One of the largest fears surrounding the COVID-19 crisis is how businesses are supposed to adapt to their employees suddenly working remotely. However, there is good news! Remote teams, especially outsourced teams, are already increasingly popular. Small businesses, who were once wary of the practice of outsourcing, are now taking that step forward. Yes, it requires more work to begin the implementation, but the benefits outweigh this for large and small businesses alike.
The distance was always an issue, but since everyone is working remotely now anyway, why not try outsourcing or outstaffing your IT work?
Here are ten of the top benefits of doing so, in no particular order:
- Lower staffing, material, and other costs
- BPs can be outsourced.
- Business can be expanded without requiring recruitment, offices, infrastructure, and other real-time costs.
- It is easy to scale the model of an outstaffed or outsourced business.
- Legal responsibility for personnel belongs to the outstaffing company, not you
- Simpler process for payroll
- Longer “open” hours for the business.
- Risks are shared between partners
- Regulations are varied and often less strict overseas.
If all of that sounds good to you, you may be ready to start looking into a dedicated offshore team. So what steps should you follow if you want to get started? Try following the points below.
- Find an IT outsourcing or outstaffing provider you are comfortable and able to work with well.
- 56% of global companies have some level of remote working (full remote, hybrid, or some distance work)
- Outsourcing and outstaffing is becoming increasingly popular
- Identify the experts to save you the complications of forming and organizing a foreign workforce.
- Look for high-quality work and a clean record.
- Make sure your partner has a decent experience – you want to know that they know what they are doing!
- Create high standards for your remote workers and your partners, and make sure they stick to them.
- Check for resourcefulness, success rate, and other such ideal achievements.
- The right selection of an IT outsourcing company will be a fantastic benefit to your workflow.
- Balance your costs with manageable expectations
- Technology keeps marching on, and while productivity and efficiency increases, that doesn’t always mean cost does too.
- The Deloitte Outsourcing Survey (2018) discovered that only 3% of organizations lowered costs by more than half after migrating to the cloud.
- Expectations for efficiency and cost must be realistic if you intend to meet the goals you need to set.
- You must consider the cost of vendor selection, communication, and other charges.
- Don’t expect immediate substantial financial savings!
- Remember to consider cultural differences, cost of transition, and management of change.
- Be cautious and realistic in your approach
- Be prepared to work on risk management
- Every strategy has risks, and a dedicated offshore team is no exception
- You must be informed and also monitor every opportunity for risk development, and actively try to avoid or lower them.
- Always have a plan in case of disaster
- Measure risk probability, impact, the amount of control you have, and your contingency plan effectiveness.
- Be aware that some risks will be outside of your control, like the other country’s economy or the distance.
- Careful planning and management will mitigate most of these risks.
- Have an effective process for change management
- Don’t underestimate the importance of change management when it comes to the interpersonal risks of outsourcing.
- Effective strategies mean that after hiring, work can continue, and the project can start without disruptions.
- Employee engagement, working relationships, and other interpersonal factors will be aided by this.
- Make your approach clear on both sides to reduce and remove uncertainty.
- Employee needs need to take precedence.
- Designing processes for the employees, rather than the other way around, will help produce a disruption-free transition.
- Pay attention and track your benefits
- Make sure you are assessing your benefits as objectively as possible.
- Don’t overestimate the advantages, no matter how tempting it might be!
- Use quantitative data to manage your remote strategies.
- If merit and expectations do not meet, you need to rethink.
- Monitor the upsides, too, to find and use best practices for hiring offshore.
While there are a lot of risks involved, the merit undoubtedly outweighs them. Once you know what you’re facing, the path is clear ahead for success.