Virtual Employees

When we say something is “virtual” in modern terminology, we are almost always talking about something related to the internet. So Virtual Dating is dating using the internet. “Virtual” does not mean something that does not exist. But it implies you are replacing a normal physical entity with a real but for the most part unseen entity that lives online.

The trend in strategic business planning is to incorporate an aggressive “virtual marketing” plan with your traditional plans. So it makes sense that eventually the move to virtual resources would reach human resources with the availability of virtual employees.

In the last two or three years, virtual employment has taken off and become a very real resource for businesses wishing to tap into valuable experience and subject matter expertise that cannot be found locally. Agencies such as Team Double Click and Rent-A-Coder provide an army of ready to work professionals that can step in and get a job done quickly and efficiently for an employer.

The obvious first application of virtual workers is to subcontract to an online employment agency certain task specific projects that have a short beginning, middle and end. Building a new function into a web page is a good example of a project that can be packaged into an understandable project and signed over to a virtual consultant to perform the work and return to the online employer. The handling agencies collect funds via escrow so neither the employer or the consultant are at risk and the handling company claims a percentage of the fee as part of their pay for facilitating the partnership. Everybody wins.

But the concept of virtual employment is going beyond providing another variation on outsourcing to a consultant. Many virtual employment agencies provide administrative assistants, sales support and many other functions normally associated with a full time employee but those services are done “virtually”. A virtual office manager can have calls routed to his or her remote phone, emails redirected and conduct office meetings and negotiations with vendors via email or instant messaging. Using these modern tools, a virtual assistant can provide almost every function an on site assistant might be able to do but do so at a lower cost to the employer.