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?

Although WFH has been a thing for a while, it's never been on this scale before. So I think lots of big employers will be using this like a live test to see if it CAN be done on a big scale.

As for the concerns about customer service & complaints - In time that will just be seen as collateral damage and because all other service providers in the same industry will have done the same - the customer will just have to suck it up, like it or not.

In my industry, for example, I use products & services that are available from maybe a dozen or so "leading companies" - One by one, they've all streamlined various aspects of their companies over the years to the point that they're all completely dire to deal with these days. I can moan and bitch all I like, but I'm still left with the same dozen crap options because they've all followed the same "cost saving" route.

I don't agree with it. But as big businesses take over - everyone else gets backed into a corner and is forced to comply. And a few disgruntled customers is still more cost effective according to the spreadsheet.

Some of it probably will be. Not as much as the likes of Kirstie Allsop and other people shitting it over their commercial property portfolios might think. Nor will it always work, which is why inshoring exists.

@TitsOutForHarambe yes, totally agree with that. Huge amounts of time gets spent preparing for work to be outsourced. Then gradually parts of it get brought back inhouse as you need to have someone to be the interface between the outsourced service and the serviced. Gradually you realise that you have to pay considerably more for the interface than for the service.

IT help desks are a classic for this.

You have an inhouse IT Help Desk. The some bright spark realises this could be outsourced and the space the inhouse IT Help Desk occupy used for something more productive.

Senior IT managers spend six months setting up the new outsourced help desk (lots of flights & hotels). Lots of training on particular bespoke software, manuals get written, SLA targets get agreed.

Help Desk goes live. You have a period of transition and a person from the outsourced helpdesk spends lots of time in the client company learning even more about the specifics of the client company and being the interface.

Staff at the outsourced helpdesk having gained experience/knowledge move on to better paid roles with other clients. The help desk is now manned by people who didnt get direct training. SLAs get missed. Costs go up so the price paid by the client goes up. Client starts looking for a new outsource partner.

Staff at the original company become their own unofficial help desk which means that solutions dont get standardised, widespread issues get overlooked until they reach crisis point.

I don't think ours will...I think the main reason is soft skills related, also I'm not 100% sure on the legalities of doing stuff like UK credit checks from abroad.

I don't think current experienced and qualified staff are at risk but if you believe it's possible for you to work remotely without any detriment for your employer, you must also think you can train your replacement and mentor people coming through remotely, so what's to stop that replacement being anywhere in the world?

This is another case of mature people being 'I'm alright Jack" and not giving two hoots for the mess we're leaving for our young people.

I don't think these jobs will go to places like India, but I do think they'll go to some of the cheaper areas of EU and of course cheaper areas of UK, which would be a good thing, but maybe not for the house prices of those who are being so smug about it!

I think YABU.

The pandemic has highlighted more issues in the “cheaper” locations that we were aware of previously. In the UK people were able to WFH. In India, there were broadband issues, shared accommodation issues, supplier issues.

To imply that those in cheaper locations have degrees and therefore can do the work done in the UK is overly simplistic. Many UK firms scoured their back office functions 10 years ago to see what could be sent offshore. Having back office bums on seats here wasn’t a justifiable reason not to send then.

I think it depends on the job. For mine although I can and do work from home for now, I also need to be available to attend site at sometimes short (hour or less notice). I have a relationship with the people I work with which would be harder to have working off site all the time.

[quote GnomeDePlume]**@TitsOutForHarambe yes, totally agree with that. Huge amounts of time gets spent preparing for work to be outsourced. Then gradually parts of it get brought back inhouse as you need to have someone to be the interface between the outsourced service and the serviced. Gradually you realise that you have to pay considerably more for the interface than for the service.

IT help desks are a classic for this.

You have an inhouse IT Help Desk. The some bright spark realises this could be outsourced and the space the inhouse IT Help Desk occupy used for something more productive.

Senior IT managers spend six months setting up the new outsourced help desk (lots of flights & hotels). Lots of training on particular bespoke software, manuals get written, SLA targets get agreed.

Help Desk goes live. You have a period of transition and a person from the outsourced helpdesk spends lots of time in the client company learning even more about the specifics of the client company and being the interface.

Staff at the outsourced helpdesk having gained experience/knowledge move on to better paid roles with other clients. The help desk is now manned by people who didnt get direct training. SLAs get missed. Costs go up so the price paid by the client goes up. Client starts looking for a new outsource partner.

Staff at the original company become their own unofficial help desk which means that solutions dont get standardised, widespread issues get overlooked until they reach crisis point.[/quote]
This is a classic scenario.

