Guest comment: The Rise of the Virtual Workforce
- Added:
- Dec 21, 2009
Small businesses are waking up to the many benefits of operating virtually, says PeoplePerHour.com founder Xenios Thrasyvoulou.
Anyone who’s run a business will know that its biggest costs are people. Even other costs bundled into terms like ‘overheads’ or ‘fixed costs’ are in essence things you need for your people, like an office and phones for them, and all the comforts for them to create the marvels that will lead to your riches. So it doesn’t take a business degree to figure out that if you can get those marvels, if you can get that work done – to the same level or better, without those ‘associated costs’ – you’re on to a winner. Obvious?
That, in a nutshell, is the basic definition of ‘virtual working’: getting your stuff done – from large ongoing projects to occasional small tasks – through a network of freelancers that work for you remotely. But for this almost idyllic mode of working to become reality you need two things: one, the means to adopt it efficiently and, two, a good reason to want to. The last two years have given us both.
The recession has given us a more than good reason to look at our cost structure. Thousands of businesses large and small have sought to reduce their head count, and outsource work to freelancers to become leaner and more flexible. Even the Chancellor’s recent pre-budget report includes a whopping £360m projected budget saving through the adoption of ‘virtual courtrooms’, where trials are held remotely.
In particular, small businesses – rid of the traditional red tape and bureaucracy of larger businesses, and less pre-occupied with deleveraging and trying to restructure their messed-up balance sheets – have been the quickest to embrace this new way of working. On PeoplePerHour.com we have companies who having seen the benefits of virtual working have transformed themselves 100% into virtual organizations with a team of 2 or 3 key people managing a network of over 30 freelancers across the UK and abroad. These freelancers fulfill every business function – marketing, customer support, accounting, admin, you name it – some on an ongoing basis but most ad-hoc as and when needed.
This is not possible unless we have at our disposal affordable and easy tools that enable us to manage that network efficiently. The internet is not new, but in the last two years broadband penetration has grown rapidly and has just now reached levels covering over 50% of UK households. And given that the majority of the new virtual workforce are home-based freelancers this is no small detail. Fast cheap internet connectivity is a prerequisite.
And then there’s new tools – most of them completely free or near-enough – like instant messaging, peer-to-peer free telephony from Skype, collaborative tools like Basecamp and Google shared documents that allow you to share and co-edit your work with colleagues remotely, cloud computing which means you don’t need any server hardware in your office and someone to administer it, and so much more. Sure many of these things have been about for some time, but everything has its timing, and somehow these tools and the right reasons to adopt them now both come together, turning your bedroom into a turnkey office.
Of course the other driver behind all this is the need from the earners themselves. With the sheer volume of job cuts since the onset of the recession thousands of Britons have turned to freelancing either as a main or a supplementary source of their income. On PeoplePerHour.com we’ve seen ex-bankers turn to freelancing in areas neither you or I would have ever imagined: blogging, link building, business planning, even stand-up comedy! Need is the mother of evolution.
And like evolution, the reasons that drive it are the first to die. What remains are the new species and a new ecosystem. The small business environment– the fastest to adopt this new trend – has no doubt been changed forever. In a recent survey we conducted at PeoplePerHour.com amongst out 45,000 users only 11% of freelancers who turned to freelancing during the last 2 years now say they would go back into employment ; whilst 98% of businesses who hire freelancers say they will continue doing so. Equally, over 85% of respondents have said they intend to invest in their business in the next 12 months, but only 19% are hiring as a priority. Why on earth would they?
By Xenios Thrasyvoulou
Founder
PeoplePerHour
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