How Businesses Benefit from the Global Remote Workforce

Even before 2020, people had already started asking whether it was really necessary anymore to physically be in an office together to work or not. Then, pandemic lockdowns happened. Everyone got their answers.

To cope with the emerging challenges, digitization of internal operations and other interactions have been accelerated by 3 to 4 years by many companies. It made the new economic and business environment highly competitive which demanded new practices and strategies. Work patterns began to change and a major opportunity arrived that ushered in a new era of remote and hybrid working.

Be it individuals, teams, or entire workforces, working well while scattered every other direction was more than possible, and started to become more beneficial than before for the companies, big and small alike. For example, for each half-time remote worker, employers saved an average of USD 11,000 in 2021.

Through this blog, we will take a look at how the global remote workforce can benefit small businesses. We will also consider some of the challenges of this new style of work and look for solutions.

Remote work offers excellent benefits for both the employers and the employees. Let’s take a look at the major benefits for your business:

This is perhaps one of the biggest advantages the global remote workforce offers to small and medium businesses. This is especially the case after the Great Resignation in 2021-22. Can you imagine what more than 70 million employees quitting in a year (not to return back for a while) would do to the talent market? It would create a scarcity that is almost impossible to solve. Unless you pull resources from the entire world.

That’s what remote workforce allows you to do. It allows you to get qualified individuals from countries like India at a lower rate.

For small businesses it is often difficult to manage fixed costs related to office space, equipment, technology, full-time salaries, benefits and so on. With on-site employees, companies may have already been operating at maximum (or a very high) efficiency in terms of reducing costs and it may seem that cutting costs further is impossible. But the global remote workforce makes it possible.

Remote workers in many cases do not charge anything except what the task requires, allowing companies to save a lot of money on overhead expenses.

It is important for all businesses to adapt as quickly as possible to the changing market. Temporary and remote hiring offers small businesses the flexibility and agility to answer to every call the market (and internal situation) makes by shrinking and swelling the workforce at a moment’s notice.

Unpredictable economic conditions, emergence of new technologies, inadequate cross-training for employees, high turnover rate, burnout are some of the things that can cause overstaffing and understaffing both of which are harmful for a business. Remote employees solve this problem with an agile business model.

Many business owners find themselves stuck maintaining their business with administrative or similar tasks that take up their time and leave little or no room for developing strategies and taking other initiatives that will help the business grow.

Delegating non-core tasks to remote experts allows in-house employees to put all their efforts on the core functions. As it relieves them of the repetitive tasks and decreases the workload to a significant degree ons-te employees feel more energised and regains better work-life balance. It improves employee morale, increases productivity and decreases attrition.

Like everything else, hiring remote workers or getting dedicated virtual assistants for your routine tasks also comes with some challenges of its own. Let’s take a look at them here:

This is one of the most frequently talked about problems with a remote workforce. If a small business wants to get the unique advantages of working with remote workers it must set a common language for all work interactions. With over 1.35 billion speakers around the world, English is the most spoken language in use. The countries that offer excellent workers for remote task compilation use English as a second language.

So, choosing English as the common language is a no-brainer, unless you want to get very specific talent that is not fluent at English. In that scenario you can provide necessary training like many companies do.

In-house or not, your teams need to understand your products and services almost like you know them. If you have a physical product you can ship it to your remote team or employee to get a full understanding. If that sounds too much, you should use the conventional methods like online tutorials, video training calls, and various web resources you have created.

If you are a business owner, you should connect with your remote worker and establish multiple ways to reach them in case they are not present at any important video conferences and so on.

Cybersecurity is not only a technical issue anymore. It is something that can cause irreparable damage to the business as a whole, incurring financial loss, reputational harm, data compromise, legal consequences, etc. Small and medium businesses generally find it hard to protect themselves from the influx of ransomware and supply-chain attacks unlike the large companies.

However, if you work with a company that provides remote talent or virtual assistants that considers ‘security’ as their top priority a lot of your tension can be relieved. Before you start working with a service provider, ensure that their infrastructure can satisfy the security needs of your organization.

If you are not working with a reliable organization, many things can lead to service disruption. For small and medium businesses, this can be devastating. Like all businesses, you also have to continually deliver value and serve your customers and clients and keep your business stable. It is vital for you to maintain customer’s trust to retain them.

To avoid a service disruption, you have to have a remote team or employee that allows you to scale up or down easily, provides great data management and backup facilities enabling you to automatically recover from failure, and so on.

If you want to list down the benefits of a global remote workforce for small businesses, it would be a long one from easy access to qualified employees to high flexibility and scalability options. However, it is important to consider the new challenges that come with the excellent benefits and carefully choose the vendor to mitigate any risks associated with it. Now, working with remote experts is not even an option, it’s a necessity, therefore ensuring the right partnership is paramount to reap the real benefits.