IME offshoring/outsourcing often involves two fundamental errors:

1. The offshored job is usually considered not very important/easily done by not very highly trained people - often things like help desks/admin. This is purely the ignorance and bias of upper management, who believe their jobs are super important while 'lower down' jobs could be done by anyone, when in fact, frontline and admin jobs are usually, by far, the most important jobs for ensuring and company doesn't go to shit. The longer these jobs are outsourced, the more the company starts to fray at the edges.

2. It doesn't matter if people doing these jobs work elsewhere and know nothing about the company. It very very much does matter. On a very human level, someone working for a company that is in a different country, that they know little to nothing about and have no personal affiliation with, where the focus is purely on keeping costs down, will over time just lose motivation. They have no reason to care that SLAs are not met, or that customers are not happy. The senior management who set all the standards and targets are a group of faceless foreigners they've never met. On the whole it's just bad working practice that leads to mistakes, time wasting and poor performance. It's hard enough keeping a team motivated and on task when they have an investment in the company and they're right there in front of you. But a team you hardly know, thousands of miles away? Practically impossible. You could directly manage the team, get involved with them, get to know them, but the fact is if they're outsourced to another company you don't have actual control over them, there's always a layer between you and them and you lose visibility of what's going on very quickly. It just doesn't work on a practical level.

I work for it. My first company outsourced a big junk of work to a company in India. It was a nightmare. We had to redo most of the work once it was sent to us.
I don’t think companies only look at money when employing but also knowledge and some of it will only be found within the country

Many roles can be outsourced at lower cost to places like India where there are large numbers of highly educated employees but with lower salary costs. All depends on the business model the employer wants to use.

@TheDailyCarbuncle - you are right about senior management not seeing support and admin as important and then it frays.

In their widom, my company furloughed all - read it - ALL the support staff in our company and kept on only management on the prinicople that management brings in the money. They furloughed 80% of staff.

It's been a nightmare. What they failed to realise is that support (the clue is in the name) allow the management to do their jobs. We are now about to go bust, because the meeting of our targets went to approx 10-15% because we had all these highly paid managers trying to do their own client calls, their own photocipying, their own preaprations of key documents that had to be someone important on time (and they did not know how to preapre documetns in the 4ight format etc, or who to send it to).

It held together for about a month, then things fell over in a big way. Because management in their wisdom did not seem to realise that support staff are not sitting on their arses filing their nailsl, but actually have very detailed very complicated and very skilled jobs.

A lot of IT work for banks is already done in India.

I work for a global consulting firm. We’ve outsourced to our offices in India all IT development and support, data analysis, research, report preparation and payroll. It’s taken a while to set up and work properly but the quality of the work is excellent.

[quote FallingOffTheBed]@TheDailyCarbuncle - you are right about senior management not seeing support and admin as important and then it frays.

In their widom, my company furloughed all - read it - ALL the support staff in our company and kept on only management on the prinicople that management brings in the money. They furloughed 80% of staff.

It's been a nightmare. What they failed to realise is that support (the clue is in the name) allow the management to do their jobs. We are now about to go bust, because the meeting of our targets went to approx 10-15% because we had all these highly paid managers trying to do their own client calls, their own photocipying, their own preaprations of key documents that had to be someone important on time (and they did not know how to preapre documetns in the 4ight format etc, or who to send it to).

It held together for about a month, then things fell over in a big way. Because management in their wisdom did not seem to realise that support staff are not sitting on their arses filing their nailsl, but actually have very detailed very complicated and very skilled jobs.[/quote]
Exactly the same thing happens around automation. Techbros who have never done a day of admin in their lives think that admin is a very easy job that a computer can just take care of. There's a huge dose of sexism in there - it's usually men who think that the (usually female) admin staff are brainless bimbos who can easily be replaced. The funny thing is they wouldn't last a week in admin, it would blow their tiny minds. Admin is the brain stem of the organisation, keeping everything alive and running.

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

This. I have recently got a new job that is purely home based. I also live in one on the most expensive parts of the country and am very seriously thinking about moving to improve my quality of life.

I've worked from home off & on since 2002, but have always had to travel too. Not needing to be in reach of London now, makes a big difference to me.

To answer the Question in the OP, I work in a role that requires a UK healthcare registration. It can't legally be outsourced abroad. While I'm sure many roles can and will be moved to overseas providers, there are also sectors and jobs that will need to retain their UK workforce.

Having seen outsourcing and automation projects close to (and participated in many) the big challenge is in understanding the activity which is being outsourced/automated.

From a distance a data entry role can seem to be easily done by a machine/remotely. But you need to understand the source of the data to be entered. Is a level of interpretation required? Is data entry the only task being performed? I know in my company at the smaller sites the person entering data may also be acting as reception, stores clerk, first aider and cleaner.

Outsourcing/automating isnt free. Just setting it up takes time and investment. Having set it up you then have to maintain it. You may also need to change as processes change. Suddenly the person who can be retrained in a day can look like a bargain.

