strategize. To strategize better, prepare answers to the following questions:
- Do you need additional resources?
- What will be the role of the new hire in the team?
- Should you hire on-site or remotely?
- What skill set should the recruit possess?
- How many years of experience should they have?
- How will you communicate and collaborate with the remote hire?
Step 2. Research a suitable partner
In the above sections, we have discussed different methods of hiring virtual employees. Among them, the best way is to hire resources by partnering with a virtual staffing agency. However, you shouldn’t select a random virtual staffing agency.
Instead, before starting the hiring process, you need to contact a reliable remote staffing provider. Research the different vendors and select one that offers value for money. Here’s what you can do to zero in on a top-rated virtual employee services provider:
- Run a Google search to generate a list of top companies offering virtual employee services.
- Use websites like Clutch, Trustpilot, etc., to identify the top-rated providers on the list.
- You can even seek peer reviews to understand which companies will work best for you.
- After you have shortlisted 5 or 6 companies from your initial search results, check each company’s website to understand the services they offer.
- Since you will ultimately be recruiting resources from these companies for your team, take a look at the quality of resources these companies have.
- Check whether the resources have the desired qualifications and relevant experience.
- Ask for samples and a free trial to examine the caliber of the resources before onboarding them.
- Take cost into account when choosing a partner. However, do not let cost be the only deciding factor. Always consider the value you are receiving and use that as the judging parameter.
Step 3. Carefully Choose Your Resource
It is important to be careful when selecting your virtual employees. Along with being diligent and experts in their craft, virtual employees need to possess several key qualities. Here is a list of some qualities you should check in a virtual employee before onboarding them.
- Adaptability– The resources you hire to work as virtual employees must be adaptable to change. Unlike an office environment where employees work under constant supervision, remote working requires them to work almost independently. Therefore, the remote talents you hire should be comfortable working independently and using different tools and technology to seamlessly execute their jobs.
- Accountability– A virtual setting does not allow constant supervision of employees. Therefore, it is important that virtual employees are self-motivated and able to meet deadlines and deliver high-quality work without the need for constant supervision.
- Reliability– Communication is very important in a virtual setting. Without proper and clear communication, misunderstandings are bound to happen in a remote work environment. It is important that the virtual employees you hire communicate in a timely manner with team members and managers. They must also be adept at effective time management and know how to prioritize their work. It is equally important for your virtual staff to step in when another team member requires support.
Besides these qualities, the remote talent you hire should also be culturally compatible. Judging all these qualities can be tough during a single interview. Hence, Remote Resource®, one of the top-rated virtual staffing companies, lets you have a one-week free trial with your chosen resource before you hire them. The one-week free trial offers ample opportunity for assessing the above qualities, competency, and cultural compatibility of your chosen resource before onboarding them.
Step 4. Sensitize Hired Resources About Cultural Nuances
Cultural compatibility is an important factor for ensuring success when working with remote workers. To facilitate cultural compatibility, you can train your resources on the nuances of your organizational culture. This will help them transition smoothly into your organization’s culture and prevent miscommunication.
Step 5. Streamline Communication
Communication should be your primary focus if you want to ensure a seamless working environment for your resources. The role of efficient and smooth communication becomes even more important in a remote working environment. To ensure effective communication between your team members located across different geographies, you can leverage technology.
Web-based asynchronous tools can help virtual team members communicate easily and quickly. To facilitate online collaboration, you can use online collaborative working documents like Google Docs, and for video communication, tools like Zoom, Asana, and Slack. You can also use task scheduler tools to keep track of project progress and monitor the work done by your remote resources.
Step 6. Recognize Small Wins
Individuals working in a remote setting can feel frustrated, lonely, demotivated, and disconnected. You can help them avoid these feelings through regular team-building exercises.
Schedule virtual one-on-one meetings to provide support, connect, bond better, and answer questions. Seek feedback from your virtual employees about your company policies and team-building activities. To keep them motivated, it is important to recognize their talents and celebrate small wins.
Step 7. Develop an Environment of Trust
Trust is an essential factor for ensuring success in a virtual setting. It is important to build trust within your team. To build trust, communicate effectively with your remote team. Clearly communicate task and role expectations. You must also give them the freedom to share ideas openly and discuss the challenges they are facing.
It is equally important to trust them with their assigned roles and responsibilities. While it is a good practice to check in at regular intervals on their progress, it is also important to trust them. There may be times when they are not at their desk; however, that doesn’t mean they are slacking.
Remote Resource®- A Premier Virtual Staffing Agency
Your search for top-grade virtual staffing companies can end with Remote Resource®. Unlike other virtual staffing companies, Remote Resource® lets you hire from the top 10% of the talent pool at a fraction of local hiring costs. At Remote Resource®, our goal is to bridge your ideas to success by offering top-grade employees who are as committed to your business success as you are.
Along with the above benefits of hiring virtual employees, here are some additional benefits of onboarding them through Remote Resource®:
No Obligatory Long-Term Contract-
Many virtual staffing companies force small and medium businesses to enter into long-term contracts. However, such contracts can be a burden on their resources and dissuade them from hiring virtual employees.
In contrast, Remote Resource does not require you to enter into long-term contractual obligations. Our pay-as-you-go model is as simple and straightforward as your Netflix subscription. The candidate will work for you under this model as long as you see fit. You can discontinue the service by giving us a two-week notice.
Robust Data Security
We understand your concerns regarding data security when hiring virtual employees abroad. As an ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 27001:2013 certified company, safeguarding your data is our top priority. Therefore, we use the best technology to ensure airtight data security and have strict NDAs with all employees to ensure compliance with stringent IP protection policies.
Retain Complete Control Over the Work Done
The remote talents you hire work as part of your team. We act as facilitators and handle payroll, insurance, and other office expenses. However, you are the sole owner of any work done by your team. The virtual employees from Remote Resource report to you at the end of day. You can have ownership over their work done even after you retrench the resource working for you.
One-Week Free Trial
It can be difficult to assess a resource’s talent and cultural compatibility through an interview alone. Therefore, we offer a one-week free trial with your chosen resource before you onboard them. During this free trial, you do not need to provide your credit card details, and you can keep all the work completed by your remote hire during this period without any obligations.
Forward Thinking Culture
We at Remote Resource® believe that having a team of highly content and motivated individuals leads to better outcomes in the workplace. Achieving this is not very difficult if you have the right systems in place. We care for our employees and offer them competitive wages along with treating them with respect.
We provide them the opportunity to grow and the freedom to experiment. At Remote Resource®, we share a common belief of putting our very best and helping bridge our clients’ vision to success. Our staff enjoy working with a diverse clientele and consistently offer their best. Therefore, amalgamating them in your team and culture will not be a challenge.
