How To Reduce Unnecessary HR Overhead And Do More

Virtual workforce may very well be a self-fulfilling prophecy

     
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal described a workforce that’s both demoralized and increasingly transient. This, along with chronic uncertainty regarding Covid vaccine mandates and the threat of new variants such as Omicron, has created the biggest challenge for HR managers in our lifetimes.

Sadly, more nightmare fuel is probably on the way and no one really knows what it will take to lure employees back into the workforce or even back into the office. Not that they’re trying very hard! As Josh Bersin recently observed: “Today only 13% of companies survey employees to understand what they need and only 18% actively manage and optimize workloads to remove stress.”

But what if you didn’t have to survey and actively manage and optimize? What if you could be rid of your recruiting and retention headaches and get back to focusing on getting the best out of your company’s human capital?

The idea of outsourcing has been with us as long as mercenary armies, meaning for centuries at least. It took hold more recently in the corporate world, at first in manufacturing and call centers, then later on in name only, as contract workers became indistinguishable from employees. But necessity still breeds invention, and to necessitate a reliable workforce, the concept of outsourcing is expanding again.

More and more executives, entrepreneurs and just plain busy people are leaning on professional, virtual assistants so they don’t have to spend time and money trying to find the right worker, only to lose them after a few months because, for example, the employee’s expectations were not met or they decided that they simply did not want to return to work in an office building.

Indeed, 45% of the U.S. workforce is already working virtually. Most are located in the U.S. but many are overseas, particularly in cheaper places that happen to have a large population of English-speakers like the Philippines. These virtual workers do not require office space. They are grateful to be working in a safe, professional environment, where they grow their skills and share in the company’s financial success. Covid has not yet figured out how to spread via fiber-optic cables, so the pandemic is not an issue for them.

Yet remote assistants are widely misunderstood and sometimes mocked. Ever since the book, Where’d you go, Bernadette? became a surprise best-seller, people have associated virtual help as the domain of histrionic housewives. Meanwhile, remote assistants are typecast as broken English-speaking robots who can’t handle anything more complicated than buying a plane ticket, if that!

But times have changed.

When my real-estate business grew faster than I could manage it, I found my first assistant, Daphne, on CraigsList, whose definition of personal services then included massages. (Maybe it still does, I haven’t checked recently!) I was pleasantly surprised by her professionalism. Years later, she’s still a valued employee. But the stigma of being remote or virtual or even a contract worker remains. It’s the same kind of stigma that haunted nascent streaming companies and online brokerages decades ago. It will dissipate.

Our extraordinary growth, from zero to well over one-thousand workers in just several years, is illuminating. So is the Great Resignation, which has left five million jobs unfilled in the U.S. economy at a critical moment. The economy needs workers to fully recover and it needs them now. Companies need a scalable HR solution. Not every company is growing quickly, but every company is now facing the Sisyphian prospect of losing more employees than it can afford.

There is a great irony to The Great Resignation. Many of those quitting their jobs have become entrepreneurs, spawning the largest creation of small businesses in history. These men and women will need plenty of help, but they themselves are evidence of how hard it is to find and keep physical labor. In short, the virtual workforce may very well be a self-fulfilling prophecy.