Will WFH be outsourced to cheaper countries?

[Alongcameacat]

Following on from a recent thread where the majority of people believe that they will remain working from home permanently, is anyone concerned that their jobs are now high risk?

Why would companies continue paying people their current salaries when there is no need for people to be in the same place at the same time?

Surely it makes sense that companies will outsource most if not all of their WFH workforce to countries like India and Eastern Europe where labour is significantly cheaper?

As for going to the office one or two days a week - Zoom, Google Teams, would suffice for the most part and any inconveniences would be more than offset by huge financial savings?

@PurplePansy05 plenty of those "Londoners" would have originally been from areas they move back to.

buying numerous properties pricing the locals out of the market and limiting the market choices even further. I understand it's unpleasant to have the prospect of tasting your own medicine.

You don't think Londoners have experienced this? Heard nothing about social housing tenants moved outwards?

I think I'm pretty safe because I can't see the UK Civil Service outsourcing my kind of job outside the UK. A lot of departments struggle enough with the concept of having an office outside Westminster ffs

If anything I think it'll be beneficial when I go for a new job (unlikely to happen any time soon as I'm about to go on mat leave!) as I'll be able to apply for jobs further away in the knowledge that I'll be able to wfh a lot of the time and perhaps only commute once or twice a week. I live somewhere with mainly only one quite niche department (ONS) at present but probably commutable to London from where I live if it's not every day.

I do think that it would be a big stretch for many in the industry I work in to use overseas workers, as said previously not because of lack of qualifications but because of lack of experience/ability to adapt to the culture of the industry.

Most employees aren't just numbers on a page, they are individuals with particular knowledge and experience.

I agree. I think the OP seems determined to not understand this.

I am flabbergasted so many people think they are irreplaceable and/or in niche roles. Obviously your company has never been bought and you have never been made redundant.

Wrong. The company I work for has been bought and has acquired other companied many times. The most recent acquisition being last month.

I’m flabbergasted that you seem to think that most if not all WFH office jobs can be outsourced. I agree that there will be many industries where this can happen, but I think you vastly underestimate the soft skills a skilled and local(ish) workforce can bring. At the beginning of lockdown the people who were furloughed where I work were not the highest paid staff, but the least skilled and least knowledgeable. They kept the experienced staff with the soft skills, who understood the market and who already had the relationships going with customers and suppliers.

We adapted very quickly, and as a result still have jobs, and will do for the foreseeable. Our team does data sourcing and data entry. You can’t source the data without understanding what it is and how and where to get it or understanding how our industry works. I’m struggling to understand how anyone who isn’t at least as fluent in speaking and writing English as a native English speaker could join our copywriting team and make as good a job as our copywriters do. IMO the capital outlay and initial costs of outsourcing overseas what we do would be prohibitive at this time.

What the pandemic has done, however, has meant that when we recruited new copywriters we recruited the best from around the country, not just someone who could commute to the office in Yorkshire.

I'm inclined to think that most companies would have already outsourced work if it would meet their needs

In regards to UK vs outsourcing abroad I agree with this. The bank I work for had already outsourced anything it could abroad long before 2020 - mainly back office IT/HR support and some inbound call centres. Anything left in the UK is, mainly, because it has to be. Big clients, big focus areas and stakeholders that wouldn’t accept speaking to someone the other side of the World as acceptable.

The whole WFH situation changes nothing in regards to ‘cheap foreign labour’ really. If work could be done outside of the UK then most able companies would likely have already considered this option before Covid anyway.

However I do think there will be a huge shift within the UK. If work can be done from home, why will large companies in London pay London salaries when they can pay someone 100 miles away far less? UK is UK - I don’t think most jobs actually ‘require’ much local knowledge.

It will also create far greater competition for some roles imo and possibly affect City salaries if WFH is opened up long term.

I have no real intentions of applying elsewhere in the current climate - but the opportunities are interesting. I’m now keeping my eyes on job openings in the whole of the UK rather than 50 miles of where I live. I’ve already seen one or two which hint that WFH may be considered which was NEVER advertised as such a year ago for these roles.

