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?

People who speak English as a second language speak it perfectly well enough to be understood.

I worked in a global team where English was the core language. Yes, my overseas colleagues had great verbal English language skills, but their written language skills were really poor. As much of our work included writing proposals, only UK staff could give final sign off before a doc went to a client.

I am not concerned about jobs going overseas; the language skills aren't good enough, the time zones don't work, face to face contact is needed some of the time and cultural differences are too big.

OP your friend is struggling to find a job (as am I) because there are no jobs, not because the jobs are going offshore.

On the (over 100) jobs I have applied for I have had to confirm I am eligible to work in the UK. The majority of jobs I am looking at offer a WFH contract. In the current climate this is good news as it opens up job opportunities for me in locations across the UK.

I think you have a point. Also outsourcing to U.K. regions. This could be a good think for our U.K. regions

My job is fairly niche as well. It is relatively low-paying but I am one of only (quickly counts) of under 20 people in the country who have that specific expertise.

Others can be trained of course but it is very client-facing and knowledge of our location is imperative.

Yeah, some businesses will do this. It's all been done before.

Look how cheap outsourcing is, wow! Let's do it!

Then a few years down the line they discover all the issues that come along with it, and whoever the young new up and coming decision maker is says "let's get back to being local. That's what the customers/clients want".

And then the whole cycle starts again. This is an old story.

People who speak English as a second language speak it perfectly well enough to be understood.

Not necessarily. It entirely depends.

I also once worked for my then-company's US office. But was based in the UK. It was a nightmare. I started work at UK time of 9 am, worked until the US office came to their office at 2 pm, went home at 5 then continued through the evening until midnight-0ish until the US office finished. No-one seemed to understand I was working 2 timezones.

YANBU

Two third of the staff in my company has moved abroad (english speaking country) since the last 3/4 years. Their salaries are half of ours. This doesn't happen overnight, we have to team together with them for at least many months before they are trained enough to take over. (It's been 2 years for my team, they just made us redundant).

The government need to do something to protect our jobs!

Our IT (apart from field eng), finance, purchase, customer services, account managers, engineers has moved abroad the last 3, 4 years. Left with sales (whoever has to meet customers), HR, senior finance and management in the UK.

[quote GnomeDePlume]**@Oblomov20 I have been an accountant for 30 years. In that time there has been a huge amount of change in terms of technology and working practices. IME a lot of the basic repetitive data entry work has already long gone.

My own work has changed hugely. Where in the past a lot of work went into getting the right number in the right place now a lot more time is spent on interpretation and understanding of information. I was busier than ever during lockdown as forecasts were constantly changed and revised.

Senior management of businesses always want what they havent got. They also want to have it at no expense. They want to have an agile business with low (or better still, no) overheads. At the same time they want to improve margins which means reducing variable costs. They want to reduce the workforce but dont want the capital investment to replace that workforce with machines. They want automation but dont want to pay for the automation to be implemented and then maintained/improved. They want tomorrow's questions to have been answered yesterday but at the same time want to have today's questions managed as top priority.

I do find senior managers tiring to deal with![/quote]
OMG Yes yes yes yes and YES!!!!!!!!

Bloody hell it is like you have a direct line of insight into my company!

@BackforGood

What *@chrislilleyswig* said.

There seems to be some people who think that people who have historically worked in an office are low skilled. Simply not the case. Nor is it the case that people 'solely' wfh or work in an office. There are masses of jobs where people go out - to sites, to clients, to meetings, to other offices or laboratories or hospitals or schools or factories or construction sites, and then have done their admin in the office. It seems likely that that admin can now be done at home, but the visits and inspections and collaborations etc etc will still happen, but the office time won't necessarily be the same.

There seems to be some people who think that people who have historically worked in an office are low skilled.

Similarly, it's clear that many people think that "people abroad" are low skilled.
They aren't, but the living costs are substantially lower.

