Distributed Workforce - Catalyst for Growth

Sushil Verma

(2021-03-14)

Vicious Circle of New Gen companies:

Higher Revenue > More marketing  > Less conversion >  More Employees > High Fixed cost > More funding > High cash-burn >  High recruitment cost >  More employee turnover > Bulky organisation structure and so on.

This is how scaling the business leads to multifunctional challenges for a midsize company. Same causes resistance within organisation to test pilot new products or new markets.   

Most of the new generation companies specially the start-ups build awesome products and have brilliant ability to transform the product as per consumers. With all rigour and perseverance they build Minimum Valuable Product (MVP) and are able to get the initial revenue growth levels however struggle to go deep in the market and scale up. This is challenged primarily due to the vicious circle indicated above and lack of proper sales and distribution setup and ability to present/service the product to the consumer at scale. The sales and distribution structure for initial revenue levels are not the one which can scale it to next level. 

How to solve for Scale or for short term projects:

We, at TheBirbal, propose to leverage distributed workforce as a viable solution for scale and for short-term work. TheBirbal has quality Work from Home resources as distributed workforce for sales and distribution, relationship management, content, training and even for large scale hiring. This workforce is lean in terms of liability but high value in terms of task delivery. It’s a quick plug and play model. The resources which are engaged here are matured, seasoned and are able to work in remote setups. They are good in communication and can be trained fast. Managed services for task like recruitment, sales & service, gives liberty to the management to focus more on the core product and technology. There are many other benefits distributed workforce such as:

How it works:

Distributed workforce can be applied in various functions of a startup. Think of an online company in B2C space, lot of time the customer needs an assurance or assistance for buying a product. This assistance can be well provided by distributed sales/ product advisors. This results in higher order sales assistance if the Salesforce is as good as consumers. It pushes not only to higher sales conversion but also migrates customers to pure online transactions

In a B2B or Niche B2C kind of setup, organisation can have a fleet of relationship officers who are managing relationships on CRM, whatsapp, phone and emails. Even this setup can help you hire people in bulk. Take an example of an EdTech company which is looking for mass teacher/ tutor hiring. They receive loads of CVs every day, the distributed workforce of HR professionals can solve for this very easily. Similarly this workforce can add value for customer service, content writing and other similar roles and projects.

Work from Home Framework:

Organisations need a framework to ensure that the WFH setup is sustainable and scalable. Manager should maintain a perfect balance in Quality, Productivity and Engagement/ connect of this workforce. This would call for redefining the way work is defined, allocated and output is evaluated. Every member has to be nurtured and tuned like an entrepreneur rather than as an employee. Leverage on technology and build robust support system keeping a common thread of values and culture.

Broad approach for setting up:

Each step of the above planning process is equally important to reach the implementation phase of a scalable and sustainable distributed workforce. Organization’s objectives should be clearly defined whether it is revenue growth, customer acquisition, increasing brand awareness or profitability. Discovery and analysis for defined objectives and end goals will help in preparing blueprint of the execution. People and Technology are the main pillars of the execution plan.  It is important to keep people in the centre and bring efficiency by use of technology for training, operations and communications. Right planning and execution would result in phenomenal success. 

Conclusions:

Distributed workforce is a necessity of new generation companies as diverse set of customers can be best serviced by diverse workforce. Organisation can penetrate new markets with cultural understanding and language capabilities with this kind of workforce. It gives an edge over the competitors and faster market spread.       

It’s a perfect time to scan your business and think on these lines!