FAQ – Outsourcing Work to Virtual IT Staffs

Our currencies are USD and GBP only. However, we choose the best exchange rate to reduce currency fluctuations issues with you.

We will have you one week of free trial with your first virtual employee. This gives you a risk-free way of losing any money with us.

The free trial works like this:

1. If you see that our virtual staffing solution is not working for you, then there is no need to pay your virtual staff for one week. Virtual IT Staffs will cover the cost.
2. If you agree to continue with your virtual staff, then an invoice will be sent to you to pay for your 1-week trial. After seeing you complying with our term of regular payment we will go with you forward.
3. A one-time free trial is designed to let you see if our service suits what you need.

With us, you don’t need to take any trouble at all. We have made the registration as sleek as possible. All that you have to do is to sign couple of easy documents, we will do the rest. Afterward, we will select then the most suitable candidates based on our requirements. In fact, we are pretty sure that our years of experience in the BPO area will do the best suitable service. Of course, mistakes can happen anytime but we ensure you that we will fix this issue by costing you no money at all.

Our virtual staff will be ready for our client within 2 weeks after having the business contract signed with us. There are the maximum chances to start work procedures within a few days, but this largely depends on your instruction to get employees set to work. And our duty will be to understand your requirement and match you with the most suited candidate.

We support any software that you decide our employees work with. Besides, we also help manage

To work from our offices, your virtual employee will be fully equipped:

– Their private desk

– An efficient brand laptop

– Output device i.e. Printer and scanner

– Commonly used pc software

– Communicating devices, such as a webcam, headset, etc.

– Broadband internet connection

– Power generators for uninterrupted electricity supply avoiding cut-outs

As to comply with our company terms and clients’ requirements, we ourselves assign the best fit candidate to the client. If anyhow the candidate is unable to perform at your expectations we can change the candidate for you. All candidates are our own employees who work for us on internal projects whilst unassigned to a client.

In hiring the most capable individuals from the job market, we use several stages of interview process which hook up the best virtual employees for our clients. Later, our experienced operations manager will guide employees to work as per our client’s requirements.

For any of these issues like sick day leave or holidays with us, you can decide the number of days you will permit to take, hence this lies totally on your pleasure. We would be best to clear things up with our virtual employees so that they miss no day unworked.

If employees are seen taking abusing the sick leave or work time, we are sure to take this into account as they will be monitored on a daily basis.

In terms of the holiday schedule, we maintain a work schedule based on the country you belong to. For this, you need to rest assured as we stay 24/7. But this is to be considered that having standard employees, clients are obliged to allow mandatory holidays off for your outsourced employee.

Once I have this information from you that you are OK with our VITS’ terms and conditions, we can go ahead and sign the terms of business. Upon receiving the terms of business, as soon as the payment has been received your employee can start with you.

At Virtual IT Staffs, we provide the most competent manpower for all our clients to get their work done. You manage your employees as you wish and this is why are paying the salary, right.

Offshore employees communicate with you via email and Skype. Hence they will be provided remote training or conference meetings and etc. as required. Our consultant will be your point of contact for any help you may require. For example, improving performance, monitoring, suggest the easy way to execute work, and so on.

We have more flexible time at our office. The employee can be able to work based on the UK, USA, and Canada with the suitably chosen work time so that work goes in the best real-time with our clients. Your employees will be online all the time on Skype and Email, via which you can communicate and relay instructions.

Our project manager will assign candidates internally for you after the meeting. You can rest assured we hire capable individuals as they go through several interview processes.

To keep employee work effectively, you are obliged to permit regular breaks for tea and lunch, this also ensures you are getting consistent performance, as you know, minimum breaks are important during work.

We prefer two methods while sending payment. Firstly, payment can be paid via Payoneer, Paypal. Secondly, our UK and US bank account can also be used. Because we believe that money transfer should be secured and transparent between our clients and us.

Definitely at VITSyou can have direct communication through skype and email, or any third-party software you choose. With Skype now you can call for free anytime. However we will encourage the use of email mainly so that the record of communication is maintained, can be used when any issues occur.

Absolutely, your virtual employee is only assigned to you, working under your management.

All of our employees work from our offshore offices. And we provide all the necessary office setup and equipment to have them ready for your work.

Potential candidates working for VITS must have to go through 3 stages of the process. Candidates here need to prove that he is capable of speaking English fluently and has vast technical intelligence to execute complex work. Furthermore, we emphasize the skill and experience of sorting suitable employees.

Generally, an annual pay-rise of 5-10% is acceptable.

