Virtual Advantages
Companies continue to realize the many advantages of the remote and hybrid work landscape. Flexibility and work-life balance are wins for employees. For organizations, decreased spending in travel and subsequent expenses, office space, commuter benefits, and miscellaneous in-office expenses and repairs are just some of the values that can add to better business. Global Workplace Analytics found that companies can save up to $11,000 for every employee working two or three days remotely per week. Another advantage of our new virtual world is the expansion of our teams. Organizations no longer need to look in their backyard for recruiting, giving them more support around DEI initiatives and expanding their talent pool. Something as simple as virtual meetings can expand ideas from local to global, which can ultimately mean higher ROI and profit margins. It also means businesses can quickly look for external resources to fill internal gaps. Staff/team augmentation is growing quickly as a solution to fill in for more highly skilled areas. These digital and development experts are waiting to help bring a company’s vision to life. As any business knows, staffing, especially a department, is a challenging task. Having an idea is the first part, but finding and developing the right staff you need to make that idea happen can be costly and time-consuming. A lot goes into hiring just one employee, such as onboarding, training, and benefits. Not to mention ensuring everyone works well together and that all the puzzle pieces are correct and in the right place. What’s good on paper may not play out correctly once assembled. This process can lengthen timelines, increase spending, and create unengaged employees. Advantages of using team augmentation include:- Filling a skills gap by using a team with the needed expertise and experience already in place.
- Discarding time-consuming training to get a team up to speed on programs and nuances.
- Eliminating the need for searching, interviewing, and checking references and backgrounds.
- Raising quality standards through additional knowledge base.
- Having a team that is dedicated and responsible to one mission – results in more agility, productivity, and efficiency.
- Elevating your project with expert decision-making and executional know-how – giving your business a competitive edge.
- Completing one-and-dones, or more complicated long-term projects with ease.
- Accelerating organizational transformation.
Timing is Everything
Now that our world has gone remote, hiring a virtual team has opened many doors. You can tap into the expert skills of a ready-to-go team at the push of a button. You only need video conferencing, a cloud network (or other information-sharing capabilities), and an idea. Outsourcing doesn’t work for every case. Typically, a position that will be critical in the day-to-day operations for years to come will be best filled by a full-time employee.. In other cases,executives think hiring an agency is the best option, but if you already have a dedicated department with the time, perhaps that talent needs to be utilized. On the other hand, specific skills can be hard to find, especially for small-to-medium-sized businesses. Even in larger companies and enterprises, you might have a competent team, but often, they are pulled in too many directions to have the time to dedicate to your project in a meaningful way. This is where providing additional team support can improve performance, timelines, and profits.Leave it to the Experts
Skill is the operative word when it comes to team augmentation. A knowledgeable, well-trained, and experienced team becomes plug-and-play for your initiative. Outsourcing was once thought about as best used for payroll, IT, and customer service, or sometimes in terms of certain types of industries, such as finance, healthcare, and insurance sectors. However, today, the practice has grown to include more niche technical and creative abilities. One specialty that is growing by leaps and bounds is product development. When you hire an outside product team, they can help you get up to speed faster, coming in with an already-in-place product development toolkit that can help you:- Build strategic product roadmaps.
- Plan and execute complex digital projects/products.
- Create better user experience and user design (UX/UI).
- Take your product from concept to release and beyond.
- Provide added insight into launching your product.