Building a remote team is one of the most cost-effective and easiest ways to improve your business.
Businesses that implement remote work policies see increased productivity, efficiency, and fulfillment from their employees.
Benefits
Costs
One of the great benefits of building a remote team is that it dramatically reduces operational costs. For example, a team of sales associates is 25-50% more affordable in Ethiopia than in India.
Fewer employees working in the office means you’ll need less office space. That leads to savings on associated expenses, like utilities, travel reimbursements, or office supplies.
If you’re already in business, improving your bottom line may be crucial.
However, it’s also one of the most feasible ways to build a new revenue stream as well. For example, we worked with one client to build a team of 5 telemarketers. They made 8000 calls per month, 200 per shift (5-hour shifts) to book appointments for insurance reps.
Increased productivity
A study in the Harvard Business Review revealed that remote employees completed nearly an extra day’s worth of work every week compared to their in-office colleagues.
Remote team building ensures that your employees remain more engaged with the organization. They can discuss, collaborate and accomplish as per their convenience.
While working from home can make it difficult to concentrate, this study shows that employees who work from home are generally more productive.
Many employees will be happier and value your organization more if you allow them to work from home more, improving productivity.
Focus on what you do best
In most hotels, when you call the reception area, you’re not speaking to someone at the hotel. Instead, you’re talking to someone thousands of miles away who either answers your questions or forwards your call to someone in the hotel.
That business model allows hotels to save costs and have their staff focus on the most crucial part of their business.
Tier 1 service uses the same model. We work with many customers whose teams use our Tier 1 service. Our team answers questions on essential tech (locked out of their email, lost a file, etc.)
If our team can’t answer it, it gets escalated to Tier 2, usually the IT person in their building. This takes the load off the IT people in the building to focus on the more difficult hands-on problems.
Augment your team
Bringing on employees full-time can be difficult – especially when your industry varies seasonally, like in the travel or event industry.
Bringing on a remote resource for a few months every year when it’s peak season allows your team to have the extra help needed and easily allows you to release that person during your off-season.
You can increase the flexibility and capacity of your team by hiring specialists exactly when you need them and for the relevant task at that time.
You also get high productivity levels as the staff you hire are 100% focused on your project and dedicated to your goals.
Relieves HR
Finding talent can be incredibly difficult, and hiring talent in your geographical area greatly limits your options.
That’s why building teams through companies like ours is easy – because we send you pre-vetted talent that means your exact specification.
By outsourcing to a third-party vendor like us, we can help you reduce time and resources spent on recruiting, succession planning, transactions, and administration so that you can concentrate on more strategic activities.
A flexible workforce is a scalable solution that empowers companies to stay on budget during busy and slow times while also avoiding overstaffing and layoffs.
Relieves overhead
The energy, the cost, and the stress behind managing people are complex.
Building a remote team means you’re paying direct costs only. So you don’t have to worry about insurance, tax, legality, hiring, firing, etc.
An employee who has a cold might take the day off to go into an office, but that same employee might keep working if they can work from home. Employees with children also appreciate working from home, as they won’t have to take days off for sick kids.
You can have a great remote employee who shows up daily and gives you and your team and your employees the support they need–everything else is off your shoulders.
Get local guidance
We work with companies that want one resource and an entire team of cvent support, developers, and programmers.
But as a BPO company headquartered in NY with offices in Dubai and Addis, we’ve seen considerable interest from companies (especially other BPO companies) to open up a presence in Ethiopia which is quickly becoming a global tech hub.
In that case, we like to call it a “backward accelerator” program. This is where we work with them to establish their company presence here. They use our resources and get acclimated to the local context.
After that, companies can choose to stay with us, or when they register their companies, they can take their resources over to them without any cost or hassle.
Even if you’re not a BPO company, working with a trusted team who has experience building remote teams makes it easy to get started.
After experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, most companies are considering remote work culture as a permanent option. The employees can save significant travel time while the organizations can cut down on expensive real-estate costs. If the activities are well coordinated, it can be a win-win for both parties.
There are lots of benefits to building a remote team. However, it is equally important to recognize the challenges involved and address them.