It shouldn’t be a huge surprise to find out that your favourite big brands regularly get their services handled by a virtual team.
You may already know this if you’ve called your local company and it was answered by a person with a strong Indian accent and there was a transfer time delay.
Most of the best-performing companies in the world right now have a virtual team and this has been increasing more over the past 12mounths with the growing need to reduce overheads but still keep performance and efficiency up.
A virtual team can be responsible for your favourite brand’s 24-hour service status, and adored reliability.
How many can you recognize from the list below?
Slack is a multi-billion-dollar company. It pretty much started out by hiring out its software development.
It boasts of more than 12 million daily active users, most of whom are startups and small business owners.
We LOVE Slack’s trendy colours, playful website and overall simplicity, but did you realize that Slack had virtual teammates making a great deal of these designs?
The remote company assigned their marketing website design, development of software and logo creation. What’s even more fascinating is that they began working with virtual teams as early as 2012.
This strategic decision proves how virtual teams as a tool can work in the favor of your business. Slack started with a prototype that helped them shape a strategy for perfecting the vital aspects of a business through virtual work.
We think Slack wouldn’t be the business it is today, without assigning some of its work to virtual teammates.
Bloomberg tells us that it was in 2018 when the contractors working for Google officially outnumbered the in-house employees.
Google has had virtual teams since 2011! Their call centres are located all over the globe and they’ve always said some of their best perspectives are from outside talent.
Keep in mind that Google has tons of talented employees but virtual working came as a solution to the high cost of in-house labour.
Lower costs mean happy investors plus the in-house team gets time to focus on their core duties.
It’s also really cool for the selected developers who get to say they work for Google!
One of the popular ones, WhatsApp has made ‘staying in touch’ super easy and affordable.
They have recently improved their apps abilities by adding business features into their app.
It’s also no secret that it’s one of the most successful companies ever created.
Did you hear that WhatsApp was purchase by Facebook for 19 billion to thwart competition for Messenger?
Before they made that move, WhatsApp heavily relied on virtual teams for its services. This turned out to be one of their best business decisions because the hired development teams broke Apple Stores, Google Play as well as a few others, Top ranking lists.
Remember SMS? Yeah, we don’t either.
Apple is notoriously known to have built its gadget empire by hiring out its production.
Whilst other companies outsource to save money and cut costs, Apple dabbles in outsourcing to save time.
Yes, Apple prefers to be just as effective as its gadgets.
It signs all its products, “Designed by Apple in California,” but the only aspect perfected in the U.S is designing.
It outsources its other services to Inner Mongolia, China, Korea and Taiwan among others.
One thought says that if Apple had been forced to manufacture in America, the iPhone cost could easily shoot to $30 000.
We have remote employees to thank for affordability!
The Chinese eBay!
It smoothly crossed the 54.5 billion USD mark back in 2019.
None of this massive growth would have been possible without farming out its website design and development work.
Unlike the above examples, Alibaba had to outsource because of a lack of skilful developers in China. It had absolutely nothing to do with cutting down on costs.
Jack MA has also talked about how it was (and still is) a better aesthetic to develop the site for both Chinese and English-speaking visitors. This was a swell idea for more market exposure and communication bridging too.
Alibaba captured both local and foreign audiences through outsourcing and built an online shopping giant in the process.
To Wrap It Up…
Managing virtual teams barely seems like an easy task but it’s used by both big and small companies successfully to bring their products and services to the marketplace. In 2021, remote working can be your game changer too.
The first step is to gather up the benefits of virtual teams, set up a strategy to kickstart your project cost-effectively and calculate the possible returns.
If these 5 business moguls could fashion their new products on a remote foundation and blow the boots off the market then so can you.