All employees are administered by a Shift Manager. You will be given direct access to them at all times, and scope to get feedback on daily work progress. Shift Manager then confronts our Operation Manger for better further assistance if needed.

We use a secured VPN (Virtual Private Network) to connect to your office online. This adds some extra protection for the security of your files, printers, or servers. This is particularly useful if your employee needs access to your personal drive in a quick time. Besides, our antivirus has built-in firmware which ensures a safeguard from hackers and virus.

Unfortunately, we do not allow employees to directly or indirectly receive any sort of bonus, salary increase, incentive, commissions, etc. In case, if you strongly feel to reward employees, you may contact our HR Department to choose the suitable methods for you.

Employees hired by us go through a difficult sorting process, in which we value every single detail related to candidates’ work history and skills. We do not hire unreliable and non-experienced employees. Besides, we arrange some workshop sessions which eventually help determine the right employee being hired.

We maintain a safe and secure network and keep our security patches updated on a regular basis. While our employees have to sign an agreement with us, they must comply with the charge for breaking the company’s terms and conditions.

Statistically our average is about 18 months. We are making efforts to bring that average up to 21-24 moths. However having said that, there are a large portion of employees who have been with us for 3-5 years!

Virtual IT Staffs is a recognized employer in our local job market. Employees working here feel more secured and satisfied with our employment policies. However, still, there are some unavoidable circumstances in which we would better suggest having two people cross-trained so that they can cover each other’s’ tasks. As a result, you may look for switching another employee as soon as possible.

Yes. Sure. We would recommend increasing the Team Leader’s pay by say $1 per hour. This incentive will inspire him to take the lead and carry an extra responsibility. Generally, after reaching a team size up to 4 people, we suggest assigning someone as a Team Leader. This adds more benefits such as,

1. Talking with one person who co-ordinates the other team members make life easier.
2. It helps build an effective team structure in case of the need for more people. Besides, it benefits plugging and training the right people for the appropriate role.

I tend to have a quiet environment which ensures work-friendly weather.

Regretfully no. and I personally wouldn’t encourage adding multiple monitors to their work stations. Although you and I may be able to use multiple screens skillfully (which I personally found took me many months of getting used to, until eventually, I was using 4 screens at a time), given the virtual employees narrow skills set and acumen you will most likely find they are either not using the extra monitors properly, or struggling more to coordinate themselves with multiple monitors.

This is mostly your and VE’s discretion. You guys can work out a comfortable routine for both. We try to be as flexible for our client as possible.

Every employee works an 8 hour shift (which can be stretched to at most 10 shift). So yes, afer 9pm EST your virtual employee would have gone home.
Of course if oyu need to adjust their working hours do let me know.

Employees do have sick time off now and again, but its quite minimal if I am honest, culturally things are quite different in the offshore office, and I have found people hardly take sick leave. A full week of sick leave is very unlikely, it has probably every happened twice in our office where the employees were really ill. Of course if a person falls in this situation that they have to a full week off, you would see 1 week refund on the following months invoice. However for normal absences/sick leave we ask clients to be considerate of this as the employees are human too, so there is no refund for those cases.
If your employee fails to do the work properly after giving him proper training and guidance, we can have a chat and decide on “changing the employees for a different one”. My job is to make this work for you, so you will have my support all the way.

I assure you, you’re in good hands. I would love to help you build a virtual team of 10+ virtual employees! At the moment we have around 100 employees, so we’re not a very large outfit, and I’m being totally honest here with you. However most importantly all my clients get my full attention, and I do the best I can to make things work for my clients.
Regretfully I am unable to give you references of other companies, you may have noticed our website doesn’t even have any testimonial except for one. And that is simply because we honor client confidentiality, and most of our clients choose not to be known as outsourcing.

With regards to interview and CV’s, I’m afraid we do not provide CV’s or candidates for interview and selection by our clients. But rather, taken from the clients requirements obtained during the consultation process, we assign the best fit candidate to the client. If anyhow the candidate is unable to perform to your expectations (very rare) we can change the candidate for you. We are usually very accurate with this, as you may have learnt from the client reference I have provided you. All candidates are our own employees who work for us on internal projects whilst unassigned to a client.

As you can appreciate, not all employment markets are the same, due to the cultural differences, language complexity and various other reasons, most employers are not suited to selecting a candidate properly from our offshore offices.

The rate varies depending on the type of developer you need. $5.9 9 is the starting rate for an average developer.
I generally judge what sort of developer you would need based on your requirements. Generally speaking, the more challenging the role is the higher the pay rate. As a guide, developers pay rate are between $5.99 – $8.99 so its quite a narrow low range, as we focus mainly on the mid-level developers which gives our clients the best value in terms of ability and cost.

