The Benefits of Selecting Virtual Employees For Your Business
Virtual employees should require more vetting before their first day on the job.
Remote working practices are becoming increasingly commonplace across all industries and all markets. Yet where it used to be that employees got a physical grounding within a company before being allowed to work remotely, companies are starting to hire “virtual” employees straight off the bat. This allows them to maintain their physical location, which may be a continent away from the shared office space.
However, you want to hire reliable virtual employees. How would you know that a virtual employee can be reliable on the job? You would want transparency from the potential hire, right?
If you are considering this option, chances are you are already familiar with the benefits of hiring virtual employees. If you are not, here are just some of those benefits:
It opens up the marketplace
It used to be that as a business, you were somewhat limited to the skills and expertise that was available in your physical location. From there, the bigger organizations sought to hire employees from further afield, and pay to relocate them – an eye-watering cost as you can imagine. Now we are at the third stage – hiring virtual employees who will likely very rarely step foot in your physical office location. Indeed, you may not even have a physical office location. But it matters not, because now you can hire based around skills and abilities alone – geographical location in not important.
If it turns out the best person for the job is on the other side of the world, the only potential problem you might face is a conflict in working hours. There are no limits now as far as who you can hire. As long as you can pay their wage, relocation costs are a thing of the past. The world is your talent pool now – think of the opportunities that opens up.
An increase in productivity
This is a controversial subject as this may be the sticking point for many traditionalists. Do people really work more productively from a remote space? It seems according to a Harvard Business Review study, they actually do. Similarly, a recent survey returned that 91% of remote workers felt they were more productive when working out of the office. Those types of combined results are pretty conclusive.
Issues of productively may well boil down the individual. While it is true that there are those of who will struggle to maintain focus in any other place outside of the office, there are others who will thrive in this environment. No colleagues to chat to, no commute to overcome: it really is no surprise that many people work more efficiently from a familiar space.
The essence of the argument is that employees who work remotely are able to maintain a better work/life balance, which fosters happiness in what they do. And a happy employee is an efficient one in most cases.
Virtual employees can be as connected as anyone
None of this would be possible, of course, if the technology didn’t exist to facilitate remote working practices. However, it does, and those who are most effectively able to utilize it are therefore some of the most connected employees out there. Indeed, their speed of connecting and communicating is arguably more efficient because they have established that skill as a way of working. Office employees may have the physical ability to get up and walk around and talk to people, but with cloud capabilities and communication mediums now delivering instant access and connectivity, the old-school methods are simply not the most efficient anymore.
You can hire virtually too
People who work remotely are usually used to interviewing remotely too. This has huge potential cost savings for business from a recruitment perspective, and is yet another benefit of this change in working behaviors.
However, it’s important to still screen virtual employees during the hiring process. When you vet virtual employees, you’re ensuring that you’re hiring the right people. You can also have virtual candidates take part in a session where you use lie detector technology like Converus to ensure transparency.
Conclusion
It will probably be that change is the biggest barrier to moving to virtual employees. Start small and scale-up if it works for your businesses. In most cases, you have very little to lose, and much to gain.
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About the author: Business writer Madeline Miller is usually found assisting organizations in their digital marketing approach. She is an editor at Paper Fellows and Bigassignments and a regular contributor to a number of other blogs and info sites, including Essayroo.
Photo by / cottonbro
