How a Virtual Assistant can Scale your Business
In the early days, the value of the Virtual Assistant was only recognized in reducing payroll costs. But as the world changed, so did the markets and more businesses saw greater value in acquiring virtual assistance. No longer were virtual assistants considered just cost-cutting measures; they became a strategic component in business development.
Here are five (5) ways in which a Virtual Assistant can help scale your business: Cost-effective option
Businesses hire virtual assistants primarily because of the cost advantage. Virtual assistants have flexible work hours and conditions. They are paid on a productive hour basis which means compensation is released once they have accomplished
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If the volume of your business has increased to the point that an additional unit of work will compromise productivity, it is time to scale up operations. Having the extra workload accommodated by virtual assistants will maintain your level of productivity with minimal incremental costs of business. Attend to specialized tasks
Gone are the days when the Virtual Assistant was just thought of as a home-based secretary or personal assistant. Today’s incarnation of the Virtual Assistant is more skilled and highly specialized.
The evolution of the Virtual Assistant was spurred by events that changed the global landscape. The business environment became volatile, unpredictable and chaotic that economies worldwide experienced down turn periods. Companies looked for new avenues to maintain productivity but streamline costs.
Virtual assistants grew out of the need to fill this demand for affordable but qualified talent. Today any task that can performed online will qualify for virtual assistance work. It should be of no surprise that you will find virtual assistants handling social media marketing, accounting, legal transcription and other diverse fields of
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Add flexibility to operations
As mentioned virtual assistants have flexible work hours. Since they are self-employed and work from home, the ravages of time and space do not apply to them unlike for full-time employees. They can work during the hours required by the client. This could be of great value if you plan to expand the scope of your business to the international market.
For example, if you are promoting your products and services to the United Kingdom, you can hire virtual assistants from the Philippines to oversee key areas of your business. You can have virtual assistants handling customer service after office hours in the United Kingdom to ensure each and every query and concern are immediately attended to.
Having a Virtual Assistant onboard will go a long way in helping your enterprise achieve new levels of growth.
Not only are virtual assistants cost effective but they contribute directly to the productivity of your business.
When you have a strategy that addresses your both your cost management and revenue generation concerns, you will have the best solution to the profitability
Technological developments and improvements have allowed for businesses to communicate information faster and better by the use of email, live chats, and video teleconferencing. These enhancements allow for a faster flow of information in which a business can easily distribute and receive responses in real-time from its customers. It helps employees to function more efficiently by using software programs such as word processing, spreadsheet tools, statistical analysis software and computer aided design programs. With the growth of the internet and social media, businesses expose its products to a larger customer base. Others advances such as inventory management software are able to track and fill orders, and replace stock when the volume fails a pre-determined quantity at much faster rates. Digital storage of documents and information on servers and multi-media storage
The adjective "virtual," practically unheard-of a few years ago, has without a doubt become the number one buzzword of the nineteen-nineties. Virtual reality has become a catch phrase for the interactive multimedia technologies that have supplanted desktop publishing at the cutting edge of personal-computer graphics technology. The virtual communities which for years have flourished in comfortable obscurity on the Internet, have recently been thrust into the glare of publicity as commercial gateways have opened up the net to the public, while virtual corporations have transformed the world of business.
Lin, C., Standing, C., & Liu, Y. (2008). A model to develop effective virtual teams.
I found this article to be of great interest to myself because my work and life has revolved around telecommuting for the past several years. As the article indicates, “a telecommuter is anyone who works at least part of the time at home, in their cars, from clients’ offices, and/or in hotel rooms and telephone booths.” Although the article is somewhat dated (1995 to be exact), I feel that what Robert Moskowitz wrote about telecommuting back in 1995 still applies today. When I chose to go to work for ADP-Automatic Data Processing several years ago, I already had some previous work experience as a telecommuter. At the time, I had no idea that my current position would actually transition itself to a telecommuting position or as I would like to call it now, “a virtual office position.”
When hiring employees, specifically an assistant, it is essentially that a leader applies a transformational form of leadership rather than transactional. A transformational form of leadership occurs when the leader believes that his/her followers are competent and full of potential. The primary focus is on employee commitment and development so as to transform followers to goal oriented actors. Where as a transactional form of leadership occurs when a follower is treated as a lazy, uninterested and incompetent individual. The primary focus of transactional leadership is task completion, meaning that the employee is viewed as an economic
A typical day for most people in today's world starts out with an early commute to work. People working in the city know what a hassle it is to deal with the many thousands of other trying to make their way to work. Dealing with long commutes and traffic congestion is a commonplace in today's fast-paced society. What if you had a chance to do most of your work at home? Would it be beneficial to you and your company? That is a common question one, which more and more companies are finding out is the future of business.
A virtual team is a group of people working interdependently via various types of electronic media across organizational and geographical boundaries for a shared purpose (D’Souza & Colarelli, 2010). Research indicates virtual teams are becoming increasingly popular in organizations across the United States and the world (D’Souza & Colarelli, 2010; Rusman, van Bruggen, Sloep, & Koper, 2010). These teams vary in size, degree of geographic dispersion, prior shared work experience, nature of assignment, and expectations of a common future (Rusman et al., 2010). Although virtual teams have potential advantages like the removal of physical boundaries, the ability to form new partnerships, and optimization of competencies (Chinowsky & Rojas, 2003), they also introduce many challenges that may not be as prevalent in traditional teams.
At the same time, virtual teams have some advantages. For instance, it’s easier to think
...urcing services, the company operation will be became a mess. This is because one organization can’t run a lot of task or project at one time. Therefore an organization need outsourcing in the way to help their organization run smoothly.
Virtual corporations have some major characteristics (Judith, 2002, quoted in Byrne. n.d.) as following state: technology, excellence, opportunism, trust and no borders. Technology makes distance no longer a problem while entrepreneurs or companies far away from, due to the computer networks link people all over the world. Excellence was showed by each partner bringing its core competencies to the corporation, which can exert all advantages. Companies make alliances for specific market opportunity and this is a more efficiency work way than any others. Members in a virtual organization must trust their partners due to they meet the need by cooperating. The new communication ways were brought by computer networks, which blur the traditional hierarchies and boundaries.
In today’s virtual society our office experience is getting more and more dependent on cyber culture. Due to the increase in employees working at home, virtual offices have become a convenient way for staff, clients, educators, students and all other types of business people to stay connected. Teleconferencing, skyping, e-mails, and texting have become mainstream ways of conducting business so it seems pertinent that businesses learn to effectively create and conduct virtual teams.
Consumers desire timely, resourceful help at their fingertips. Plus, the cost of call centers can be expensive and difficult to manage.
-Virtual communication allows an individual to communicate despite engagement in other schedules hence this can well be practiced by employees and their Employers.
With the rise of mobile working whereby companies employ from different regions without necessarily having employees enclosed in one building, they end up employing more skilled and qualified workers regardless of their location. This has been made possible by companies embracing virtual meetings and video conferencing where managers and
The nature of the background and role of administrative office management makes it the most logical of all organizational areas to have responsibility for the management of the organization information (Velva Tyson). For this reason, I think that for us to have a better understanding about what Administrative Office Assistant really is or means within an organizational setting; we should first define it and then acknowledge the crucial role administrative office assistants play in all kinds of businesses.