The new look for home office work?

Since the pandemic, home offices have become more and more popular as a form of work. Companies have found that it is not often necessary for employees to be on site and this new form of work can establish itself. If you think more about this work situation, new forms of work in the home office will appear – such as booking a virtual assistant for your own company. […]

Flexibility of working from home. This form of work is currently gaining increasing acceptance in society. Preliminary studies show that in the wake of the pandemic, the younger generation in particular places great importance on flexibility and the option to work from home when looking for a job. More and more companies are also explicitly offering to work from home to fill job vacancies. Digitization and globalization are now opening up new opportunities for both companies and job seekers by separating company work and location.

The technological situation nowadays enables exactly this and the increasing acceptance in the broad society also contributes to the fact that home office can be implemented in many businesses. When companies realize that their employees do not need to be in certain positions, this also increases the chance of not only being able to win over interested parties in the immediate vicinity of the company. National or even international parties and experts interested in this way can be identified and recruited as potential new employees. A home office can also prove effective by saving commuting and travel times, and there are huge fixed costs for companies that only hire home office employees.

Virtual assistants as flexible employees

Specifically, it is about virtual assistants. Depending on the requirements, companies can reserve a virtual assistant online for certain tasks, the activities of which include, for example, responsibility for customer service or data processing. However, such an assistant cannot take on specialized services, only all those tasks that can be performed after a short training period of employees. When companies benefit from this external support, they remain flexible. But assistants are also highly flexible, as they are not tied to a fixed location and do not require any special specialized knowledge for their work.

This type of work is also suitable for all people who cannot commute daily to the employer due to commuting or infrastructure reasons. For years, it has been the norm in large companies that customer service personnel, for example, are not on site at the company, but do their work from elsewhere – also to save costs. Thus, all those tasks which are characterized by a high degree of routine can easily be performed by outside employees. Other areas of activity can include processing data sets, managing social media channels, or B2B sales.

Low prices and fair payment

MyTalent offers exactly this service: companies can book German-speaking Georgian employees as virtual assistants – at low rates. The fact that using the services of assistants is much cheaper than real employees is mainly due to the fact that the hourly wage and the cost of living are much lower in Georgia than in German-speaking countries. This creates a win-win situation for both helpers and companies, as companies save huge amounts of staff costs, but workers from Georgia still get paid very well for their country-specific conditions.

If some talk about exploitation, the reality is just the opposite: some people who live in Georgia who speak German cannot get a job that takes an hour to fly to because of infrastructure, commuting, or family reasons. However, thanks to their work as virtual assistants, they can work from home without any problems; The MyTalent team in Georgia is at their disposal in case of complications. As an intermediary, the company uses a transparent billing model to ensure that a fair reward is paid and that companies are not only interested in one-time use of this service in the short term, but consider helping as external employees.

Create new job opportunities

For employees, too, this form of work appears to be an opportunity in some respects. By processing your services online, you do not need to be in the company from which you booked. So you can stay where you want to. Digital migrants and nomads in particular can take advantage of the opportunity to do their work around the world. For German-speaking immigrants in Georgia, for example, a job as a virtual assistant provides an opportunity to work in their language despite their differences.

Since the activities that a virtual assistant performs are not usually specialized operations, language skills at the native level are not necessary. As a result, all people who are not fully fluent in German can do this work for a fair wage. With the aspect that neither subject-specific knowledge nor native-level German proficiency is a prerequisite, it becomes clear that jobs are created here for people who might be paid less for their work.

conclusion

The virtual assistant business form offers tremendous advantages to both employees and employers. Companies can book them at low rates and thus save costs, while assistants are well paid for their conditions and can work regardless of their location. This work situation shows great potential in the context of globalization and provides opportunities for migrants and nomads. The pandemic has certainly shown that working from home can work flawlessly and that both sides can benefit from it. Virtual assistants are the winners of digitization and globalization, as this new work mode opens flexible workplaces for many job seekers.

* Author Julien Diebel is recruiting for MyTalent.io German speaking virtual assistants in Georgia for clients in the DACH region.