Absolutely no fees other than the developers salary. I would send you an invoice at the start of each month to send your virtual developers salary to our company account, and we would handle the payroll etc. for you its simple as paying their salary on a monthly basis and working with them on a day to day basis.

Absolutely none. Most other outsourcing firms to charge extra. We simply don’t see the need to do this. Our argument is – why should we charge for an account manager, when we need to hire an account manager regardless?

No minimum contract period. We have structured our solution very much like hiring your own employee. So your virtual developer works exclusively for you. dedicated to you. you pay them on a monthly basis. You hire them for as long as you need. And when you don’t have a business requirement for this virtual employee, you simply let me know and you can make them redundant.

Yes absolutely. Your virtual employee belongs to you, you manage and instruct them as you feel comfortable. They report to you directly.

full time employees work 5 days per week, 8 hours per day.
Part time employees work 5 days per week, 5 hours per day.

No. Legally your Employee is employed by Virtual IT Staffs. Subsequently you have no tax, insurance or employment law obligations/liabilities. You are paying for a service, which includes: an Employee, office space, office equipment, management services, technical support…etc.

Unlike other firms we do not tie you down to long term contracts, our agreement is essentially a 30 day rolling contract, you simply need to give 30 days notice to terminate the contract. We have tried to keep our model as similar to hiring a local employee in your office.

Yes. All employees abroad are synchronized to work when you are working.

Your Employee works 8 hours per day. This does not include any time taken for breaks or for meals. Typically A full time employee will work for you Mon-Fri 9am – 5pm UK Time (unless your Consultant has agreed a different time with you), this ensures your employee is accessible to you at all time, and you can work real-time with them. As the ‘effective employer’ you are obliged to permit regular breaks for tea and lunch, this also ensure you are getting consistent performance, as you know, breaks are important during work. This will be your responsibility to ensure you treat and maintain your outsourced employee with the same etiquette and standard.

The fee quoted to you is the full and complete cost. The fee charged covers everything from, the Employee’s salary, office space, office equipment, internet connection, telephone, management services, technical support etc.

‘Virtual IT Staffs’ Logistics Mangers are monitoring your Employee working at all times. Our Consultants will also show you methods and techniques we advise you deploy to get the most out of your employee and obtain good performance. It will feel like they are working in the same office! Furthermore you will be able to judge your Employee’s effort and performance from the results he/she produces.

No fees are charged until you have decided to hire an employee or employees. We will offer our ongoing Consultation for free, support you to get you started, do the all due diligence prior etc.

We take our client confidentiality, trade secrets and IP very seriously. We are proud to say that in 6 years we have never had any breach.

Virtual IT Staffs and your Employee you hire will sign any legally binding non-disclosure agreement you have for the handling of any sensitive data/information. Our agreement also cover this for you.

Your outsourced virtual staff is effectively your employee, therefore, as with your own employees in your office you are expected to treat them and honor any holiday/time off requirements as normal. Your Consultant will email you an Holiday Schedule for the year so you know which holidays are permitable. In the event that you may instruct your employee to take time off for reasons relevant to your business i.e. down-time, you will still be billed.

We will provide employees who can deliver for your job specification. If however the employee does not deliver to the expected standard you may choose to ‘make redundant’ your current employee and hire a replacement employee.

Yes. We can provide Employee’s who have a significantly neutral accent in comparison. However as you can appreciate it will never be a native English accent.

The complete process of Consulting with you, understanding your needs, doing all the paperwork and allocating an employee to work for you takes 2 weeks. We usually aim to have virtual staff ready for our client within 2 weeks of receiving the signed terms of business. There have been instances where we have managed to allocated within a few days, but this largely depends on which employees we have sitting on the bench waiting to be allocated.

As a general rule any office based employee you would find in the USA or Europe will also be available in our offices abroad. The Indian sub continent is renowned for its technical talent, with companies such as IBM, Dell and HSBC employing thousands of employee’s in India. Furthermore all our staff are hand picked and trained by us to deliver a quality service to employers equivalent to that in the UK.

We will do everything to support you setting up your outsourced virtual employees.

The setup for this will depend on whether you want to make just outbound calls, or receive inbound calls as well. Inbound calls a free, but if your virtual employee needs to make outgoing calls, you will pay the call costs.

To give you more control over this, Skype has a very cost effective solution that we propose our clients use.
In summary this is how Skype solution works:

You purchase a local Seychelles number. (Or even better, a local number of the country from where most of your clients are, that way your call costs will be cheaper)
If you have a current office number, redirect to this new number which your Virtual Assistants will have
You control the skype account and top up call credit when required. That why you manage the expenses.

