We’ve talked a lot here on our blog about hiring, training, and working with a virtual assistant. Occasionally we’ve even discussed hiring different VAs for different tasks.

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What we haven’t really covered (and isn’t covered in much detail elsewhere online) is building an entire virtual workforce by hiring a team of VAs.

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What better way can there be to scale your business up without incurring the massive expenses involved in hiring locally? What’s more, there are ways and means to develop a virtual workforce in a way that makes it function as effectively as a full-time, local team of employees.

In this post, you can learn about the first important step in building a virtual workforce—keep your team remote, but local.

Hire Your Virtual Workforce in One Locality

While your virtual workforce will be working remotely from your business location, its members don’t have to be remote from one another.

There are a couple of ways in which you can hire a team of VAs who can interact with each other face-to-face and perhaps even work together in a shared facility. For example, one way is to search for recruits in a specific city or locality. Let’s say you plan to source your virtual workforce from the Philippine population.

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Instead of scouring the freelancer job sites and other sources for Filipino VA’s, narrow the search to a specific city in the Philippines.

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Manila, Cebu, and Davao for example, are all populous cities with plenty of VAs seeking new clients. Perhaps an even easier alternative though is to hire your virtual workforce through a service provider that employs VAs and manages them within its own facilities.

The Virtual Workforce that’s Remote But Local

Whichever way you go about it, the advantage of hiring people in one location is that they can be close to each other and physically work together, making the new team cohesive and enabling a greater degree of integration into your business.

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When you build a virtual workforce this way, you remove some of the challenges which would exist if all of your VAs were scattered around. Rather than having a remote workforce, you have an offshore team.

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If you assemble a team of freelancers, you can help them to organize themselves to spend at least some of their time working in shared workspaces, or at the very least, getting together in one place to attend project or business meetings that you host online.

If you hire through a virtual assistant company, candidates will already be working together in the same office, so the only thing changing is that they will begin working together as a team for your business.

Virtual Assistants – Real Teamwork

If you have a small business that’s ready to grow, you know you will need the extra human resources to support an increase in scale. Building a small virtual workforce might be one of the most cost-effective ways to do that.

You have all the cost benefits of hiring remote workers, with the advantage of being able to manage them (and help them manage themselves) as a real team. That has to be better than hiring three or four VAs based hundreds of miles apart, don’t you think?

Actually, we’d love to hear what you think. So please, if you’ve had any experiences of working with multiple VAs, or would like some more tips on creating a virtual workforce, please feel free to drop us a comment or two below.