Nobody can dedicate his time to personally running each function of one’s business, and doing so will just lead to frustration – the result is low efficiency and overall decrease in productivity. As every manager and business owner know, at some point one will have to delegate some of the tasks to someone else. But the question now is whether to take in an in-person or a virtual secretary.

In the old ways, getting a new secretary is in itself another task that a business head has to do. This requires sifting through piles of resumes, supervising applicant examinations and long interviews. But modern technology now gives us the option to do away with these processes, taking just one step instead – that is, getting a secretary or assistant online.

The practice of hiring online virtual assistants is, in fact, becoming the trend in small-scale business or company department operations. Subcontracting supplemental tasks to an online assistant is particularly suitable for small enterprises and companies who are taking cost-cutting measures. Company heads have found that hiring online virtual assistants gives them a more flexible schedule: they can easily hire (or replace or remove) as many online assistants as they need and they can choose their own hours.

Business owners and other employers are increasingly seeing the advantage of outsourcing business processes to a virtual staff as it offers improved communication channels (e-mails, instant messengers and video guides – as opposed to simple verbal communication – make instructions easier to understand and clarify). Another major benefit of getting a virtual secretary is that employers no longer have to provide him/her with working space or equipment. Virtual assistants are paid for their output only, meaning that employers can significantly save on operational cost. And, perhaps most importantly, virtual assistants provide the same quality of work as that of in-person assistants.

Virtual assistants are of different types, each offering their own special functions. Depending on your needs, you can hire online accountants and bookkeepers, payroll assistants, ghost writer, graphic artists, and website developers. It is not particularly difficult to find virtual assistants in the internet. There are many freelancing individuals, but it is always better to hire an established firm instead, as they can provide assistants who have been properly trained and adaptable to different requirements.

Unavoidably, there are critics who believe that remote assistants are not as effective as in-house assistants. One of their contentions is that communication through the internet can be unreliable – even though our technology is better than ever. Another problem, they say, is that it will be harder for supervisors to check the work of online assistants. This is simply not the case as online assistants submit their reports daily, and can easily be contacted through e-mails or instant messengers. Additionally, online assistants are trained to update their supervisors on the progress of each of their tasks.

This is not to say that hiring in-person assistants does not have its advantages. However, for an up-to-date, streamlined business processing, getting a virtual secretary is definitely the better way to go.