At the end of the day, your workforce decides whether your business succeeds. You need good people at a price that leaves room for a return in your business. But the cost of hiring keeps going up, making it difficult to bring in the people that will really make a difference as your business grows. One option may be to consider a more global workforce.
In every business, there are plenty of tasks that don’t need to be done in your office. The number of tasks that can be handled off site keeps growing, as well: if you’ve got a few key pieces of technology, anything from bookkeeping to marketing can be done away from your office. That opens up the possibility of working with a remote team. Just who is on your team can also vary: it’s no almost as easy to hire a virtual worker in the Philippines or in India as it is to hire an employee who lives down the street from you.
Changing the Cost Question
There is one key factor when it comes to working with a global workforce, rather than a local one: cost. The monthly income for most jobs in the Philippines is under $500 (U.S. dollars) — an engineer might expect to earn a little over $400 while a receptionist would be closer to $150. There are other reasons that your overall costs would be less when working with a distributed team: you wouldn’t need to pay for office space for those team members located outside of your geographic area. It may take some investment in terms of hardware or software to make sure that your team can work well, but internet access and even computer ownership is becoming fairly common in most countries (at least in the bigger cities). A global workforce presents an opportunity for most businesses.
Considering Your Own Business
It can take some careful consideration to determine just what jobs in your company don’t need to be done in the office. There are also personal considerations: you may simply have a preference to have your bookkeeping done locally or something similar (although you might consider the opportunities available by choosing a bookkeeper who is local but also doesn’t come into the office. You may need to check out what tools and technologies are available for your industry — many fields now have specialized tools to make telecommuting and distributed workforces easier to manage.
In the most recent Small Business Success Index, many business owners reported less successes in training and developing employees, although there were moderate successes in improving employee productivity and rewarding employees. Turning to a global workforce can create more opportunities for small businesses to expand workforces and create better working environments, if only because of the relative costs involved in looking for new employees outside of the country.
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Tags: SBSI, small business, social media, Workforce
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