In today’s highly competitive business climate, balancing workload with staffing needs may lead to outsourcing work to a virtual assistant or temporary employee. Of the two services, the temporary employment business has been around much longer.
The use of temporary employees was pioneered in 1946 by entrepreneur William Russell Kelly (Kelly Services). These early temps were primarily female and performed basic clerical duties. Those of us of a certain age may remember the term “Kelly Girl”. Working as a temp is still popular; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were approximately 1.2 million temps in 2005.
Temporary Turnover Verses Permanent Career
One of the drawbacks of temporary employees is that they are just what they advertise, temporary. It’s the nature of the business. Many employers lament about spending time and money to train a temp, and then they vanish. When you hire VA from a virtual assistant firm with in-house VA’s, you will be given a dedicated virtual assistant (s) to work on your projects who is working under the understanding that it is a career position in the firm, not just a temporary job to make ends meet. It is a firm’s intention to retain employees, invest in them and make them a more valuable part of the firm. Whether a client assignment is temporary or long term, the virtual assistant is a full time, permanent employee at the firm.
Issues with Physical Location
Although you don’t have to pay payroll taxes and benefits to temporary employees they still bring many of the same personnel issues as full-time employees. With temps in your workplace you still have to worry about no-show’s, goofing off, office space, desks, computers, equipment, personal problems and being sued if they get a paper cut on your premises. A virtual assistant works off-site with his or her own equipment. Many times, using temps can create tension and morale problems in the workplace. Full-time employees may feel threatened by the presence of temporary workers and friction can occur if temps receive higher wages than full-time employees. By using a virtual assistant none of these issues are relevant. The VA works away from your site so your other employees don’t have any idea what your VA is doing or how you’re paying them. There is no employee gossip trail when your hire a virtual assistant.
Specialized Training
Another advantage of virtual assistants is that they are usually better trained than temps. Most office temps perform basic administrative duties like answering phones, taking messages, data entry and light bookkeeping. VirtualAssistant.Org offers VA’s who are educated, skilled and then receive 50 or more hours of training from an experienced management team. This cutting edge training produces virtual assistants that can tackle meaningful tasks such as:
- Website Development
- Graphic Design
- Search Engine Optimization
- Content Writing
- Flash Animation
- Video Presentations
- Link Building
VirtualAssistant.org is a firm that employs professionals that are already computer/software savvy, and then performs in house training before each professional is made available to the marketplace as a virtual assistant. These professional VA’s maintain continued education within their fields of expertise through ongoing training at VirtualAssistant.Org. This significantly shortens or eliminates on the job training for virtual assistants.
