When it comes to outsourcing work to a remote staff, there are an abundance of questions companies have flowing through their minds. A big question is how to keep that staff busy. The answer may actually surprise you, and potentially overwhelm you, but it’s fantastic for your bottom line.
In short: you should delegate more work than your average employee would be able to handle on a given day – let’s dive into why that is.
Outsourced Remote Staff Are Undistracted
Place yourself in shoes of your teams for a moment. Outside of their core responsibilities, they are riddled with distractions that slow them down. Those distractions are good for your company in the long run, and great for employee satisfaction, but they are distractions, nonetheless. In the midst of any project, your team could get an email or phone call from a colleague they need to address, interrupting their flow (which takes time to get back into). They also have meetings they need to attend, required for company alignment and innovation. Additionally, the culture of your company requires fostering relationships with teammates, which results in side-conversations that are good for your organization’s culture as they help drive engagement, but ultimately take away from productivity in the moment. Lastly, it’s important your employees are focusing on their professional development, which makes them even stronger members of your team in the future but does take away from daily productivity.
With an outsourced remote staff, none of the above is true. Beyond understanding the expectations of a project or assignment of tasks, when you outsource work to a remote staff, they spend all of their time on those projects – no interrupting phone calls or emails, no team meetings, no side conversations (as they are remote), no dedicated time for professional development (that happens on their own time).
Remote Staff Can Accomplish a Surprising Amount – Quickly
Due to their lack of distractions or interruptions, a remote staff or virtual assistant can accomplish far more than your typical employee in any given day. That is where a challenge presents itself at the onset of a relationship with Outsourced Staffing Solutions as you won’t be accustomed to how much a remote staff can accomplish until you see it first-hand. A great rule of thumb is to start by assigning 30% more work than you would a member of your team, then calibrate from there. As a relationship continues, the staff will become more and more efficient, so that number can be increased over time, but 30% beyond what you are used to is a safe starting number.
Thinking about how much more you can assign a remote staff, and the cost of that staff relative to your payroll employees, the value proposition becomes abundantly clear – you can get exponentially more work accomplished in a day for less money out of your pocket. When “do more with less” is a goal most organizations strive for, Outsourced Staffing Solutions truly becomes key to achieving that goal.
Keeping Outsourced Remote Staff Busy – The Key
After you have establish a baseline of what you want/need to have done and you have bumped that up about 30% of what you would expect from your in-house team, the KEY to success goes back to communication and expectations setting on both sides of the coin. Set clear daily activity goals, set clear communication channels, and most importantly do short check in digital meetings. In this meeting, ask the simple question, where are you at with your capacity? You will often be surprised when the response is that they have some time. Add in tasks, rinse and repeat!
It may sound overly simple, but remember an outsourced remote staffing resource is not always bound to a specific team, maybe there are similar tasks that other areas of you business can utilize the resource, don’t be afraid to leverage and utilize across business lines. Remember, these remote resources are working 8 hours a day and want to stay busy just like any other person. And without the distractions, they accomplish a lot if they know what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by, and most importantly how to communicate their success!
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