How Hiring Virtual Assistants Can Reduce Employee Turnover

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Olivia CoughtrieCo-Founder & Director at Oriel Partners

07 September 2020

Getting your key workers to undertake simple administrative tasks may not be the best idea. Here’s why you should hire virtual assistants and how they can reduce your employee turnover.

Article 4 Minutes
How Hiring Virtual Assistants Can Reduce Employee Turnover

Virtual assistants (VA) are hired by companies to render services that are crucial but time-consuming to be carried out by in-house employees, or the individual themselves. Their duties may include content creation, administrative work, customer service, research, social media management, and finance management. Many companies have now opted for virtual assistants compared to in-house employees.

In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of hiring virtual assistants and how they impact employee turnover.

Benefits of hiring virtual assistants

From calendar management to checking emails, virtual assistants can help businesses with repetitive, time-consuming tasks, and improve your bottom line. Here's why you should invest in virtual assistants:

Reduced labor costs

Compared to permanent employees, the cost of hiring virtual assistants is relatively low. You may have decided to pay these workers an hourly rate. Also, you may have chosen to make payments depending on the duties they carry out successfully within a specific timeframe. Virtual assistants aren’t entitled to a basic salary, insurance benefits, and leave days that a permanent employee would be. Since they work remotely, companies benefit from reduced office expenses, including:

  • Internet and phone charge
  • Extra working space
  • General office equipment

The fact that virtual staff can be hired for a certain amount of hours, depending on the workload, enhances profit maximization. Apart from that, they can also be obtained by consulting a PA recruitment agency, who can do the whole recruitment process for you saving you time and resources.

Many companies end up bearing the extra cost and time consumed while training their employees even after they’ve hired them. However, virtual assistants don’t require any training as they’re already proficient in their respective fields and have vast experience.

Increased productivity

As virtual assistants don’t require a specific physical location, all they need is a reliable internet connection and a computer or smartphone. As their work is based online, this enables them to concentrate without any distractions that would arise had they been working in a busy office set up. They plan their schedules and carry out tasks effectively as they don’t spend time traveling to and from the office. A Harvard Business Review study shows that staff who worked from home completed 13.5% more calls than their office counterparts.

By hiring a virtual assistant, you’ll benefit from increased productivity as employees will be able to focus on more relevant and valuable tasks. Due to their highly qualified nature, virtual workers carry out their duties with utmost perfection. This results in a high degree in efficiency and effectiveness of how tasks are carried out, thus more productivity.

Reducing employee turnover

Employee turnover refers to the number of employees who leave a business and are replaced by new workers.

If your turnover rate is high, you might have a problem, and if not managed properly, this could negatively affect overall productivity.

While virtual assistants have grown in popularity, many businesses have seen a decline in their turnover rate. Therefore, let’s discuss the impact these virtual workers have on employee turnover.

Virtual assistants enjoy a comfortable working environment

When hiring virtual assistants, permanent employees are provided with an environment that lets them use their time effectively and efficiently. They concentrate more on their professional work as they’re relieved of low-level tasks that consume time and drain their energy and morale.

By getting virtual assistants to undertake low-value tasks, this will ensure office employees can achieve both personal career and organizational goals.

Work-life balance is easily accessible

Managing multiple workflows can be hectic, especially in growing companies. There’s a need for employees and those in managerial positions to focus more on growing the business. But if they had no choice but to concentrate on repetitive, time-consuming tasks, this could overwhelm them and affect their overall performance. And if their workload grows and they end up working extra hours to meet tight deadlines, this could cause stress and impact morale, which in turn might make them reconsider their position.

Hiring a virtual assistant skilled in carrying out the necessary tasks enables smooth flow of work, improving the employees’ ability to achieve set goals. When goals are met, there’s no performance pressure on workers. Since both the employee and employer are satisfied, the impact of virtual assistants is generally positive.

Olivia Coughtrie

Olivia Coughtrie is the Co-Founder & Director at Oriel Partners, a PA and administrative recruitment consultancy based in London. Olivia is passionate about providing high-quality candidates to businesses.

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