There is nothing wrong with hiring staff in-house where you can physically see and get familiar with all faces of those you have on your payroll.
But if you are not taking advantage of the wonders of the new digital global economy, you are leaving a lot on the table.
And the reason(s) you are still stuck with a 100% in-house team, is often due to the deep belief of myths that are rampantly being spread all over the place in both work and social settings.
Letting go of these myths clinging onto your mindset and embracing virtual workers could potentially lead you onto a new growth trail that can even astonish yourself.
1) It is always best to have your staff in the real physical office
In recent times, it has become clearer and clearer that having subordinates in your office adds little extra value to their output.
Watching over them so that they don’t skive is pretty much inefficient in modern times.
Employees can still malinger by:
- Surfing the net on the pretense of doing market research
- Checking Facebook on their mobiles even when you have blocked it in the office LAN
- Declaring out-of-office meetings that take longer than the meetings actually were
- etc
In fact, managers and business owners these days probably communicate more with teams via digital methods like email, SMS, instant messaging, video conferences, and even social media.
If you are honest with yourself, you would probably admit that having your employees working in the same office as you is more of an ego boost. You will be able to give commands and watch people do exactly what you say.
It makes perfect sense to have staff who hold important roles around so that there can be easier and clearer communication when discussions take place in person. However, for non-essential staff doing routine work, it makes business sense to outsource their tasks to improve efficiency and save manpower costs.
Having virtual staff allows you to judge employees solely on the job they do. Relationships and personal preferences will not be able to cloud your judgment as you don’t know your virtual employees virtually.
Heck! You have never even seen them in real life!
This makes it ideal to hire virtual team for jobs where results are much more important than the process used to achieve those results.
2) Virtual communities are ineffective
This is one of the most baseless criticisms of virtual teams.
The primary reason how virtual workers have to carry this stereotypical burden of their shoulders is because managers often don’t believe that virtual assistants don’t really work 8 hours a day as they are supposed to.
And it’s rightly so that this perception exists.
If you have ever had the experience of flexible working and worked from home for a period of time, you’d know that this is true to the most extreme extent.
However, critics are only telling half the story.
What they are leaving out is the exponential productivity levels that people working from home are achieving. So fast and efficient have they become in doing their jobs that they have ample time left to laze around…
Surely you cannot fault such workers for doing their jobs well. If anything, they should be rewarded. And that little leisure time they enjoy each day for finishing their tasks in great speed is often reward enough.
3) People working from home or halfway across the globe lacks commitment
Physical presence is not a fair measure of commitment just like how age is not a measure of ability.
Granted. Casual virtual workers you outsource to service providers could have a lot on their hands including work coming from many other organizations. But they run their business like any other service providing business.
Work you requested gets queued for fulfillment with support of tens of assistants waiting to take on the job. You might not be top priority depending on the level of service you are hiring. But you can be assured that job requests are delivered in a timely manner when you are engaging the services of dependable and credible companies.
4) Third parties can steal sensitive corporate information
This is a fear that can be applied to anyone and everyone. It’s unfair to tagged this unfavorable stereotype to virtual teams.
Even bringing work documents nicely tucked into your bag to the cafe can put your in danger of losing sensitive information. It is not limited to digital transit.
Pessimists can even insist that any information sent via email and instant messenger is prone to hackers.
This fear of unintentionally revealing corporate secrets is more due to corporate practices. You’d be a fool to send sensitive information to someone who you don’t trust with certainty.
Outsourcing should never be for core competencies and work containing material information.
5) It would be impossible to train a virtual worker
Another nonsense argument that is rightly labelled as myth.
Let’s take for example one of the most outsourced departments in multinationals – Telecommuting
Telemarketers and hotline customer service officers are very highly trained in the area of conversing and communicating over the phone. In fact, if you just send them a product description and the process of redress, they can pretty much hit the ground running.
And you don’t need to worry about overloading them with information. Call centers are fitted with cutting edge telecommuting equipment. It’s just a matter of inputting into their systems.
Even better, they might be able to draw from experience and improve your scripts and processes to streamline your protocols.
So really…
If the myths about hiring virtual workers and project teams are what’s hindering your decision to try out their services, these really are the least of your worries.
Your worries should instead be how much you are missing out by not outsourcing at least 35% of the work being done in the office.