European languages speakers, other than English are not widely available in our current employment market. However we will endeavour to meet this requirement should a client need.

Simply fill in a contact form, and we will do the rest. An advisor will contact you to discuss your needs.

All employees have to clock in and clock out when they enter and leave the office. We can provide this record upon request.

In terms of software requirements you are more than welcome to provide any software you wish your employee to work with.
To work for your from our offices, your employee will be fully equipped:
– Their own desk
– Their own Dell laptop
– Printer and scanner
– Commonly used software
– Peripherals such as webcam, headset etc
– Broadband internet connection
– Power generators for uninterrupted electricity supply avoiding cut-outs
– Air conditioning at all times

As a general rule any office based employee you would find in the USA or Europe will also be available in our offices abroad. The Indian sub continent is renowned for its technical talent, with companies such as IBM, Dell and HSBC employing thousands of employee’s in India. Furthermore all our staff are hand picked and trained by us to deliver a quality service to employers equivalent to that in the UK.

We will do everything to support you setting up your outsourced virtual employees.

The setup for this will depend on whether you want to make just outbound calls, or receive inbound calls as well. Inbound calls a free, but if your virtual employee needs to make outgoing calls, you will pay the call costs.

To give you more control over this, Skype has a very cost effective solution that we propose our clients use.
In summary this is how Skype solution works:

You purchase a local Seychelles number. (Or even better, a local number of the country from where most of your clients are, that way your call costs will be cheaper)
If you have a current office number, redirect to this new number which your Virtual Assistants will have
You control the skype account and top up call credit when required. That why you manage the expenses.

European languages speakers, other than English are not widely available in our current employment market. However we will endeavour to meet this requirement should a client need.

You can use email or any of the IMs, Skype, MSN, Yahoo, AIM or ICQ for example. We also have an IP phone in the office. However, we recommend you have a digital paper trail of your conversations with your employee.

Depending on the skill set and the level of employee’s experience the process usually takes 1 to 4 weeks. This can be more if you’re putting a team together of highly experienced employees and depending what you put on your job order. For example if you wanted a data entry clerk or creative writer then we would have hundreds of applicants per week for this position. If you choose a level 4 programmer then we would expect to process 5-10 applicants per week before we give you qualified resumes.

We implement a very strict attendance policy wherein if your employee does not report for work for more than 3 days in a month, then your bill will be adjusted to reflect these days.

You are not required to pay for an employee that leaves without any prior notice. We would replace your employee at our expense and not yours. We also have strict contracts in place and we must stress that it is very rare that such a situation would arise.

Bank wire transfers
Any remittance company such as Western Union
Credit Cards
Paypal – as a last resort due to high costs.

All our employees work from our office, we do not allow employees to work from home. We provide our employees with air conditioned offices, fully equipped with their own desk, computers, internet and peripherals.

If you require additional coverage for 24/7 you would simply add more virtual employees to your team that would do the later shift. Bearing in mind, we will only accommodate shifts for unsocial hours for teams of 2 or more virtual employees.

Having the expectation is very important. If you, the client can do something in 2 hours it doesn’t mean an offshore VA can do it in 2 hours. The client is a professional, experienced and know their stuff. A virtual staff is a “pawn” in a game of chess. Naturally their skill set will be much lower, hence the really low salaries. Moreover, with internet etc not being as advanced, there is a drawback of things taking slightly longer to get done.

We generally say to the client, whatever time it takes a local employee to do the work, realistically, add on about 30% more time.

Virtual Assistants are versatile to a certain extent. You can only give them task that are within their scope, e.g a admin VA can only be expected to do admin work, and not web development work or marketing work for instance.
VA’s are not multi skilled enterpreneurs, or experts or professionals, otherwise they would probably be running their own business. So it is important to give each VA a specific set of tasks within their skill set.

It is important to have realistic expectations of a VA. They are not super humans or robots, and they will never be as good as you are in your job. Hence planning your time and deadlines realistically are important when assigning task. You should never overly rely on an offshore VA such that a contract is dependent on their work being delivered.

We try to be as reasonable and flexible with our clients as possible. Although all payments are required within the first week of each month, we understand sometimes things go wrong we work with you to accommodate your difficulties as much as possible.

Our service is rather like hiring your own employee, working directly for you, but from our offshore office. Whether you give your employee work or no work, it is important that they are paid. Naturally you want to ensure they are occupied with work all the time.

All VA’s are permanently assigned to our clients, although being employed by us, unless we have agreed in advance that it will be a short term temporary placement, such as for a data entry project.
As per our terms of agreement, clients are not allowed to circumvent MVP. Besides why would you want to hire a virtual staff outside of our agreement? You might as well hire any freelancer.

