Entrepreneurs are always looking for the state-of-the-art solutions that help their businesses grow and increase profits. And in this highly competitive tech world, the success of business not just depends upon the quality of the product or service you offer but also on the quality of employees that you hire.
But getting the most talented and productive employees is not a child’s play, you need to devote a lot of time and money behind it. If you are a software development company who is facing hardships in hiring the right people, one option you could consider is to hire dedicated virtual employees and there are many good reasons to consider this model.
But what is a virtual employee and why would you need to hire one? In this article, we will explain to you the meaning of a virtual employee. We will also highlight the six key benefits of hiring virtual employees for your business. So let us start with no further delay.
What is a virtual employee?
Often people get confused between a freelancer and a virtual employee. Before understanding what a virtual employee means, let us first clear the confusion between virtual and freelance employees.
Freelancers are self-employed individuals who works for multiple clients. Freelancers do not work for a particular person, they can charge anything as per the size and time duration of their project. On the other hand, a virtual employee or remote employee is one who works full-time or part-time for a company from a remote location.
With the growth of smart workplace softwares, it’s fairly easy to hire and manage virtual staff. Hiring virtual employees gives autonomy to the employer over what tasks a virtual employee does and how much they will get paid for it. That is why many companies are comfortable in running parts of their business without a physical office by going virtual.
So why do companies hire virtual employees? Let us look at the reasons for this in detail:
6 important reasons to hire a virtual employee
Virtual staffing is an efficient approach to find top-notch team members without overpaying them. You have the advantage of interviewing virtual employees from around the globe that helps you to widen your talent pool tremendously.
So, if you are at a place where employees with specific skills are a rarity, then hiring a virtual staff could be an excellent way to extend your development team and get positive outcomes. By opting for virtual employees you can save overhead, onboarding, and hiring costs.
But before you start, you need to look for a few more reasons to hire dedicated virtual IT employees:
1. Cost effective option
Overhead costs are considered as one of the major issues in scaling up the business. Because you need to hire additional employees. And to house them, you’ll need to invest in larger offices which involve a lot of overheads like rent, utilities, internet connection expenses, office supplies, etc.
But with virtual employees, you don’t have to expand your office as they can virtually work for you. Apart from this, virtual employees work from home or other remote locations, so you only have to provide them with the required software. This significantly reduces your operational costs by minimizing your hiring expenses.
2. A highly dedicated team
The virtual employee model provides you with the assurance that they will exclusively work on your project for a minimum amount of time. This guarantees you a round-the-clock development by developers dedicated just to your project.
A virtual development team employs multiple task tracking mechanisms such as daily stand-up meetings, tracker sheets, blogs, newsletters, diary, etc. These mechanisms help the client keep a track of their project on a daily basis.
3. Smoother communication
In situations where you and your team don’t share the same physical space, you need an effective communication channel in place on a project management level and on a cultural level.
Ideal virtual development teams imbibe a culture of transparent communication. This communication transparency is maintained through time-sheets, blogs and standard checklists and various collaboration tools such as Slack, Skype, Hangout, GitHub, etc.
Furthermore, a virtual development team works with excellent agile project management tools such as Jira, MS projects, Asana, Basecamp, etc. that further equips a strong collaboration and communication
4. Good turnaround time
The time for delivering projects can also affect the hiring process of virtual employees. A virtual development team ensures you the top quality development in the minimum possible time. Besides this, a virtual team will fulfil your expectations and meet the demands if your project is extremely critical.
Companies do not need to hinder because of different time-zones. Professional offshore web developers are very stringent about client satisfaction. They regularly keep their clients in the loop, share necessary updates, and keep them informed of all the proceedings.
5. No long-term commitment
The virtual employee hiring model is basically an extension of your own software development team that gives you complete control over your project. It is easy to hire and ramp down developers as per your project requirement.
Moreover, the virtual team model offers unparalleled convenience, as they do not commit to you for a long time. This unmatched flexibility of a virtual development team can drastically cut down all of your onshore hiring costs and other related expenses.
6. Faster time to market
Speed is also important, along with excellent quality, when you are going to deliver an impeccable product in the market. When you hire a virtual development team, you can speedily find the type of developers you need among a large pool of talent available across the globe.
Virtual employees remove the harmful bugs to fasten the launching process. A virtual development team automates the development process using DevOps and continuous integration and continuous delivery approaches. In this way, virtual employees can increase the speed of development which will eventually help you to make your product reach the market faster.
Conclusion
A virtual development team is an easy and cost-effective way to extend a small development team. Working with virtual employees allows you to expand the talent pool of your company. You can save your hiring and onboarding times, save money on overhead, and get additional time to work on the most important things.
In this blog, we have discussed with you in detail the different reasons for hiring a virtual development team for your business. After this, if you are thinking of hiring virtual developers for your next project, then you can reach us out at any time. Our experts will help you get the best talent in the industry.
Till then, keep following this space for more such wonderful insights. Thank you for reading this blog.
