Staffing of Virtual Workforce: A New Hrm Problem to Solve

Staffing of Virtual Workforce: A New HRM Problem to Solve

Summary

With the advancements in information and communication technologies, an increasing number of employees today are operating in virtual or remote environments. This has enabled companies to pool the right mix of talent and expertise by eliminating barriers like time and space to boost their performance and competitiveness. Despite the growing prevalence of virtual workforce, relatively little is known about the unique challenges it creates for human resource management (HRM) in selecting, recruiting and assessing the right candidates that can operate efficiently in virtual environments. This paper will present the two major challenges faced by HRM in the context of staffing of virtual workforce and will explain how the dynamics involved in virtual environments generate unique competency demands for building a virtual workforce. Finally, a conceptual staffing framework is proposed that focuses on identifying unique competency demands for virtual workforce by analyzing their virtual environment and assessing candidates based on their diverse cognitive characteristics like multiple IQs, thinking and learning styles in combination with conventional job spanning capabilities.

Introduction: Virtual Workforce

With the change in technological landscape, the meaning of coworker and the definition of being “at work” are being totally redefined as employees across the globe communicate via latest information technologies. A survey found that 85% of executives expect a significant increase in virtual workers over the next five years (Conlin, 2006). This dramatic shift is forcing organizations to adopt a more innovative HRM approaches particularly in areas of staffing, recruiting and assessing of global virtual workforce.

A virtual workplace as described by Tucker, Kao, and Verma (Hewitt report titled "Next Generation Talent Management") is a type of work environment where employees are not chained to their desks and are free from traditional nine to five schedules. With no fixed physical location and increased use of technology such as smartphones, high-speed internet and PDA’s (Personal digital assistants) to facilitate work, workers are accessible to work from virtually anywhere in the world. This allows them to spend significant portions of their time working at client sites, in hotel rooms, at home and even on vacation. Virtual workers have become a part of a global talent supply chain that spans across different countries, culture, corporations, professions, and job classes, which use a common infrastructure and set of protocols to recurrently connect based on mutual interests. This virtual collaboration across an organization’s globally spread workforce provides a dynamic global scope that has become a foundation to compete in the global marketplace (Lipnack & Stamps, 1997; Schelin, 2001). As virtual workforce is viewed by many practitioners and researchers as the centers of 21st-century organizations (McDonough, Kahn, & Barczak, 2001), its increasing use presents a major challenge to the human resource management (HRM), particularly concerning staffing (Pauleen, 2002).

This paper will point out the implications of the dynamic virtual environments on HRM in the context of staffing and assessment by presenting the two fundamental challenges in the preservation of competencies in a virtual workforce. To address these challenges, a multidimensional staffing framework is proposed, which is an extension of framework suggested by Harvey et al. (2004) in the context of global virtual teams (GVT's). The recommended framework focuses on two primary staffing aspects of the virtual workforce. First, to understand the virtual environment and its unique needs and carefully examine those with a systematic approach. Second, recruit the right pool of individuals by assessing them on a particular set of cognitive behaviors in combination with conventional capabilities.

Staffing Challenges in Virtual Workforce

While the adoption of virtual workforce brings many inherent benefits, new challenges also rise with them. Cascio (2000) explained five main disadvantages associated with the nature of virtual workforce; lack of physical interaction, loss of face-to-face collaborations, lack of trust, bigger concern with predictability and reliability, and low social interaction. Therefore, it is crucial for HRM to be aware of these challenges and recognize that the lack of physical interaction in the virtual environment makes consensus building harder for members. In a virtual environment, individual members need to put more efforts to increase the team’s effectiveness and thus require some unique competencies to overcome its inherent challenges. Additionally, variation in virtual environment and cultural heritage have a strong influence on an individual’s thinking styles and interpersonal orientations (Rosenzweig & Nohria, 1994), which makes it more and more challenging for HR to design effective staffing processes. Petrick et al. (1999) suggested that there are two fundamental challenges that HR need to deal with in preserving right competencies in a virtual workforce:

1. Assess the unique competency demands for the virtual workforce: As virtual environments are different from the physical face-to-face workplace; they require unique skills in the members to overcome these variations to work effectively in achieving the desired goals. For HRM, it is critical to understand this unique skill demands to design an effective staffing process.  
2. Select right combination of individuals for the virtual workforce: Identification of right competency requirements is not enough; a well-thought assessment process is required to select and preserve the right blend of talent to get the desired results from a virtual workforce.  The ability of HRM to create a proper perspective of skill diversity among members of the virtual workforce may become an organization’s critical differentiating capability that enhances its competency preservation of virtual workforce (Harvey et al., 2004).

A suitable approach to address these two challenges is to investigate the uniqueness of competency demands for the virtual workforce through a multidimensional staffing framework presented in the next section of this paper and outline them using different perspectives that exist between virtual and physical environments.

Conceptual Framework for Staffing of Virtual Workforce

It is crucial to hire people who will have the right competencies to succeed virtually, given the unique problems related to staffing of virtual workforce, it is of foremost importance to appropriately analyze the environment in which virtual teams have to work and operate to identify its distinctive dimensions and challenges. After careful evaluation of the virtual environment, HR functions must then identify the critical competencies required for its effectiveness and develop a methodology to assess these competencies during the selection process. Fig. 2 illustrates the necessary steps needed to increase the probability of successfully assembling and managing a virtual workforce.  [pic 1]