WFH or Offshore/Outsource

[Wilmslowboy]

With battle grounds now being drawn on WFH (some business owners/ leaders suggesting we need to get back in the office full time), together with significant challenges even recruiting ‘back office’ admin employees (including salary inflation pressure)

Are we going to see an even further push to offshore (outsource) these roles
or will business leaders look to adopt tech tools (I.e RPA) to automate away these duties ?

[rog007]

Great question! And some real thorny issues challenging businesses.

Some say it will be a blend of all of that and more depending upon your sector.

Recruitment is the key challenge as you say, whilst RPA matures and folk gain a better understanding of its potential, this may indeed force some off shore.

WFH habits and expectations of the future workforce are still to be fully understood, so the challenge for employers is significant, particularly those with the least flexibility. This in turn could be the death knell of some sectors where they can’t adapt and the future workforce have no interest.

Interesting times ahead!

[Stuart70]

RPA and hybrid working.

[Alex Z]

Basically, all of the above. If your job can be done from home it can be done by anyone from anywhere. Some employers will still value local staff and continuity of service, offering flexible working to keep and recruit the best people. Others will look for any opportunity to cut costs, and won’t worry about the complexity & challenges of a full remote workforce.

Automation of work is pretty much independent of that and will always be an option.

[DanL]

Wilmslowboy said:

With battle grounds now being drawn on WFH (some business owners/ leaders suggesting we need to get back in the office full time), together with significant challenges even recruiting ‘back office’ admin employees (including salary inflation pressure)

Are we going to see an even further push to offshore (outsource) these roles
or will business leaders look to adopt tech tools (I.e RPA) to automate away these duties ?

Option 3 is to adapt to the working from home model, and keep local staff…

I work for a software company. We were expecting hybrid working, with 2+ days in the office. Reality has hit - we’ve just sublet a floor in our HQ as people just aren’t coming in. Now it’s more like 1 day a week, maybe.

My company is global, and if the role could be done elsewhere, we’d already be doing it. So, we seem to be going with option 3 - accept that staff want to work from home, and have the office for in person collaboration when required.

If your company hasn’t previously moved staff then I would assume that a number of roles will be outsourced to offshore companies, or to offices in cheaper locations (depending on the options available).

[Deep Thought]

Wilmslowboy said:

With battle grounds now being drawn on WFH (some business owners/ leaders suggesting we need to get back in the office full time), together with significant challenges even recruiting ‘back office’ admin employees (including salary inflation pressure)

Are we going to see an even further push to offshore (outsource) these roles
or will business leaders look to adopt tech tools (I.e RPA) to automate away these duties ?

Any company that could previously have offshored work generally has.

Its never just as simple as farming the work out to the far east or even to nearshore the work in to parts of europe. There are skills differences, cultural differences, time differences. Also, to make it work you really need a team / office out there.

I've been in IT for 30 years now and i've been hearing about the big scary monster of offshoring since i started.

Most of the big global companies i work with tend to have a blended approach, so picking the best resources / skills / cost for the roles across the teams. So currently we have IT staff in the UK, eastern europe and the far east.

Wife's company is a big global call centre group and they push some of the work to SA, Egypt, India etc, but a lot of their clients want UK based customer facing staff.

[Deep Thought]

Alex Z said:

Basically, all of the above. If your job can be done from home it can be done by anyone from anywhere. Some employers will still value local staff and continuity of service, offering flexible working to keep and recruit the best people. Others will look for any opportunity to cut costs, and won’t worry about the complexity & challenges of a full remote workforce.

Automation of work is pretty much independent of that and will always be an option.

Conversely, and previously, if it can / could be done from an office it could be done from an office anywhere?

Time differences, cultural differences and skills differences dont make it as simple as just dumping the work over to somebody cheap working on the far side of the globe.

[Mr Penguin]

I think the only thing stopping it is that people are expected to go in one or two days a week or be expected to be available for a face to face meeting within a couple of days.

[Deep Thought]

Mr Penguin said:

I think the only thing stopping it is that people are expected to go in one or two days a week or be expected to be available for a face to face meeting within a couple of days.

Thats the only thing is it? Not the time differences, language barriers, issue recruiting and keeping remote staff, skills differences? None of those?

How many companies have offshored in the past, only to bring the work back here? How many companies offshore to an extent already but want / need UK staff here also?

[OutInTheShed]

WFH is not new.
Employers knew they could save money in some roles by using WFH, quite a few people I know were a high % of WFH before 2020.

In some roles, WFH peaked at some point around 2015 as it was found to be better for the organisation to work in the office.

So, I think it will continue to vary according to the role and the company.
Companies which are training up new staff or doing new things will want people working face to face more.
The tech has improved to allow more people doing their 'same old Same old' jobs to work at home.

I think WFH in many roles is going to be associated with stagnation and looking forwards to retirement, while growth and new stuff happens in the office?
Some organisations will be rightly afraid of stagnation while start-ups in offices eclipse them.