1 word. Huawei.

Do these companies want to take the risk that Apple has?

I am flabbergasted so many people think they are irreplaceable and/or in niche roles. Obviously your company has never been bought and you have never been made redundant.

I've worked for 'my company' for over 30 years, surviving many mergers and takeovers. In some cases I probably escaped redundancy because I was working from home rather than in one of the offices being rationalised.

I may be something of an outlier but I don't flatter myself I'm unique in this. The "knowledge economy" should put increasing value on skills retention. DH left a position where he had a heck of a lot of knowledge because of the politicking and crappy work-life balance and is now grimly amused to see them painfully reinventing wheels.

If your job could always have been done by someone with little to no knowledge of the company or local industry, no expertise, less skill in your specific area and without any personal flair you bring to it, it would have been outsourced on the cheap long ago. Why would they ever have needed you?

Software development has always been tempted by cheaper outsourcing and they always come back home as the quality of the code isn't as high. Here we value robust, tested, scalable code. Some companies value code that simply 'works', but doesn't scale. They are welcome to that strategy but it doesn't suit many UK tech companies.

@PurplePansy05

And London outsourcing was a long time coming, we've had how many years of "tired Londoners" moving here "for quality of life" and "better work life balance", taking professional local jobs off the local market that were few and far between comparing to London and buying numerous properties pricing the locals out of the market and limiting the market choices even further. I understand it's unpleasant to have the prospect of tasting your own medicine.

I'm quite sure Londoners were more than sick of people like you coming to London and pricing them out of even renting in their home city, away from their family and support network - and having been forced out, then getting stuck living amongst ignorant, hostile, insularity.

You'd better brace yourself for a large influx of Londoners if WFH becomes permanent and full-time. Despite city centre jobs going, housing there will remain unaffordable due to continued investment property (often left lying empty). Millions of people live in London, most are the opposite of rich. They'll need to move somewhere else in order to house themselves and their families.

And I've no idea why people are clinging to an obsession about coffee shops. It's about much much more than the thousands of coffee shop employees.

As we all know, the rich coffee shop owners will be fine. As will the commercial property owners, who can sell or convert to (overpriced but poor quality) housing. Let's hope so, as it's all our pensions (invested in commercial property) that will suffer if not.

The commercial property owners are often the very same people, company CEOs, who are keen to skimp on office space costs (despite it being a false economy).

It's the hundreds of thousands of low or average income workers in all office related employment who will lose out. Facilities, maintenance, utilities, cleaning, security, transport, etc. At a cost to us all. The economy is very interlinked - and impacts on social cohesion.

We'll need big tax increases. Either to foot the huge unemployment benefits bill and/or to pay for the extra demand on criminal justice sector, social services and mental health support, healthcare, and more.

I agree that propping up sky high London rents shouldn’t be our concern.

And it’s nice that there are so many people on this thread who feel safe.

The wider concern is the economy as a whole and our society as a whole where many people aren’t safe.

I agree we would adapt. Humans always do. But the economic upheaval could take a while and as Keynes said, “in the long run, we are all dead.”

Also, rich countries don’t always stay rich. We need to earn our way in the world.

I dont honestly expect to see much of a stampede from London to the Yorkshire Dales. What I do expect to see is a move away from outer London to commutable locations further afield. A long commute once a week may be far more agreeable if it means a garden and room to WFH.

It will differ across sectors and departments but no I doubt it for my sector. I doubt wfh will stick longer than in needed to, people already going back in for various days to work together.

If your job could always have been done by someone with little to no knowledge of the company or local industry, no expertise, less skill in your specific area and without any personal flair you bring to it, it would have been outsourced on the cheap long ago. Why would they ever have needed you?

I don’t understand this thought process. People have to start in every job. People need to be trained in every job. I worked in the financial sector in the city. We were paid more but we frequently had discussions where we concluded that with some training, any school leaver could do our job.

