It began local, but became global. The economic crisis threw its shades all over the world, causing shock to many and fatal loses to others. Many businessmen began reconsidering their business plans or their current projects to minimize their losses much as possible.
You can’t actually predict when will all that end, but even if it will be soon nothing will remain the same as before. It will take years for businessmen to regain confidence in the stability of the economy (whether locally or globally), and it will take even more years to regain the customers’ confidence in the businessmen and the firms they are running!
That explains the expectations of many economical experts that enterprises will be more selective when it comes to choosing their employees or projects.
For everybody in every industry, part of being cautious is to decrease financial risks as possible. As a first step towards this, employers should look for more services with more quality and less costs. In other words, they should follow the global business trend of outsourcing and virtualization.
By virtualization we simply mean getting someone through the web to do the job. But there’s a common misconception about virtualization (and outsourcing) that once you decide you’ll hire someone online you’ll have a group of third world citizens willing to do anything for anything (that will be probably more than the silly wages they are offered home) and you’ll be lucky if they don’t screw everything up!
Actually that’s only one side of outsourcing, the other side is, when you have the internet as your ’employment office’ you get to choose from a world-wide range of people. You may find more experience, better talents and outstanding hardworking regardless of the nationality or residence. It’s surprising to know that the calibers of many professions and industries in the U.S. are of non-European origins, more precisely from eastern (middle and far) origins!
Such fact is very clear to organization which don’t seek just to survive the crisis, but to maintain their reputation as fine competitors. They give much more attention than any other organizations to the benefits of outsourcing and virtualization and how to remove the dust over the golden talents of the third world countries. It’s not an easy job at all, and it needs a lot of self-confidence to be able to think of such creative solutions when everybody is panicking!
But even for those seeking survival only, the requirements changed. Now they need someone to do more work for the same or hopefully less money without compromising the quality. Yet, that’s a non a realistic wish. What’s more realistic is to search for someone that can make a better use of your or his resources so that the net profit will increase. This needs a lot of creativity and experience, and is more evident when it comes to a very demanding-by-nature field like technology.
IT business needs a lot of resources and tools, that’s why it is the primary target for companies wanting to decrease their expenses. But it should be taken into consideration that no matter how expensive IT is, it has a lot of long term hidden benefits. That’s because IT has a key role in every industry and business. It’s like to have the biggest celebrity dead at the beginning of the greatest movie you are making, no matter how great the movie is it will still be frustrating to the audience to miss their favorite start so early!
So, a better option than cutting costs on IT is to think of a better use for it. For instance, you need to need to hire someone who’s more aware of using less IT tools for the same results, or maybe combine multiple tools in one usage for faster results.
When it come to the point that it’s a must to do more jobs with less money, many enterprises use virtualization. This is not a synonym to ‘use the internet’ at all. It rather means getting all the available talents worldwide to make a better use of your resources regardless of the location of either of you.
You can re-divide all your tasks on your in-house and virtual employees in order to let everyone focus on their particular task, like assigning software development to your Indian virtual assistant thus making your local employee create a new strategy that influences your project’s core. When all your employees, whether in-house or virtual, give more attention to their particular job the over-all change will be very remarkable. Jobs will be done in less time & effort and more quality & quantity.
A more unique feature of virtualization is that it has no physical burdens of any kind on both parties. You don’t have to get a new office or a new desk for your new virtual assistant. On the other hand, he/she doesn’t have to dress formally or waste time in transportations!
Returning to IT as an example, if you use a ‘physical’ server (more particularly an in-house one) it will take around 15% of your resources in the form of, for example, the number of computers or the amount of their free spaces. Not to mention than in case your have a ‘work jam’ or an ambitious project you’ll have to use more and more resources.
In case you go virtual, your growth is limitless! You don’t have to tighten your ambition because of the lack of resources. You can easily create a new server online or even get more features for your current server to fulfill your growing requirements any time you want. Notices that virtual servers in general are less expensive when it comes to creation, replacement or maintenance.
As mentioned before, there’s always an option to outsource your virtual assistant as you’ll get a wider spectrum of labor choice then. After spending some time in outsourcing you’ll begin to find special talents and experts, You can even outsource someone to mange your virtual team!
Nowadays there are many firms specialized in providing outsourcing services to companies. In other words, if you don’t have time to search for talents, they’ll find the right talent for you!
Such firms have a large database of rated labor from all around the world, they have many categories for different specializations. Even more, some of the websites that provide this service enables you to search in terms of your financial or technical requirements.
More recently, some firms began to have outsourcing specialties, like outsourcing IT services or software development only. They can adjust your plan technically and financially to come out with more creative solutions for your problem, or even creates a brand new plan!
By creating a new plan to your business, you’re actually creating an extra infrastructure which can be a very useful tool to maintain the balance between keeping your current business growing and your limited budget.
There’s no time to waste on waiting for the economical crsis to be settled. If you don’t want your business out of the league you should start thinking creatively to solve your current problems and prevent future drawbacks.
Persons or organizations that will survive this crisis by using outsourcing or virtualization or any other ‘out of the box’ solution will gain an extra benefit after the storm goes away, they’ll discover how much new talents and hidden capabilities they explored during the crisis and maybe reconsider some of their temporary employees more seriously.
A common factor in all successful leadership stories is the dare to change. This applies most to few business now the managers of which will not fear to make a major change that can alter their lives forever.
Article Source: SKG Technologies.