We always agree on realistic time scales on getting you started before you sign the contracts with you. If there will be any kind of delay on our part due to shortage of candidates or something, we will keep you informed. We work with you as a partner, so there will always be communication from us, we help you along the way as much as we can.

No there is no such thing. If you hire 2 employees in your local office, you wouldn’t say to employee 2 “you are not getting paid”.
Of course we will work with you to remedy the under-performance of employee 2, and if required we will change this person for another virtual staff.
We’re generally quite accurate in selecting the most sutiable virtual staff for our clients, so this kind of discrepancy should be very minimal.

Yes all virtual staff communicates in English. They are not as fluent as us native guys, but they have good command in English language. They tend to be better in English writing than speaking. Everyone is degree educated; this is a minimum requirement for getting a job in MyVirutalPeople.

We generally find clients need a neutral accented virtual employee want to have a casual chat prior to committing. This is completely fine, and it can be arranged for you, we want you to be totally comfortable before moving forward.

We support our client anytime they need us. Your Advisors job is to ensure everything is working out for you, and ensure your virtual staff is working and delivering good work. So you would report to your Advisor with any difficulties you face.

Yes we provide all virtual staff with their own desk, computer, telephone line etc. so that they can work for you. They also have access to printers and scanners if required. There is no additional cost of the phone line, as long as it is incoming calls only. If you need them to make outgoing calls, the call cost would be added to your monthly invoice. Call rates are charged at local rates to your country. So if you are based in USA, your virtual staff will have a USA telephone number – making it affordable for you to call them, and also for your virtual staff to call any USA phone.

No additional costs at all. Your invoice will be transparent. You simply pay the quote hourly rate multiplied by the hours worked per month, which usually tend to me 40 hours per week, 160 hours per month.

Sick rates are really low, which is a surprisingly good thing. People tend to be very serious about their work and dedicated, just not taking much sickleave unless absolutely necessary.

If a VA is off sick, the Team Leader or Line Manager will contact the client to inform them of the absence. You will also know of the absence as it will be important for you to be in the ‘know’ when its something related to a client on your books.
If a client has more than 1 VA, then the team mates inform the client directly.

General VA’s are hired the most, as the work set covers a wide spectrum of admin work – so pretty much any capable employee from any background can easily be trained into the role.

We have around 109 employees currently in the offshore office. Everyone works from the same office, nobody is allowed to work from home, we don’t hire freelancers, or sub contract to third party companies.
Our office is based in a town called Sylhet in Bangladesh. We are looking to expand into other town and setup office to help diversify our operational risk going forward. This will also help unlock newer talent pools and allow us to increase our offering to clients with higher calibre candidates.

Client don’t get involved in the candidate selection process. I handle this for the client using my years of experience working with offshore guys. Im usually quite accurate, but I do make mistakes, say 1/10 times I might choose the wrong staff for the client.
As soon as we realise the staff is not capable to meet the client expectations we change the staff for someone more suitable, taking on board the shortcomings we discovered.

Yes, if you need your guys to have a desk phone to make any urgent calls to UK or USA this can be arranged. We can also give you a local phone number to be able to call them directly if required for any reason. E.g. if you are in UK, we can give you a UK number that routes directly to their deskphone, so its rather like making a local phone call for you.

Yes 5 hours ahead currently due to daylight savings, but usually 6 hours ahead.

Yes, every virtual staff would need to be hired on a full time basis, which is 8 hours per day and 5 days per week. The 5 days can be any consecutive 5 days, as we are also open weekends.

There are 3 shifts we run in the office to cover 24 hours.
Shift 1 – 9am-5pm UK time
Shift 2 – 5pm – 1am UK time
Shift 3 – 1am-9am UK time.
Your virtual staff will be working on one of these shifts depending on your requirement. Unfortunately staff cannot ‘overlap’ shifts, due ot the timing in the offshore office. E.g 5pm is late at night, which is the latest time someone can be expected to go home.

No VAT, or any ongoing costs on top of this. Your monthly invoice is simply for the monthly salary for each full time virtual employee that you hire.

Yes you will be sent a bespoke Holiday Calendar that we follow. This is fusion of some UK and Indian public holidays, to strike a fair balance for both clients and virtual staff.

If an agent is off sick, you will be informed as soon as we know, but we will also ensure there is cover assuming you have at least 2 full time guys. So in such a situation we will call the “other staff in your team to come into work and cover the sick person”.
If you have 1 full time person only its not possible to have cover, since every staff is working dedicated to his/her own client.