People need to give their heads a wobble and realise that they are NOT the only person in the world who can do their job and that EVERYONE is replaceable.

There are some roles that may offshore more frequently but if companies were going to do that they would have done already, offshoring is not a new concept, of it was a viable solution that was going to bring significant cost savings they would have done it by now.

Some of the problems with it:

• public perception, reputation
• U.K. government contracts and many others require data to stay in the U.K. this means servers/tech infrastructure but also the people who process and have visibility of the data.
• language
• remit - I have worked in devising and delivering training to a new offshore call centre for a furniture delivery service. The training was huge, we had to cover U.K. road infrastructure like double yellow lines, bus lanes, red zones....typical home layouts, types of vehicles used and barriers to delivery, all of which U.K. staff would just know. They were heavily scripted with a system that gave the script and various options onscreen that they could select. As soon as the conversation went off script the call had to be transferred to a smaller U.K. team.
• there are also tax implications

Of course you are right OP. People are in denial when they say it won’t happen. Of course, Offshoring has been happening for years and this crisis will now escalate the process.

Both my adult DS are currently WFH. They would like to get back into the office, but it is the management who have decided the office will remain closed until January at least. Partly this is due to the Social Distancing rules, and presumably the fear (on behalf of the company) of corporate liability if anyone caught the virus after returning to work, and became seriously ill.
It already was the case that some people worked from home 'sometimes'. I have often thought that partial WFH would suit parents, who could stagger hours; eg. If mother WFH one day a week, and father also WFH one day a week, then that would only be 3 days child care, or wrap around care required.
But WFH all the time has serious repercussions. No 'at your desk' collaboration or mentoring; no ad hoc discussion over the coffee machine; no team building drinks after work, etc.
Currently to comply with SD rules, leaving empty desks, etc, then only part of the office can return. In the case of my DSs, then the plans are for certain teams or workers to return first (such as those who can commute without using public transport).
So, I suspect, if some refuse to return, then eventually those still at home will inevitably be excluded.
The obvious example is the lunch time drink, which often acts as an unofficial team meeting. The WFH person is excluded by their absence. This is the risk!
The main concern with WFH, is that work has to be visible!. This only works with certain jobs where there are specific bench marks, which determine that work has been done. But some jobs are not like that, and require 'networking' to be effective, and in these cases WFH hampers work.
WFH also has some data protection issues, and also Health and Safety issues of its own; have you the right desk, chair, space etc to be effective

I think IT, accounts and supply chain type jobs are at significant risk. Anything that requires an understanding of the nuances of the local country less so. I can also see a core of people in the UK with colleagues in other countries - e.g. an estate agent needs to go out to do viewings, etc, but an estate agent in Poland could manage the paperwork side from anywhere. Good English is going to be come an ever more lucrative skill.

It's not overseas outsourcing I would see as the biggest concern, it's outsourcing to cheaper UK regions.

I just looked at senior accountant Jobs on indeed. London, there's quite a few jobs paying £50-65k a year. Newcastle, I'm struggling to find anything past £35k. There's no reason why an accountant with the same experience and skills couldn't be found in Newcastle, and then work from home, maybe coming down to London on the train a couple of times a month for anything that necessitated a physical presence. No tax implications, no time zone issues. And the employer has just knocked £20k or more off their wage bill.

I think we are at the beginning of a second industrial revolution when it comes to people’s jobs. The pandemic has exacerbated it, but it would have come anyway.

However most people have more to fear from automation than out sourcing. In the longer term at least.

It will be interesting.

@TitsOutForHarambe

Yeah, some businesses will do this. It's all been done before.

Look how cheap outsourcing is, wow! Let's do it!

Then a few years down the line they discover all the issues that come along with it, and whoever the young new up and coming decision maker is says "let's get back to being local. That's what the customers/clients want".

And then the whole cycle starts again. This is an old story.

This exactly.

