1Hiring Offshore Teammates
When it comes to virtual assistants and any other offshore professional service that brings workers onto your teams, it is a different story. You are bringing overseas workers into your office, virtually, to work side by side. Quickskill hires, trains, manages and coaches VAs as a managed service. There are benefits to this beyond potentially lower costs.
- Higher quality support
- A team of managers and backup VAs
- Faster hiring
- No extra management
Quickskill trains VAs to be teammates with U.S. executives, and most love the relationships. When it comes to the treatment of employees, all are W-2 employees of Quickskill with full benefits, and most have come from less rewarding jobs in call centers. Compensation is attractive—there are VAs that left nursing and teaching jobs because they can do better at Quickskill. The company’s mission, Amplify People, applies to employees as well as customers. In a recent internal survey, 98 percent of Quickskill VAs said that their skills prepare them for better jobs and different companies.
While you might think you are taking a job from someone in the U.S., you are also giving meaningful work to VAs in the Philippines or Guatemala (in the case of Quickskill), and the employees don’t have to leave their homes and families. You can read some of the Quickskill employee stories here.
2The Benefits of Diverse Teams
When we think of diversity in the U.S., it’s often about our internal inequities for domestic populations, which is extremely important. We want to expand access to quality education, healthcare, and jobs to all. But there are also vast populations outside the U.S. that lack that access as well.
It is now well known that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams. It’s not even controversial. McKinsey has been studying the issue for six years, and every year the performance gap widens—diverse businesses keep getting better and better. Here’s why.
“For over a decade, study after study has propagated the same conclusion: A diverse team – representing diverse nationalities, genders, abilities, ideologies, religions and more – makes organizations more innovative, profitable, appealing to workers and resilient to economic shocks,” the World Economic Forum said.
3Removing Bias
One of the primary reasons diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones is that they remove bias in decision-making. “The main reasons you’ll gain productivity and a boost in creativity is that you’re bringing together individuals from different walks of life,” Entrepreneur said. “These people come from varied backgrounds and experiences and will each have unique ways to improve your products and services.”
4Culture Fit vs. Culture Add
“It’s time to bid farewell to ‘cultural fit,'” said Indeed.com VP LaFawn Davis. Yes, you want to hire for shared values, and it is human nature to want to work with like-minded people. But culture fit has been shown to eliminate diverse candidates because they do not fit the background that the culture becomes. “Culture add is a much more meaningful and beneficial hiring consideration than culture fit,” Davis said. “It means that the candidate in consideration will bring new, fresh and different ideas and experiences to their team.”
You want to add skills, experience, perspectives, and aptitudes that you don’t currently have. While engaging offshore virtual assistants is not a cure for diversity deficits in U.S. companies, it can be a step in the right direction.
5Social and Economic Benefits
This is not to say that Quickskill VAs are “better” than U.S.-based alternatives. There are multiple types of virtual assistant services and business models inside and outside of the U.S. Some advertise prices as low as $2 per hour. Finding the right VA or service provider depends on the needs of different executives and businesses. The points here are that not all outsourcing is the same, and that can be social and business benefits to U.S. companies that engage workers from places where talent is abundant, but opportunities are scarce.
For more information on what it is like to work with Quickskill, download our guide.
