Why Hiring Virtual Employees Is The Future
- Written by News Company
More companies are choosing to hire employees to work from home. Last year Amazon hired 5000 remote employees. Some companies such as FlexJobs meanwhile have taken on entirely virtual teams. Not all jobs can be done virtually, but for those office-based jobs which only require a computer and a phone, it makes sense to use remote workers for various reasons.
There are different ways to hire employees virtually. One option is to outsource skills to a company. Managed services can handle options such as IT support over the web rather than having to hire them in-house. Another option is to hire actual employees on a full-time basis. These employees work solely for your company unlike outsourcing a company.
Hiring virtually is much cheaper than hiring in-house staff in many cases. Employers don’t have to pay for the extra office space and can afford to have a smaller premises. They also don’t have to pay for extra equipment such as chairs and desks and computers. It’s become a great new way for startups to hire their first employees on a budget.
There’s also an added flexibility to hiring virtually. Employers aren’t limited to employees living locally and can hire the best talent from around the world. This can also offer flexibility for companies that trade internationally. By hiring someone living in another time zone or someone who is able to work evenings, companies are able to more efficiently communicate with clients around the world rather than being limited to the standard 9 to 5 office hours.
Hiring virtual employees also has added benefits for the employees themselves. Remote workers don’t have to deal with the stress of commuting. This not only frees up time in the morning and evening, but also saves employees the cost of commuting and the aggravation of being caught in traffic or having to deal with train delays.
Research has also shown other benefits to hiring virtually. Virtual employees take 38% less sick days than employees in open plan offices. 77% of employees also reported being more productive when working virtually due to having less distractions.
As for those employers worried about not being able to monitor employees, there are now various forms of software that can do this. Time tracking software can allow you to clock your virtual employees’ hours. Cloud storage programmes meanwhile can allow you to share files easily – whilst in days gone by employers may have to email files over, cloud services can store everything on a remote server that can be accessed from any location and edited in real time. As for communicating with virtual employees, videoconferencing can still allow for face-to-face interaction as if you were in the same room. As well as being able to check that your employees really are at home working, you can present data and have a more personal conversation than a phonecall allows.
There are still some future obstacles to face including providing remote workers with adequate cybersecurity and encouraging camaraderie, but other than this hiring virtually has many perks that make it likely to be the future of labour.