Outsourcing to cheaper areas of the UK isn't necessarily a bad thing is it? Concentrating everything in London/the south, leading to massive house prices and ridiculous congestion, while other parts of the country have high rates of unemployment isn't a good thing IMO.

I don't think jobs will be outsourced to India. However, they can be done by anyone in any part of the UK. And isn't that a good thing? Rather than having everyone concentrated around the cities and south-east of London, you can work for any employer, and an employee can live much further away from their employer, which makes finding work (and recruiting) more flexible. And maybe it will mean that we can stop concreting over the countryside to build houses, though that seems to be happening all over the country, not just in the south-east.

I saw this argument repeated online many times, to the point I think it's trolling.

Or it comes from people who have never been in a professional job and do not understand what it entails.

Most WFH jobs are professional and require the education, experience and knowledge of the realities of this country to be done properly. Most people who have worked from home throughout lockdown and continue to do so have been able to do so successfully in the first place because of the above, not simply because they have a laptop and internet.

It's a spurious argument thoughtlessly repeated online, mostly coming from the right side of the political spectrum and/or from working class. It is factually incorrect, because in reality outsourcing is most likely to affect non-professional roles and this has been happening regardless of covid and WFH. The choice is simple, if a business doesn't care about its reputation and quality of service then it may wish to cut costs this way, if it does, it's unlikely to ever go down this route regardless as it would likely backfire and bring it more trouble than it's worth it.

Don't forget a lot of professional roles are regulated in this country and no reasonable firm would want to get in trouble with the regulator.

south-east AND London not just the south-east of London :)

Now the panic of CV19 is settled down a bit employers need to think carefully about it. Eg some are now announcing policies. One big law firm has said 20% to 50% of the time people will be allowed to work from home if that works in their role and depending on the work at a particular time. www.ft.com/content/eb4da0b1-d36b-4ddd-b520-0bd62deab157

"	Law firms are not the only City institutions wrestling with the future of their offices. In recent weeks, major employers including NatWest Group and Standard Life Aberdeen have told staff they will not return to the office until the start of next year. Asset manager Schroders went a step further, telling employees they can work from home indefinitely.

While law firms are starting to embrace remote working, they are also reopening their offices.

Baker McKenzie opened its London base this month, letting a maximum of 20 staff work in its building on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Clifford Chance and fellow “magic circle” firm Allen & Overy said staff would be able to return on a voluntary basis from dates in September. Both firms are operating a rota system to limit numbers. "

And Daily Carbuncle's example is a lesson in how the furlough system was abused. In a way I am glad it backfired, but it's sad for the people now losing their jobs because of the greedy ones at the top making stupid decisions. And the ones at the top will be fine, they always are.

The furlough scheme was meant to be to prop up the industries that had to close down, not to subsidise other firms which saw a means to save money (on female jobs in this case).

And the final consideration is data protection and security, a key issue before any outsourcing can take place, and a potential big headache (and rightly so).

@GnomeDePlume

Having seen outsourcing and automation projects close to (and participated in many) the big challenge is in understanding the activity which is being outsourced/automated.

From a distance a data entry role can seem to be easily done by a machine/remotely. But you need to understand the source of the data to be entered. Is a level of interpretation required? Is data entry the only task being performed? I know in my company at the smaller sites the person entering data may also be acting as reception, stores clerk, first aider and cleaner.

Outsourcing/automating isnt free. Just setting it up takes time and investment. Having set it up you then have to maintain it. You may also need to change as processes change. Suddenly the person who can be retrained in a day can look like a bargain.

I agree. Data entry is an interesting one. No matter how 'automated' a system is, data entry occurs at some point - the data doesn't just appear in the system. Traditionally, data entry was done by a relatively low-paid, low-skill person, it was their job to find the data, keep track of it and be accountable for it. When 'automation' is introduced, that person is usually replaced, meaning that now people are responsible for entering their own data. These are usually more qualified, more highly paid people, for whom this data is not their primary job - a good example is automated accounting software that requires each employee to log their own expenses. Where once employees would have handed that job over to another person, they now have to remember that job themselves and spend time doing it on top of their actual job. They may do it well or not - but it's not really their responsibility, it's no-one's responsibility. So mistakes are made, people have to be chased up etc etc. If you totted up the time it took for highly paid staff to do their own data entry and added in the chasing up time, it would almost definitely turn out in most companies that it is two or three times cheaper to just hire an actual person to do the job.

'Automation' works in some instances, but in many instances it's a total con.

Simply put, yes, OP, it will. What happened to the working class is coming for the middle class.

Everyone who thinks their skills are "niche" or particular enough, think twice. Your skills are ultimately replaceable, and eventually they can be replaced by people who live in a country where the wage is a fraction of your own. This won't happen tomorrow, or the next day, but I think that in the next 10-20 years that's where it's going.