Why Some Companies Fail at Using Virtual Staff

Avoid these common problems to ensure success with outsourcing

At Noon Dalton, we’ve been providing virtual staffing services to companies all over the world for many years. In this time, we’ve worked with organizations of all shapes and sizes, and come up with a guide that can hopefully prevent you from making common mistakes that can derail the success of your virtual staffing initiatives. In this blog, we’ll go through some of the reasons companies fail at using virtual staff, and some of the ways you can avoid or improve on these problems. Our goal is to get you prepared for when and if you decide to leverage the power and efficiency of outsourcing in your business.

Outsource the wrong duties

Is a business outsourcing core, well-defined activities, or are a variety of tasks building up throughout the day that are then being sent to the virtual staff? If virtual employees are unsure whether they’re doing the same job each day, it can be incredibly difficult to properly train them to match the wide range of experience that they are attempting to replicate.

Lack of time for training

Once tasks have been identified that can be offloaded to a virtual resource, training becomes incredibly important. Committed training and feedback are essential during a dedicated onboarding period that is set aside for training and process documentation of the specific tasks that need to be outsourced.

Lack of communication

Virtual staff members work well with feedback and response that are as close to real time as possible, especially in the beginning of a working relationship. Once properly trained, virtual staff members can work autonomously, but without timely feedback things can get off to a rocky start, and both sides end up getting frustrated.

Never worked with anyone remotely

While the working world is moving to a more remote culture, some organizations still have yet to embrace it. If a company has never worked with anyone remotely, the chances increase that their experience with virtual staff will be less satisfactory. The key to avoiding this issue? Effective communication is extremely important when working with remote resources. If an organization is not willing to put in the effort to communicate with virtual staff members, the outcome will likely be less productive for both sides of the relationship.

No buy-in from the person who is delegating the work

Often an owner will decide to outsource certain duties and delegate a junior person within the organization to gather the tasks to be delegated and facilitate the communication between the outsourcing company and the organization. And occasionally, that junior employee may be incompetent, fail to see the value in and prioritize outsourcing, or become unnecessarily worried about their job. Failure of buy-in from any individuals responsible for getting the program off the ground can result in poor outcomes.

No single point of contact

If multiple people are communicating different goals and tasks to a virtual staff member, the result is usually not ideal. It’s important to have a single point of contact that is responsible for communicating with the virtual resource to ensure that both sides are clear on roles, tasks, and expectations.

Communication critical to effective virtual staffing

If you look over all of the common problems listed above, many of them deal with ineffective communication in some form. Success with virtual staff relies on properly communicating goals,

expectations, and feedback to ensure that both sides are effectively supported. And good communication during the initial training and onboarding process is essential to getting virtual resources off to a productive start. For more tips on successfully implementing a virtual staff within your organization, contact Noon Dalton by phone at 877-820-6522 or through our contact form.