Outsourcing is a completely false economy IME. It seems a lot cheaper, from the point of view of salaries mainly, but there are so many complicating factors - even paying people in a foreign currency is a costly pain in the arse. Then you have to factor in other things like the political stability of the outsourced company, changes in taxes, employment law and basic things like whether the person you're paying to oversee the whole thing is doing their job properly or not while you're unable to really keep an eye on them. In order for outsourcing to work properly for years it takes a huge amount of organisation and investment, which eventually outweighs the savings, Apart from anything, a huge disconnected tends to arise between different parts of the company and the fact that everything is based on cost rather than on any sense of working together means that over time companies often lose morale and momentum - the whole thing becomes a bit pointless. Some bright spark then says 'wouldn't it be better to have this in the in UK?' and it's seen as a brilliant change to revitalise the company. No one seems to learn a bloody thing.

One thing I would say OP is that the 'work from home permanently' thing is a flash in the pan. I'm hoping flexibility will stay, ie working from home some of the week or the month - but permanent wfh for 20+ staff eventually falls apart IME. It is vital for people to meet face to face at least some of the time to keep track of each other and to stop getting disconnected. The effects of wfh can be subtle and take a long time to emerge but companies will eventually see it. Plus I'm not sure how many people are going to be happy to provide their company with work premises for free indefinitely (which is what you're doing in you wfh permanently).

I agree with PP, in accounting and finance a huge amount of our work is outsourced but as part of the outsourcing agreement it needs to come to us for analysis and review before sign off. I dont think this can ever change.
Our office is already in one of the smaller cities, so the lease payments and wages payments are lower than if it were one of the main cities. Plus with more people WFH, they will not need all the space they are leading and will save more money there.

It largely depends on the particular skills. Russians are good at legal docs, Romanians at finance, India at software. WFH has not been perfect by a long way. Projects are slowed. Outsourcing has been happening for a while and it’s still finding its way, sometimes successful but not always.

It will depend on the job. If it's niche to the country you're in, if it requires judgement based on local knowledge, if it's the kind of job where servicing clients or customers requires physical presence, then no, these will not be replaced.

Outside of that, then yes i imagine many more companies will be looking at off shoring. I run a few off shoring centres in my job. The company i work for is large and has many functions, for most of which i would struggle to come up with a good reason why much of their departmental workload couldn't be done remotely by someone in a cheaper location. Ironically I'm still employed in England but I'm under no illusions. If i go, or they ask me to go, the person who'd step into my shoes will be based in one of the off shoring places.

No, if large numbers of jobs were outsourced there would be huge tax implications for companies involved and for the Government.

This is exactly what I came on here to say!

WFH permanently for 100% of the time will not be the norm in my opinion.

Why are people so quick to leap on this and devalue (as ever) the importance of face to face communication?

One thing I would say OP is that the 'work from home permanently' thing is a flash in the pan.

I agree with this too. The practicalities of getting back to the office are difficult now and the fear is still high. These barriers will go and businesses will revert to their previous thinking on wfh pretty quickly after that. Though there will be a little more flexibility than there was.

I agree that more wfh will lead to more outsourcing to other parts of the UK however people will move to cheaper areas. Plus everyone I know who works in professional services is looking at more wfh but still 2-3 days in the office a wk so you can commute but not from too far away.

It’s not overseas outsourcing I would see as the biggest concern, it's outsourcing to cheaper UK regions

^this. I could see people working remotely who are based further away with a requirement to travel in occasionally.

I replaced an internationally outsourced function in my job.

Despite it being done by a group of highly educated people in the US, it wasn't working:

• time zones were causing issues internally and externally
• they were missing the nuances of the UK languages and couldn't get informal tone correct
• everything was over complicated in the outsourcing process
• they lacked local knowledge and insight
• they struggled to build a rapport with challenging stakeholders

So in my case, I very much doubt they'd outsource my job as they've just brought it back.

Some functions in my industry are outsourced by large companies and it's always obvious which and it just doesn't work very well