[Dingu]

OutInTheShed said:

I think WFH in many roles is going to be associated with stagnation and looking forwards to retirement, while growth and new stuff happens in the office?
Some organisations will be rightly afraid of stagnation while start-ups in offices eclipse them.

Based on any actual experience?

Some people work much more effectively WFH and if some of the workforce are at home it makes not much difference where everyone else is as meetings end up remote/hybrid anyway.

Some companies will insist of office presence but their success or otherwise won’t have been majorly affected by that decision.

[Wilmslowboy]

"Any company that could previously have offshored work generally has."

I'm not sure this is the case..

One of the objections to offshoring was the 'I want. them in my office so I can see them working' - a bit old skool I know but none the less applied by some leaders.

What's changed is local people can now get WFH contracts with London businesses (I'm in the North West) and many (not all) expect to only come into the office one or two days a month.

Here is a live example -
Team of 20 back office admins (paper & IT processing not client contacting) - cost was £450k a year in salaries (plus desk space etc)
Same team now more like £550k a year (and want to work full time from home) office space costs can not really be recovered, and extra IT costs due to WFH.

Team can be off-shored to equally motivated individuals ( in the main more Educated with good English skills), all run as a service agreement, so no more pandering to the shop stewarded protagonist etc ....flex team to meet peaks and troughs in demand and save about £100k (20%) a year in the process.

[Mr Penguin]

Deep Thought said:

Thats the only thing is it? Not the time differences, language barriers, issue recruiting and keeping remote staff, skills differences? None of those?

How many companies have offshored in the past, only to bring the work back here? How many companies offshore to an extent already but want / need UK staff here also?

My company has already offshored jobs to India. No trouble with the language, they work in Indian offices which are considerably cheaper than paying people in the UK to WFH, and they work on British time zones.

Recruitment and skills aren't really a problem because so many people in other countries have degrees and relevant qualifications in many things. I think it would be hard to send legal work offshore because its intrinsically linked to the country's laws, but most jobs that can WFH full time can in principle be done anywhere in the world.

[Om]

If it can easily be done from anywhere by anyone then chances are it has been mechanised or outsourced already. I think it depends how commodified your offering is - for any role (backoffice/support or core offering) in any sector. Also it is not a binary WFH or Outsource, you can do both or a mix or something entirely different - whatever works best for you.

We work in the software sphere - an arena that is ripe for outsourcing, however we have always been predominantly homeworkers - based all over the globe. What we do is fairly niche and in demand with a limited pool of potential employees - so we employ globally as it is the only way to get staff. Admin/sysadmin is in-house and a mix of office and home-based because it is more responsive and better attuned to our needs that way. The primary measure is whether your work gets done to a satisfactory standard.

[ozzuk]

I think the argument that if this was possible it would have been looked at before and already done doesn't hold that much water. COVID forced many business to adapt to a new model quickly, this goes against a very common management ethos that if you aren't in the office you aren't working. What some businesses have seen is that productivity often hasn't been an issue and in some cases improved so it means both employees and managers are challenging that ethos. You also need to factor in employee demands - many want to keep that flexibility of WFH/hybrid, and this has had a secondary impact of out of town house prices rising as people realise they can live in a 'nicer' area and commute on the odd office day.

I'm also seeing the majority of roles that are coming up on linkedin for senior level IT positions are now virtually all remote, that is very new.

I do think the risk is the next logical step is, if you can work remotely...how remotely and we'll see an increase in outsourcing. That world has evolved as well, and the ease of adoption of offshoring has increased again due to covid because people are used to working via remote means. Collaboration tools are second nature and reliance on email alone is dropping.

Some companies will push back - I work for one of the largest mining companies in the world, prior to covid home working was really hard to justify, now our issue is getting people back in and we're having focus on hybrid models. We also work seamlessly with many outsource partners in many countries, Deloitte, Infosys, Accenture etc and the way we work with them has improved massively, you often can't easily tell they aren't part of our company (teams integration for example).

[OutInTheShed]

Dingu said:

OutInTheShed said:

I think WFH in many roles is going to be associated with stagnation and looking forwards to retirement, while growth and new stuff happens in the office?
Some organisations will be rightly afraid of stagnation while start-ups in offices eclipse them.

Based on any actual experience?

Some people work much more effectively WFH and if some of the workforce are at home it makes not much difference where everyone else is as meetings end up remote/hybrid anyway.

Some companies will insist of office presence but their success or otherwise won’t have been majorly affected by that decision.

Yes.
My experience is that teams learning new stuff often need people to work closely together and learn from one another. About 8 years ago, I was on projects where some people were WFH, but they were 'out of the loop' in so many ways. When it comes to contract renewal, those of us who were on site most were favoured.
Last few years, my sister has been WFH in an organisation which is supposedly training some graduates, it's not gone well.

I've also worked in a few companies where significant change has been afoot, companies taken over, joint ventures, major changes of technology etc.
When new roles are being defined, you want to be in the loop.

When things are going wrong you want to be face to face.

