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How Hiring Remote Teams Can Benefit Businesses During This Pandemic

It’ll probably be months and even years before we’re able to understand the full influence of the Coronavirus pandemic on politics, culture, and society. But one thing that is clear even now is that the impact on the global economy is already significant. The forced closure of businesses both small and large has led to a stock market crash, skyrocketing unemployment rates, and many other changes in the working world.

As a business owner or executive, this can be a confusing and scary time. You’re adjusting to a totally different set of processes, reevaluating your goals and targets, and questioning how best to handle your workforce. It can be a lot of pressure and, unfortunately, it’s undeniable that this pandemic will prove to have a significant negative impact on many companies, even causing some to fail and close down.
But a smart business owner will not be discouraged by what is happening. Rather, they will adapt, using flexibility and an open mind to survive and perhaps even set you up for future success after the pandemic ends. Because there are lessons to be taken from COVID-19’s impact on businesses. Namely, organizations can turn to remote outsourcing as a way to save money, mitigate the effects of the pandemic, and keep their business afloat.

Cutting Costs

Unless you are lucky enough to be a company like Zoom or Instacart, your business’s cash flow is likely suffering from the effects of the global shutdown. If you’re in the travel industry, you might be struggling to bring in any money at all. That means that, if you want to stay afloat, you have to cut costs. You’ll have to find a way to do identify anything that isn’t essential and significantly reduce spending on it, if not cutting it out completely.

First, identify the expenses your business has that are not creating any clear benefit. For example, putting a lot of money into renting an expensive office in a luxury building on the nice side of town is likely no longer doing you any favors. Physical office space is an obvious area to try and cut costs in right now.
Additionally, you can look into cutting costs related to:

  • Events and team-building activities
  • Food and meal stipends for employees
  • Recruitment and hiring of full-time, local employees
  • Training and conferences
  • Business credit cards

 

What About the Staff?

Unfortunately, cutting costs on the non-essentials still might not be enough to save your business. Whether you like it or not, you’ll probably have to find ways to cut staff costs, which usually represent a business’s most significant expense. One of the best ways to do this without significantly reducing your business’s productivity is to turn to outsource.
If you hesitated to outsource before because you weren’t comfortable with the idea of having remote employees, you’ve certainly had to become accustomed to flexible, work-from-home arrangements since. So why not use the fact that your business is already making changes and learning new processes to give remote workers a chance?
Remote outsourcing is one of the best ways to eliminate non-essential spending, which can potentially save your business. You’ll be able to keep a staff, maintain your business, and cut costs at the same time. It’s a flexible solution that you can tailor to your business’s particular needs. You can keep the full-time, local staff that are essential while supplementing with overseas workers, or even build teams that are totally remote. It’s up to you to decide what will work best for your organization.

Building a Remote Team

Depending on your field, there are many different opportunities for hiring remotely. Here are just a few examples.

Marketing, Media, and Advertising

From paid online ads to content marketing, there is a huge staff of remote workers with the skills, qualifications, and experience to help your company reach an audience of people who are spending much more time-consuming media than usual.

Customer Support

An extremely common area for outsourcing, customer service is a great candidate for remote work, with great opportunity to cut costs while maintaining a high standard of email, phone, and chat support.

Operations and Logistics

While your operations team may typically be heavily involved with maintaining the office space, there will be much more emphasis now on the HR and accounting functions of these employees. Conveniently, those are all tasks that can be easily done from a distance by remote employees.

Advisors and Consultants

Rather than paying the big bucks to bring in a local specialist to help consult and advise on such issues as mental health counseling and remote work tools, or even asking your current employees to try and master these areas without the relevant experience, turning to remote experts can help give you the high-quality advice you need without a big price tag attached.

Looking to the Future

Another major benefit of making a remote recruitment plan now is that it will also set you up for future success after this pandemic is over. In addition to helping you survive what could turn out to be our world’s most significant economic downturn in a century, outsourcing is also useful for organizations in times of economic prosperity.

By taking advantage of this crisis now to learn and identify the areas in which your business can save money by outsourcing, you’ll have a stronger understanding in the future of what areas of work can actually stay remote, keeping your business costs lower even as the economy begins to ramp up again.
You just might learn that there are areas you could have been saving money in this whole time without sacrificing any quality or productivity. You’ll move forward with a leaner operation, making it that much easier to rebuild your business when the time comes. That way, you’ll be ready to go and grow as soon as the opportunity arises.

 

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