Online staffing requires more dependable, performance-based metrics. We doubt the business axiom that says, “whatever is measured can be done,” because despite the daunting but seemingly stable processes, the opposite can apply: “whatever is measured may not be done.” Given working SOP for metrics, most companies can apply these only after a longish integration period where results are unreliable. These metrics are typically used for large numbers of employees.
Most metrics will measure and track employee performance, which ideally should tell whether anything done by the employee is competent and effective. If the levels dip, a company has additional frameworks in which to help the employee get back on track. However, there are so many intangibles and external/internal factors in the process, that what HR experts using standard performance metrics usually get is a generalised and unrefined view of any single employee’s heart and mind.
In theory, you can set up training programs for any sort of business process to support performance and create competency. In online staffing, the primary points to the competency program include specific skill set/s, virtual interaction, teamwork, initiatives-based motivation, and the determination to compete. All along the line benign pressure is often built up and maintained to maximise on the work of VAs and specialists in virtual teams using these points.
There are performance metrics that can sum up employee performance. The performance is measured in quantities, usually a set of numbers or parameters that run through a range of levels starting with worst and ending with best.
Are there true metrics to measure individual and group competence in business?
There are standards in human resource metrics that can provide good statistical and analytical overviews of business office performance, whether these apply to individuals or groups in a business organisation. “True metrics” is an extendable process, meaning it can help management go beyond average analytics and statistics to get at the heart of things, be it for measuring consumer behavior or C-suite relational modules. The one overarching factor involved is human emotional intelligence.
Take a set of fluid emotion-based data that provides consistency or solidity to the latest personality development programs. Emotion is amorphous, once thought to be something that couldn’t be reliably tracked, but today a digital assistant/chatbot is “brought up” to have a “personality”. Developers program bots to target audiences on the basic emotional level, with a perfect background on culture and local mores.
The further question is whether technology can come to terms with the entire set of functions in a human brain. If you understood the cautionary fable in the movie “AI”, it tells you that human emotions are primary in communications. Emotion drives decisions and actions, and objectivity is actually driven by controlled or intelligently-used emotions. With its limitations and possibilities, emotions help humans (and perhaps someday, robots) communicate with the largely conceptual framework of divinity.
This entity is emotionally viewed, and AI scientists and scientists in other fields are crossing the scientific border to study the divine. Preliminary findings say that emotion is the true driver of human work and business. In HR, AI is coming into the scene, and the refinements on emotional intelligence testing, studies and analysis are clarifying.
Emotions rule work, and this applies to an online staff.
Emotion is inescapable, and it rules how an online staff is able to work. They need good HR professionals working for them. Pros who, even when stripped of tools and programs, rest on foundations of stable emotional competence to be able to take the measure of the human investment in business, without which business would be a null concept.
Tech is an excellent thing that is made more excellent by human emotion. A virtual staff lives and dies by the tech it uses, and where in some sectors this is thought a limitation or disadvantage, tech companies and their developers aren’t ready or willing to accept this. A good virtual staffing firm shouldn’t.
Tech can be perfected in well-defined goals and levels, emotions can reach plateaus of perfection but cannot be perfected, and between these two working principles, tech is always a solution and should never be part of any difficult, impossible-to-address problem.
In performance levels, the virtual staffing HR experts should know how to measure, develop and encourage teams to reach the aforementioned emotional plateaus with the aid of online platforms and tools. Where these plateaus go is where your business goals should be realised. If you are a potential client of a good VA services provider, you shouldn’t be daunted by true metrics, or issues about tech.
Online staffing competencies are always built to make it through the crunch.
Human to human interaction is still a highly vital thing in virtual personnel management. Competencies start to develop from this, and programs can be applied later. Onboarding also affects competencies right from the start. Which means that any good managed virtual services provider knows how to leverage for these competencies throughout the course of virtual employee life.
Engagement expectations for employees always means the use of interactive technology. The more agile and adaptive these are, the better, and the market for the tech is currently at the cutting edge of any outsourcing improvement initiative. Crunch times are virtually the high points of any outsourced process, addressing things like ramped-up sales and marketing drives, changes in tech and programs, or any client request for improved deliveries.
So competencies are drilled into virtual employees right from the start. Many firms find it better to find experienced professionals for their teams, because the competencies are organic to experience. Offices doing things like outsource CRM or offshore businesses, to one degree or another, mould virtual assistants or team specialists into highly-polished, effective pros. All along the line, true metrics may be applied to improve performance.
Cutting out “cost centers” should be part of competency development programs for remote or virtual teams.
The final iteration in the development of core competencies in online staffing will be an almost automatic capacity to cut out cost centers. (Read TechTarget CMO John Steinert’s article on this and related topics.) Traditional management practices can play the zero sum game with regards to cost centers without an awareness of their doing so.
Virtual teams adjust almost day-to-day to cut off any costly, useless elephant (or mouse) in the system — what works is measured, and what does not is either avoided or cut out of the system. The teams influence decisions because their managed virtual services firms regularly review their work and use surveys to find what things can be cut or adjusted. A good firm provides the means of daily reportage for teams, and the best teams have members who know their jobs and their minds.
Client businesses are given the reviews and survey results to know what things they can do without. Often, they might lag in adjustments because they might still be in transition. But a firm providing VAs will make the sanest recommendations for them, and these are connected to the bottomline.
The managed virtual services market is agile and forward-thinking.
Managed virtual services firms providing online staff services belong to one of the the most forward-thinking and agile of markets. People here simply adjust to any pressure, inside or outside. This is generated by those who are staying traditional, those transitioning from traditional to new, and those born under the new star of business success. Needless to say, traditionally-minded companies might not be able to compete well. But in general terms the successful business formula remains traditional.
The successful businesses of the new age are often the biggest ones today, with the most well-known brands. These are giants in the digital landscape, the place where virtual staffing does its work. Many of these giants use VAs, upskilling in AI terms, and they have encouraged traditional big businesses to do the same. This has made outsourcing become big business in itself.
But in big business terms cost centers are still features of the landscape. In in committed terms big business may want these features to remain on that landscape. For firms providing managed services this fact has given the native advantage in terms of efficiency, flexibility and speed.
We help your startup or SME compete with online staffing, minus cost centers.
In plainspeak, cost centers are things we identify and help you do without. If your startup is hoping to compete with bigger companies, here is one area you can use to advantage. We will help you leverage it with online staffing. We can help you build up platforms for advanced tech, and integrate it into your system. Solutions are all of a piece, meaning that they are interrelated and any push forward would bring them altogether on compatible levels. The thing is to help you build along competency lines with a balancing factor in tech.
For details, use your free chat option when you contact us, or visit our website.