Business VoIP Featured Article

How Temporary Employees Keep Business Nimble

July 17, 2014

By Mae Kowalke, Business VoIP Contributor

The Internet has done a lot of things for business, and one of them is increasing the pace of business. Innovation and flexibility are now not only useful, but they are also essential features of business.

Firms must stay differentiated and adapt as the market adjusts, and this means focusing on the core line of business and having systems and people that easily adapt.

The Internet has made innovation and flexibility easier, too, thankfully. It is now easier than ever to bring temporary workers and independent contractors on board. This is thanks to the ease with which competent workers can now be found online, as well as hosted services like business VoIP making it easier for businesses to connect their employees remotely. A business can focus on its core concept and easily outsource the work that is less unique to the business—such as accounting and IT, for instance.


Having the right worker with the right skills at the right time also is easier thanks to the Internet. Smart businesses are taking advantage of services to scale up and down their workforce as need demands, adding a skilled worker here and dropping them there when the need changes.

Or even just engaging workers when they actually are needed.

“Do you need occasional articles written for your blog (and spend three days dreading the writing and another half day slogging through it?),” asked Mike Michalowicz in a recent Nextiva blog post. “Find yourself a freelance writer. If you’re an accountant and need additional help during tax time, you can find freelance help to help you get through the busy time.”

As Michalowicz noted, hiring an independent contractor will usually cost more than an employee on an hourly basis. But with an independent contractor, the employee is only paid when they actually are performing critical work. There also are tax and benefit savings from using an independent contractor.

As an independent contractor myself who also uses other independent contractors for parts of my business, I can speak from firsthand experience about the value that such as-needed employment can bring to a company. I both see the money I save the businesses that hire me to blog for them instead of doing it in-house, and the improved quality they get from having a professional journalist writing their work.

As a businesswoman, I also know that my business is far more flexible because I can bring a graphic designer or search engine optimization expert on board as needed, acting like a fully-staffed large firm when in fact I run a small but nimble operation.

The savvy business can take advantage of the new pace of business if it is willing to adjust its business model a little.

It needs to embrace a flexible work culture, and keep to its core identity. It needs to think it terms of hiring on an as-needed basis, and understand the difference between core employees and those who are only needed part of the time. It also must have infrastructure to support remote teams, as Michalowicz noted in his blog post, including a unified communications system that lets employees connect with each other no matter where they are located or the extent of their contract with a company.

Some people lament the new pace of business, rightly pointing out its challenges. With every challenge, though, also comes a business opportunity.




Edited by Alisen Downey

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