Virtual employees: What they do and why you should hire them

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Want to hire a virtual employee for your business?

Most companies hire virtual employees to scale their businesses quickly and reduce their overheads.

In this article, we’ll cover the five key benefits of hiring virtual employees for your business. We’ll also highlight a few things to keep in mind when hiring them and where you can hire them from.

The article contains:

(click on the links below to jump to a specific section)

• What Is A Virtual Employee?
• The Five Benefits Of Hiring Virtual Employees
• The Three Things To Keep In Mind When Hiring Virtual Employees
• The Main Challenge With Hiring Virtual Employee
• The Top Eight Virtual Staffing Companies

Let’s get started.

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What is a virtual employee?

A virtual employee, also known as a remote employee, is a person who works full-time or part-time for a company from a remote location. While most people confuse virtual employees with freelancers, they aren’t the same.

Freelancers are self-employed individuals who usually work for multiple clients at the same time. An employer doesn’t have much control over when the freelancer performs their work, who they work for and the money they charge for their work.

However, virtual employees work for a single employer. This gives the employer more control over various aspects of their job, from what tasks they do to how much they’ll be paid for it. They’re like a regular employee — just not in your office!

With the growth of smart workplace software, it’s fairly easy to hire and manage virtual staff. This is why most companies are comfortable in going virtual and running parts of their business without a physical office.

So why do companies hire virtual employees?

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The five benefits of hiring virtual employees

Here are the five benefits of hiring virtual employees for your company:

1. You can quickly scale your business

One of the major issues with scaling a business is the overhead costs you’ll have to bear.

Think about it.

To scale your business, you’ll need to hire more employees. And to house them, you’ll need to invest in larger offices which involves a lot of overheads like rent and utilities.

However, as virtual employees are remote employees, you don’t have to expand your office space to scale your business. You just hire them and they work for you virtually.

This way, you can comfortably expand your business offerings without having to set up additional office spaces. For example, if you’re an SMB, you can provide 24×7 IT support without having to set up a call center.

2. Low in-office cost

When you hire in-house employees, you have to take care of various expenses like:

• Tech expenses like an internet connection and software.
• Office expenses like rent, office supplies, heating and air conditioning.
• Maintenance costs.
• Miscellaneous expenses like food and beverages.

As virtual employees work from home or other remote locations, they are fully responsible for their work environment. You might only have to provide them with the software required for the job and nothing else. This significantly reduces the expenses you’ll have to bear after hiring them.

3. Can enhance diversity

Another benefit of hiring remote workers is that you can hire them from another city, country or even another continent! As this gives recruiters access to a global talent pool, you can hire skilled and experienced virtual employees from anywhere in the world.

Additionally, you’ll be recruiting people with widely different ideas and outlooks towards life. This can make your brainstorming activities more diverse, adding more creativity and innovation to your business ideas.

4. Can provide 24×7 services without overworking your staff

When your business and staff are located in one place, it can be hard for you to cope with customers and clients from across the world, especially if you offer services like IT support.

For example, if your business is in London, your peak operating hours will be at night for your clients or customers in Sydney. You can only provide them services if you and your staff stay awake all night.

However, as virtual employees work remotely, you can hire them from around the world to attend to clients and customers from various time zones. This way, you can grow your business while you and your employees work comfortably.

5. Can increase employee motivation and job satisfaction

Another benefit of hiring virtual employees is that they can have a better work-life balance — leading to increased motivation and job satisfaction.

How?

• Virtual employees don’t have to spend time and money on commuting for work.
• Most of them have flexible working hours – this lets them handle work and personal responsibilities easily.

As they get the freedom to enjoy a good work-life balance, your virtual team is more likely to be satisfied with their job, which can motivate them to be more productive.

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The three things to keep in mind when hiring virtual employees

While hiring virtual employees comes with tons of benefits, there are a few things you need to keep in mind during the process:

1. Know what jobs can and can’t be done in-person

Remember, you can only hire virtual employees for work that doesn’t need their physical presence.

This includes jobs like:

• Content writing
• Data entry
• Customer support
• Accounting and bookkeeping
• And many more.

But not all jobs can be done virtually.

For example, hiring a virtual employee from Noida, India, to show clients rental properties in Washington DC, the United States is impossible. Jobs like this need someone in-office with you to perform their duties.

Thoroughly know what the job entails before deciding to hire someone virtually for it.

2. Create the right job description

Once you have identified what job can be given to a virtual employee, you need to create a job description for it.

While the job description for a virtual employee is not that different from the one for an in-house employee, it should clearly list out how the work will be carried out virtually.

Here are a few things your job description should contain:

• Information about your company — what you do, details about your services and products.
• The activities involved in the job.
• The skills and experience required.
• The work hours of the job — you must specify the time zone your company works in.
• The tools they’ll be using — common workplace and project-specific tools.

