Welcome to the fourth part of the Hermes Technologies Business 2.0 series where we explain how we are adopting a whole new model of doing business. In this post we explain the advantages of not having an office and utilizing a global workforce.
1. Office not required
In business 2.0, there is no need for company to have an office, especially at first when funds are low. Employees can work together from their homes, collaborating on the Internet.
Advantages to not requiring an office:
A. The cost of finding, negotiating, renting and maintaining an office is done away with.
As commercial property is outside the expertise of most businesses this allows business 2.0 companies to focus on their core business activities rather than running around trying to find office space, light bulbs, cleaners etc.
Me (w/laptop) and John (w/ armchair) busy working from our home office
B. Each employee saves time they would otherwise spend commuting.
In situations were one is self-employed this saved time equates to money and leads to a competitive advantage. It is not unreasonable for managers to require workers to put in a little bit of extra hours into the work considering they have saved quite a lot of time by not having to commute.
C. You can recruit from anywhere in the world rather than being limited to the talent available in your locality.
With increasing specialisation it can be hard to find someone with the appropriate skills in your neighbourhood and so, in the business 1.0 world you may have to settle for a less skilled employee. With Business 2.0, however, you can find the specialist you need by choosing from the enormous global marketplace and thus your chances of finding someone with the appropriate skills are greatly increased.
There can also be cost advantages to this. Business owners can take account of international salary differences or currency fluctuations to minimize the cost of employment. For our HiredHelp.ie website, which at this point in time is still in development, we took advantage of the very weak Sterling to hire an exceedingly talented programmer at a greatly reduced price.
Reservations about supervising employees when they’re working remotely?
Managers may fear that there is no way to tell whether an hourly wage employee is doing what they’re paid to be doing or is wasting time. This supervision problem is met by the use of a number of online tools.
Two we like to use are Skype and Basecamp. Requiring employees to log onto Skype when they get into work means you can see that they are starting work at the right time. Online project management tools like the excellent Basecamp allow managers to effortlessly set each employee sets of tasks (in the form of to-do lists) with each task being assigned its own due date. Employees then have a responsibility of registering a task is completed on the Basecamp system as soon as it is done. This way managers can see the approximate speed at which tasks are completed and can judge an employee’s effectiveness on this basis.
Using Basecamp to manage the Hiredhelp project
2. Employ experts from across the globe on very short-term contracts
Websites like Elance allow business owners to browse through an enormous variety of experts in different fields and then hire them on either an hourly or a fixed price basis.
A. Safety
Each service provider is reviewed on the site by other employers and so, just like in eBay, any scam providers are quickly caught and removed from the system. Additionally the use of an Escrow system (where employers lodge money into a middle bank account first and then only release the funds want the task is complete) means that The incentive to scam anyone out of their money is no longer present as it has become so difficult to do so. These measures make Elance a safe bet form of employing people.
B. Finding the right expert
To help you choose the right expert Elance offers service providers a set of tests which they can take to have their skills rated in the areas they profess expertise. You can also see a portfolio of each experts previous work and comprehensive reviews of their previous work made by previous employers. Interviews both by e-mail or by phone are also possible on the website.
C. Employ only on an ‘as-required’ basis
On Elance you can hire people for contracts worth as little as $100, very handy when you need an expert to do a small task which might take one of your employees a number of days. Being able to hire experts only when they are needed allows you to save a great deal of money since you don’t have too keep employees on the payroll in case they are needed in a pinch.
When we were creating the FindGrinds.ie website, we required some help programming the credit card processing software. I logged onto Elance and posted up a description of the work I required alongside my time frame and my approximate budget. Within 48 hours nine different experts had placed bids on the work and had gotten in contact. I then browsed through their portfolios and reviews then exchanged a number of e-mails with the most promising ones before eventually choosing the one I regarded as the best value for money.
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