Since GoToMarket helps businesses by employing virtual employees, it is essential we lay the foundation by explaining what virtual staffing means and what virtual employees do.
Virtual staffing involves virtual employees who are your regular employees working from remote locations. These locations could be their homes, co-working spaces, cafés, restaurants, or any place that the virtual employee chooses that provides access to high-speed internet.
You may wonder if these are just regular employees why all the hype?
Virtual employees save employers the cost of providing them the “office environment.” Employers do not have to spend on infrastructure, do not have to facilitate commute, and can hire from regions that offer competitive rates but good quality talent.
While the ongoing pandemic has forced companies to ask employees to work remotely, these virtual employees choose remote work voluntarily. In fact, these employees are less likely to join a collocated job because they value the liberty and flexibility that remote work offers.
Studies show that 90% of employees who have tried the latter are less likely to go back to an in-office job.
By hiring virtual employees, companies can access larger talent pools and reach their diversity goals with a level of ease that is difficult while hiring locally.
How is Virtual Staffing Different and More Beneficial than Conventional Staffing?
With virtual staffing, employees work from their location of choice. They take care of their own workspace and ensure they have a working desktop, internet, and place to work. The employer no longer has to worry about these factors.
Often, remote employees choose to work remotely because it gives them the ability to attend to personal responsibilities, like ailing parents, taking care of infants, or taking care of their families.
While employers believe that working at home might create distractions, in a study by CoSo Cloud, 77% of respondents reported that they are more productive when they can attend to their responsibilities while working at home without the necessity to take off days to do so.
Virtual employees find the time to achieve their deliverables by working around their schedules. This promotes high employee satisfaction that might often be very low in employees attending work half-heartedly from office spaces.
Most companies hire virtual employees from countries like the Philippines or India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, where the cost of living is relatively lower, and rates are very competitive, thereby allowing them to save on employee salaries. These countries also tend to have higher quality talents in some fields as compared to other countries.
How is Virtual Staffing Different from Employing Freelancers?
There is a fine line that often gets missed and it is quite normal for business owners to have this question due to the nature of the work of both these categories. Let us clear it for you.
Virtual employees are regular employees working on the company’s payroll from a remote location. Employers have to offer benefits, rewards, and everything else they have to offer to their regular employees as a part of their annual package. They allocate all their time to the company and do not take up any other projects.
They may be required to clock in a certain number of hours every day and have set KPIs to achieve each month. Employers may deploy project management tools, collaboration apps, and time tracking applications to ensure they have complete control of their employees’ productivity during work hours.
Freelancers, on the other hand, are contractual employees who work independently. They have the freedom to take up as many projects as they wish. They can outsource menial tasks and get paid according to milestones or on an hourly basis.
Freelancers decide their prices and generally are very competitive. Employers do not have to offer any extra benefits or rewards to freelancers. Employers also have limited control over freelancers. All that matters is that they deliver their work with set deadlines.
Businesses mostly choose to work with freelancers if they need an extra pair of hands only for a specific project or want specific tasks done without having a permanent employee. So, even if the freelancer charges a high one-time rate, it might not be even 10% of what the employer would have to pay a regular employee each month.
How Do Companies Hire Virtual Employees?
Employers can directly recruit from online job boards and portals or recruit an outsourcing agency that hires on behalf of them. Outsourcing companies often have their own pool of talent and assign candidates to different projects. These employees get paid through the company’s payroll.
However, there’s an emerging type of virtual staffing service providers that helps companies build and develop virtual teams. Often, business owners refrain from having virtual teams onboard because co-ordination becomes an issue, and with a hybrid workforce, the team might not be in sync.
GoToMarket is one such company that can act as a knight in shining armour for such distressed companies by completely taking charge of their virtual teams. GoToMarket hires, manages, ensures collaboration, and also takes control of the employees’ payroll.
Being an arm of an established business conglomerate, GoToMarket already has the reputation of providing the best. It has a handpicked pool of talent who specialize in different business functions.
Whenever there is a need, GoToMarket matches it to a candidate that fits perfectly in the role and trains them through their own resources. Right from training, recruitment, infrastructure, operational costs, and so much more, the list of benefits of deploying the GoToMarket team is endless.
As such companies are relatively new, there is ample scope and a lot of ground to cover. However, the model is a tried and tested one and is one that is sure to succeed.
Ready to opt the virtual staffing trend? Contact us for a free consultation from our experts!