For example, if you’re hiring someone for graphic design, your job description should mention that the candidates should be familiar with popular design tools like Adobe Photoshop.

It’s also a good idea to mention what workplace software they’ll be using, like Slack for communication and Google Docs for file management. This way, the candidate will have clarity on how the work should be done virtually.

3. Ensure that you have the right processes in place to manage a virtual team

While you could have the best possible virtual team, you could still face tons of issues.

Think about it.

Your virtual employees will be working from their home or any remote location.
Without investing in the right tools and creating flexible processes, it’ll be hard for you to manage them.

Two tips to cope with this are:

A. Invest in the right software and tools

Your virtual employees could be thousands of miles away. This requires you to invest in tools that help you communicate project demands, share relevant files and also monitor them.

Here are three essential tools for managing virtual employees:

• Communication tools like Slack and Zoom, that help you instantly message your virtual team members and hold meetings with them. For example, you can host virtual project meetings to discuss a new product.
• File management tools like Google Docs, that let you easily collaborate on documents and save them online.
• Performance tracking tools like Time Doctor, that help you monitor your virtual employees during their work hours.

B. Have flexible work timings

As your virtual employees could be from different time zones, you need to have flexible work timings to keep your business moving forward.

Remember to set work hours that are convenient for you and your virtual team. This ensures that you can keep the ball rolling without overworking your employees.

Also look for timezone overlaps when your entire team can be online. This way, you can still conduct full-team meetings at reasonable hours for everyone.

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The main challenge with hiring virtual employees

The major reason why most businesses shy away from hiring virtual employees is that it’s hard to monitor them.

Think about it.

When your employees could be thousands of miles away, you won’t be able to:

• Know what they are doing during work hours.
• Verify if they are actively working on their tasks.
• Know if they access websites or apps that violate company policies.

Luckily, performance trackers like Time Doctor make it super easy for businesses to manage virtual employees.

What’s Time Doctor?

Time Doctor is a powerful performance monitoring tool that is used by large companies and by SMBs to monitor their employees.

Here’s a closer look at how Time Doctor makes managing your virtual employees a breeze:

1. Know how your virtual employees spend their work hours

Time Doctor auto-generates a detailed Project Report that breaks down how your virtual employees spend their work hours. You’ll know who is working on what project and the duration they spent on it, in real-time.

As these reports are highly accurate, you can use it to bill clients for the work done.

2. Prevent distractions during work hours

Worried that your virtual employees are distracted by unproductive websites and apps during work hours?

With Time Doctor’s distraction management feature, you don’t have to.

Whenever an employee uses unproductive websites and apps like social media, the tool displays a pop-up alert asking them if they are still working. This little nudge is usually enough to get them back to work.

Time Doctor also gives you a Web and App Usage Report that shows you the websites and apps accessed by each employee and the time spent on them. You can use it to determine if they’re using non-work related sites and apps like social media that violate company policies.

3. Ensure that they work actively

Time Doctor’s inactivity tracker helps ensure that your virtual employees don’t log idle time as work hours. The tool automatically pauses the timer if there has been no activity on their keyboard or mouse for over three minutes.

This way, your remote workers can only log active hours as hours worked.

Note: Time Doctor only tracks if any keyboard keys were pressed or not. It does not track which keys were pressed.

4. Quickly pay them for their work

Time Doctor’s payroll feature helps you automatically calculate the remuneration to be paid to your remote workers.

It easily integrates with most payment methods such as Wise, formerly TransferWise, Paypal and Payoneer. However, it also allows you to choose any other payment platform to pay your virtual employees.

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The top eight virtual staffing companies

Here are the top eight companies that offer quality virtual staffing solutions:

1. WoodBows

WoodBows is one of the top virtual assistant providers in the world. They have been chosen as the best virtual assistant service providers by renowned US-based review sites like Clutch, The Manifest, VirtualAssistantAssistant, Brex, SmallbizTrends, Guru99 and many more.

WoodBows’ virtual assistants work from their well supervised environment in USA, India and Philippines. Their 10+ years of experienced virtual assistants are known for saving ton of money and time for their 1100+ clients.

Key virtual employee services:

• Content writing
• Social media management and marketing
• App development
• Software development
• Web design
• Real estate virtual assistant services
• Accounts and bookkeeping
• Data entry
• Customer support
• E-commerce solutions
• SEO

2. Triniter

Triniter is a reputed virtual staffing company specialized in customer support and back-office support. Their 24/7 customer support professionals are known for going above and beyond to retain their clients’ customers by providing high-quality customer support services.

Their 1100+ clients and 300+ verified positive reviews on an independent site reveals a lot about their high-quality. They get more than 89% of their clients through word-of-mouth, which means, they are doing a good job for their existing clients.