Of course there were colleagues who thought we did Very Important Work but it really wasn’t the case. Anybody could have done it with some training.

@GnomeDePlume

I dont honestly expect to see much of a stampede from London to the Yorkshire Dales. What I do expect to see is a move away from outer London to commutable locations further afield. A long commute once a week may be far more agreeable if it means a garden and room to WFH.

Knock on effects. More people moving to commuter towns = increased house prices because of more competition. Which means people will be priced out of buying or renting in the commuter town. So they move further out. Including to the Yorkshire Dales. So what was once a problem largely suffered by Londoners alone (fractured family links and support networks - with the resulting social problems) will start to spread across the country. We'll become less socially cohesive and more isolated and insular - with all the consequent social issues.

Outsourcing has been a real option for most companies for well over a decade. It is not the fact that people work in an office that has stopped their roles being outsourced abroad. As many others have said, a lot of people have country-specific expertise or are required to have an operational site presence for example.

My job can't be done from India, for example as I need to be able to visit operational sites in the UK and I need to have specific knowledge and experience of legislation here (and also it is a public sector job...).

However COVID lockdown has shown that my job can be done entirely without me being in an office building.

I'm quite sure Londoners were more than sick of people like you coming to London and pricing them out of even renting in their home city, away from their family and support network - and having been forced out, then getting stuck living amongst ignorant, hostile, insularity.

I never moved to London, thank you. I never priced anyone out either. And you're typically rude, no surprise.

You'd better brace yourself for a large influx of Londoners if WFH becomes permanent and full-time.

You're so self-centred that you have failed to notice that the regions have had that influx for years - this isn't new. And I'm not talking about the people moving back to where they originate from (who sadly in many cases had to move away to London in the first place because investment in London has sucked out investment in the regions and they simply haven't had the opportunities here - this is the core of the issue). I'm talking about rich, stuck up know it alls. We have had more than enough of that. Do I need to brace myself? No, thank you, get off your high horse with your threatening tone. The reality is, if anyone needs to get their arses in gear, it's the Londoners because the regional professionals have been doing exactly the same jobs as you for many years for less. Watch this space.

When it comes to London, it was less investment, but more plundering.

Highly qualified, educated, fluent English speakers abroad can do many of the jobs just as well as (sometimes better than) any 'regional professional'. For less money.

All this division is exactly what I mean btw about social cohesion, and how interlinked the economy is - across the whole UK.

Yes of course jobs will go offshore. All jobs? No. Many, many job? Obviously yes. People are often deluded about how niche their skill sets are.

There is no social cohesion in this country, there has never been. Creating access to opportunities regionally would certainly improve it.

And it's incorrect to think foreign professionals could easily replace UK workforce for many reasons, all of which have already been mentioned in this thread. There's a huge difference between a foreign professional living in the UK and performing a job based here and someone who has never lived here, they simply will not have the same outlook. This isn't comparable and I speak from experience of someone who moved and worked in different countries before myself. An additional consideration will also be Brexit and its impact on the workforce will be interesting.

I'm amazed that anyone thinks a degree and 6 months of training is in some way remarkable. Soft skills are not limited to the people of Ohio. There are people in cheaper countries with soft skills aplenty with Phd's and an abundance of other experience who will happily work for half of what is currently being paid.

Maybe, but I dont give a shit, something has to change and nobody is going to scare me back into that nightmare.

As for the western worlds delusion that somehow 'other' cultures won't 'get it'. I can tell you that there is currently a massive global restructuring being undertaken by a multinational HQ'ed in the US. Who is handling it? Consultancies in the US? U.K.? France? Nope....PWC Nigeria. Lol. You people are clueless. It's not 'going to happen'. It's already happening.

@damnthatanxiety people may have PhDs (no need for an apostrophe, btw) but they are not comparable. Would you rather someone had one from Bucharest or Oxford?

@damnthatanxiety are you worried about your job?