Virtual Workforce On the Rise

A study last year of 330 companies showed that the virtual workforce is growing, a trend that is expected to continue for the next several months.

This isn't necessarily about outsourcing work to other countries. Instead, increasing pressure from company costs, improvements in technology, cheaper "cloud" tools and the rising number of laid-off workers have driven companies to hire virtual workers.

Inc. Magazine reported that the number of part-time workers has exploded, tripling from 3.1 million to 9.1 million people from 2000 to 2010. It quoted Cari Sommer, the founder of Urban Interns, a temporary-workforce sourcing company in New York: "The economic benefit (of part-time work) is from the ability to staff up and staff down as you require, and people have embraced this flexible concept."

Employers gain many benefits from hiring a virtual team, including:

• Lowering their headcount, and reducing the overhead associated with full-time employees
• Lowering costs by hiring workers in other parts of the country that have a cheaper hourly rate
• Decreasing the number of commuting employees, which helps the environment by reducing traffic and pollution

For workers, it can mean several things:

• They can leverage their skill sets across multiple employers and projects
• They can work from anywhere in the country (or even the world), whatever hours they want, day or night
• Free online and professional networking tools such as LinkedIn allow them to market their skills anywhere

Workers don't need expensive or complex tools to become a virtual extension of the company.

Virtual Employees Help Small Businesses

Dave Farpelha, owner of Custom Sports Cards in Livermore, uses virtual workers. After being in the corporate world for many years, he and his business partner, Pam Baker, started their company in 1997, long before the Internet had become a viable tool for marketing, online orders or leveraging virtual employees.

They've morphed with the times, and now employ several virtual people to help produce their specialty trading cards. Their company produces customized sports-related "baseball cards" such as birth and wedding announcements, event "tickets" and corporate logo cards.

Their virtual workforce provides customer interaction, design work, and mockup and final production of the graphic images. The only physical part of the business is the printing equipment that Farpelha uses.

They've produced trading cards for teams as far away as Australia, and wedding invitations all over the country and into Canada. Their virtual team keeps costs down and the savings get passed along to customers.

"It helps us in lots of ways. We can scale our business with no overhead, no one needs to commute to the office and it saves us rent on what would normally require extra office space," Farpelha said. "As long as there's an Internet connection, we can get the work done."

Protect Your Business

If you decide to use virtual employees, you need to make sure you protect your intellectual property, assets and your company. Make sure you've got a contract in place that defines the following (and this protects the employee, too):

• What the person will be doing
• Compensation
• Company benefits (if any)
• Employee status
• Who owns intellectual property and assets
• An exit plan — what happens if or when you sever the relationship

Denise Chambliss, attorney with Garcia and Gurney, said, "There are many employment laws and issues of concern for an employer, regardless of whether the employees are in-house or are virtual. An employer should consult with an attorney to understand these matters before hiring any employee. This advance preparation will guide the employers in how best to formalize arrangements with their virtual workforce."

Whether you're an out-of-work employee or an employer looking to scale back easily, having virtual employees may work for you, at least for the short term, until the economy picks up again.