Key virtual employee services:

• Customer support services
• Back-office support services
• Automation and AI services

3. TrinityWired

If you are looking to hire a virtual employee in IT sector, TrinityWired would be your best bet. TrinityWired is a group companies of Triniter. They served several companies in Fortune 500 category and they have 100% clients satisfaction rate.

Key virtual employee services:

• Custom software development
• Mobile app development
• Web development
• E-Commerce Development
• UI/UX design
• IoT solutions
• DevOps services
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
• Quality Assurance and testing

4. Serve Team

The Serve Team is among the top virtual assistant service providers. They are known for their dedicated VAs. The Serve Team guarantees 200% performance. And all of their VAs work on the same ideology. Recognized by various clients and third-party reviewers. The Serve Team has won 18+ excellence awards.

The Serve team has the highest client satisfaction rate of 97.8% in the market. And they have served the highest number of clients. This company has been in business for more than 10+ years, and their VAs hold a decade of experience in their industries as well.

Key virtual employee services:

• Real Estate VA
• Virtual Assistant Services
• Web Design
• Graphics Design
• Digital Marketing
• Customer Support
• Data Entry
• Content Writers

5. Connect Center

Connect Center is a virtual assistants provider offering various services. This company has been recognized by various esteemed portals like Clutch, GoodFirms, and The Time Doctor. Their services are ranked among the best in the industry.

Connect Center has been in the industry for more than 12+ years. They train and polish their VAs before offering their services to clients. The VAs work from their well-managed office and clients get a dedicated account manager that supervises them.

Key virtual employee services:

• Data Entry
• Web Design
• Digital Marketing
• Customer Support
• Real Estate VA
• Virtual Assistant Services
• Content Writers
• Graphics Design

6. VA Staffer

VA Staffer is a popular virtual staffing agency that provides skilled employees who work from home or the VA Staffer office. With over five years of experience, VA Staffer offers services to entrepreneurs and small business owners.

Key virtual employee services:

• E-commerce solutions
• SEO
• Social media marketing
• Graphic design
• Lead generation

7. Virtual Employee Pvt Ltd

Virtual Employee Pvt Ltd is a staffing company that offers virtual employee services across North America, the United Kingdom and other European countries.

Key virtual employee services:

• Content writing
• Web designing
• Software development
• Mobile app development
• Digital marketing

8. Premium Help

The premium help can be an answer to your problems. Premium help offers virtual assistants on a budget. They have attractive packages to choose from. You can hire an assistant for a week, month, quarter, or even a year.

These VAs are trained to complete different tasks. They can eliminate the need for dedicated employees. As they are trained to help the client in every task. The VAs can assist you in maintaining and developing websites, SEO, data entry, etc.

Key virtual employee services:

• Digital Marketing
• Customer Support
• Data Entry
• Web Design
• Graphics Design
• Content Writers
• Real Estate VA
• Virtual Assistant Services

9. The Teams Hub

TheTeamsHub is a decade-old company with ample experience in the virtual assistant industry. This company offers affordable packages to its clients. Transparent pricing and a dedicated account manager are some of the key features of the company.

TheTeamsHub has completed over 14000+ tasks since its inception. And have 1300+ happy clients. TheTeamsHub employs over 380+ VAs. And all of them are handpicked for their skills and experience.

Key virtual employee services:

• Digital Marketing
• Customer Support
• Data Entry
• Content Writers
• Real Estate VA
• Virtual Assistant Services
• Web Design
• Graphics Design

10. Virtual Staff Finder

Whether you’re an online entrepreneur or a small business owner, Virtual Staff Finder helps you hire suitable virtual employees. Based out of the Philippines, it’s more suited for businesses looking for long-term staffing solutions.

Key virtual employee services:

• Customer support
• Graphic design
• Content writing
• Web development
• SEO

11. Task Virtual

Task Virtual has some of the most experienced and qualified virtual employees for businesses. Based in India, the company offers a wide range of virtual staffing services at competent rates.

Key virtual employee services:

• Content writing
• Social Media management
• Web Designing
• Data entry
• Internet research

12. 24/7 Virtual Assistant

24/7 Virtual Assistant offers virtual employees who help manage your personal and business activities. With locations in India and the United States, they chiefly provide services to small business owners.

Key virtual employee services:

• Accounting and bookkeeping
• Data entry
• Administrative support
• HR management
• Real estate services

Conclusion

Should you hire virtual employees?

The answer is yes!

They can be as flexible and productive as regular employees while costing you a lot less!

Check the remote staffing agencies we mentioned here to start building a virtual team for your business quickly. Once you hire the right talent, use the tips we mentioned here to manage your virtual employees easily.