Thursday, September 16, 2010

opposites attract

 

Recently Jim and I received some feedback from a client who commented on how we have such different styles, skills, capabilities, strengths and mindsets between the two of us – which seems to have made for a very strong partnership and an enabling characteristic for what we do. Feedback from clients is always appreciated especially when it has such a positive undertone to it. However, the perspective wasn’t anything earth-shattering for either of us – we have had discussions with one another on numerous occasions about just that and it is something that we deliberately try to leverage in driving the decisions behind most everything that we do. To avoid saying that we are completely different, we do share many similarities in our capabilities, as well.  Our dynamic, though, has allowed us to be flexible, nimble, and think about things from many different perspectives which have enabled us to grow virtualwirks in ways that we may not have originally intended or thought. I write about this in this post not to blow our own horn, but to draw upon this as a parallel between two completely different business models that, when paired together, can deliver breakthrough accomplishments. Of course I am talking about virtual and premise based workforces – it is, after all, what we focus on and specialize in. Contrary to a lot of common misconceptions, having a large remote workforce requires a much different approach, skill set, resources, etc. than that of a premise based model. Both have their advantages and disadvantages in terms of some of their characteristics and each may be used to accomplish different objectives. One concept that is most commonly overlooked by organizations about the two is how they can work together to generate and elevate positive outcomes for a common objective in ways that are difficult – if not impossible – to achieve through the utilization of one or the other in solitude. For example companies have successfully leveraged part time employees to help balance and flex resources with the demands of the business to dramatically improve profitability while leveraging premise based full-time employees to fit the demands of the more static environment. This differs from more traditional mixtures of full and part-time models because the company is able to scale the business resources up or down without having to invest in or repurpose other assets such as facilities and equipment. You can really start to see trends in business shifting in this direction across many industries and job types as it is becoming more apparent about the gains that can be realized. Contact centers, for instance, have really started to invest heavily in this capability in order to not only save millions of dollars in capital on facilities, rent, and equipment, but to be able staff employees more efficiently during time of high call volumes such as lunch hours and evening when consumers have time in their day to take care of such tasks. Using part time employees that work from home, contact centers can staff employees for shorter shifts that fit into small pockets of high demand. The challenge that a lot of organizations run up against in trying to achieve this sort of flexibility is that it really isn’t as easy as just sending employees home with a computer and a VPN connection. When deploying a remote workforce on a large scale deliberate planning, processes, and tools need to be in place to really capture the full potential in the model. In addition to that challenge, companies often fail to realize the potential that remote work process have for their bricks and mortar operations, as well, and so they miss out on a large part of the return on their investment when pricing out  and considering the costs to develop a remote workforce model. For example, much of the recruiting processes and tools that are necessary to hire employees without ever physically meeting them are much more efficient because of things like electronic paperwork, signatures, and data processing. In many brick and mortar based hiring practices, these things are done through paper intensive and manual processes that cost money and time to complete. These practices that are critical and essential to a remote based model can be adopted and deployed through the rest of the organization to drive greater gains in efficiency and productivity… However, they are often overlooked when the numbers are getting crunched for expected rates of returns on capital investment. We are proud to say (and I will blow our own horn here) that Virtualwirks has successfully aided companies in finding and realizing the gains in a good marriage between the two models. It is difficult and will challenge employees to think and manage the business in less traditional ways, but when invested in and pursued properly (which I cannot stress enough) it can really produce breakthrough achievements for the entire organization.

–TADD

1. Marge says:

   December 4, 2011 at 2:16 am

   Begun, the great inteernt education has.