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2020 has been a major test for the current infrastructure of the global economy and the lives of many, many private citizens. On the other hand, COVID-19 has demanded adaptation, and that adaptation stands to provide a few key benefits once the threat of coronavirus has come and gone. Here’s what you need to know in order to make the most of COVID-19 preventative measures well after the pandemic ends.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing is by no means a new idea. For quite some time, outsourcing has been used almost by default for certain complex roles such as IT and Marketing. However, the ongoing pandemic has created conditions ideal for expanding the role of outsourcing in the modern commercial landscape. Try Googling “outsourced IT in San Antonio,” as an example, and you’ll see a variety of options in your area in terms of qualified professionals that can help you to simplify the complex and to do so largely from a remote location.
Outsourcing allows a business to find the expertise needed for certain demanding tasks more easily, all while minimizing the direct contact between your It department, for example, and the rest of your staff. Compartmentalizing labor in this way can do a lot to protect workers from cross contamination, but it can also save businesses money and increase productivity, regardless of the current circumstances.
In addition to your IT needs, you can also outsource marketing. Outsourcing marketing is generally your best bet if you want to create compelling and effective marketing campaigns, because it allows you to hand the reins over to a dedicated team of trained experts in the field of marketing.
Remote Employment
While superficially similar to the outsourcing of labor, remote employment offers employers and employees an alternate to the same problem from a different perspective. Where outsourcing is done with specific regards to fields that require a lot of knowledge and skill, remote employment can offer the same benefit of distance to positions of various skill levels to your actual employees. Remote work must inherently be done using nothing more than a computer and some software. While this limits the possibilities somewhat, you’ll be surprised how many positions this applies to that are also all but universal among various companies and industries.
For example, payroll is a job that deals heavily with recordkeeping and math, and that makes it ideal for remote employment. By using payroll apps instead of traditional time clocks, you can have employee hours sent directly to a database accessible to your payroll department who can then process that information into employee wages. Once you put two and two together, it’s hard to see why this kind of arrangement wouldn’t become the norm even after COVID-19 is in the rearview.
The basic idea of using outsourcing and remote employment during the pandemic is fairly simple: reduce the number of people who have to come into the office as heavily as possible in order to minimize the risk of infection. However, this can also save companies a lot of money that would otherwise go toward accommodating the presence of those on site workers, something that will prove to be a strong financial decision for businesses moving forward.
E Commerce
Along the same lines as outsourcing and remote employment, you can also take steps to reduce the direct contact between your staff and your customers, and there’s simply no better way to do that than to implement e commerce functionality into your business model. E commerce minimizes the human involvement necessary for shopping and other services almost completely when it is employed at the end user level, and there is ample incentive for consumers to use this kind of service at the best of times.
While e commerce can do a lot right now to reduce the hazards of navigating a pandemic, it has already been on the rise. This is because the aforementioned incentive for users is that they can simply get the goods they want or need more easily using an app. This increases sales on average by giving consumers more access to their favorite retailers that is also more convenient.