Not much of this stuff is new, I did video conferences last century, I did a significant amount of WFH on several contracts going back 25 years. I've got permie friends who've not had a desk in the office to call their own since Gordon Brown was PM. I've also spent many many hours commuting great distances to do work I could have done better at home.
Then again, I recall being paid to 'be there in case' and drink tea.

For sure, some roles can work very well at home.

[rxe]

Dingu said:

Based on any actual experience?

Some people work much more effectively WFH and if some of the workforce are at home it makes not much difference where everyone else is as meetings end up remote/hybrid anyway.

Some companies will insist of office presence but their success or otherwise won’t have been majorly affected by that decision.

Yes. I’ve run a project that has been “in the office” for the last 2 years because of some complex security reasons. I QA a project that is WFH. The office based team is about 30% more productive. I could supply a tonne of metrics to show this, but they are a bit confidential.

Problem resolution (at any level) is about 50% longer in a WFH team. Doesn’t matter if is a complex design issue or a simple production incident.

There’s at least a 10% tax on people going to pointless meetings because they feel disconnected from the work. You can attack this with comms sessions all you want, to no avail.

We spend a lot of time sorting out the sort of petty disagreements that would normally be solved in seconds face to face.

If you’re just cutting code to a spec, sure, WFH is fine, as WFIndia has been fine for years. Complex projects with large teams, WFH is going to be a graveyard for companies and individuals. We’re already at the point where if you’re not in the room for a design session, your opinion doesn’t count.

[DanL]

rxe said:

Dingu said:

Based on any actual experience?

Some people work much more effectively WFH and if some of the workforce are at home it makes not much difference where everyone else is as meetings end up remote/hybrid anyway.

Some companies will insist of office presence but their success or otherwise won’t have been majorly affected by that decision.

Yes. I’ve run a project that has been “in the office” for the last 2 years because of some complex security reasons. I QA a project that is WFH. The office based team is about 30% more productive. I could supply a tonne of metrics to show this, but they are a bit confidential.

Problem resolution (at any level) is about 50% longer in a WFH team. Doesn’t matter if is a complex design issue or a simple production incident.

There’s at least a 10% tax on people going to pointless meetings because they feel disconnected from the work. You can attack this with comms sessions all you want, to no avail.

We spend a lot of time sorting out the sort of petty disagreements that would normally be solved in seconds face to face.

If you’re just cutting code to a spec, sure, WFH is fine, as WFIndia has been fine for years. Complex projects with large teams, WFH is going to be a graveyard for companies and individuals. We’re already at the point where if you’re not in the room for a design session, your opinion doesn’t count.

I can well believe that - some stuff works better / faster when you can simply tap the shoulder of the person next to you to ask a question.

It’s safe to say there’s no one size fits all answer to working from home.

[rxe]

Dingu said:

Based on any actual experience?

Some people work much more effectively WFH and if some of the workforce are at home it makes not much difference where everyone else is as meetings end up remote/hybrid anyway.

Some companies will insist of office presence but their success or otherwise won’t have been majorly affected by that decision.

Yes. I’ve run a project that has been “in the office” for the last 2 years because of some complex security reasons. I QA a project that is WFH. The office based team is about 30% more productive. I could supply a tonne of metrics to show this, but they are a bit confidential.

Problem resolution (at any level) is about 50% longer in a WFH team. Doesn’t matter if is a complex design issue or a simple production incident.

There’s at least a 10% tax on people going to pointless meetings because they feel disconnected from the work. You can attack this with comms sessions all you want, to no avail.

We spend a lot of time sorting out the sort of petty disagreements that would normally be solved in seconds face to face.

If you’re just cutting code to a spec, sure, WFH is fine, as WFIndia has been fine for years. Complex projects with large teams, WFH is going to be a graveyard for companies and individuals. We’re already at the point where if you’re not in the room for a design session, your opinion doesn’t count.

[zippy3x]

rxe said:

Yes. I’ve run a project that has been “in the office” for the last 2 years because of some complex security reasons. I QA a project that is WFH. The office based team is about 30% more productive. I could supply a tonne of metrics to show this, but they are a bit confidential.

Problem resolution (at any level) is about 50% longer in a WFH team. Doesn’t matter if is a complex design issue or a simple production incident.

There’s at least a 10% tax on people going to pointless meetings because they feel disconnected from the work. You can attack this with comms sessions all you want, to no avail.

We spend a lot of time sorting out the sort of petty disagreements that would normally be solved in seconds face to face.

If you’re just cutting code to a spec, sure, WFH is fine, as WFIndia has been fine for years. Complex projects with large teams, WFH is going to be a graveyard for companies and individuals. We’re already at the point where if you’re not in the room for a design session, your opinion doesn’t count.

As an experienced developer, I see lots of red flags on your project.

Large complex systems can (and are) developed very efficiently by distributed teams who rarely meet - I've been on a few very successful ones over the last 15 years

to be blunt, just because your organisation can't make it work doesn't mean it can't work