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?

[quote Menomosso]@CherryPavlova I hope we don’t start relying on online doctors! Surely mistakes in diagnosis will be made if a doctor cannot examine a patient by touching them physically?

And as for 999, we already know that call centres have problem when the workers have to go off script. Imagine that in an emergency situation?[/quote]
There is current research showing robotic diagnosis can be more accurate than human.....not suggesting that we move away from human doctors but medicine is changing.

Even before Covid19, hospitals were offering virtual clinics and appointments, telemedicine is increasing and the benefits of virtual working are being seen.
Undoubtedly we will be moving to far more online consultations because of capacity and timeliness.
That means it can be done from anywhere. Not all consultations, but many do involve touching.

Call handlers should not go off script without a clinical advisor present or telling them to. No reason that a person in the Czech Republic couldn’t go off piste supported by a senior nurse or paramedic working from the U.K.

Covid19 and Brexit will change how medical services are delivered going forward.

They tried it in my exh company, just with a few junior staff. Employed a few people from east Europe.
It was terrible, impossible to manage properly and to recruit the right people.
The (multi-national) company did a U-turn and fired all the new overseas staff.

There's lots of east Europeans in the UK office and they do a wonderful job.

If it was so simple it would have already been done.

@Alongcameacat i’ve been through 8 big redundancy waves in the last 15 years. My current company took 3 years to recruit me. I was the only candidate. its a highly specialised and niche role, and there are 1-2 of us in the seriously big companies. worst case we’ll have to move county, but that’s fine. I don’t know anybody in my field who’s been unemployed for more than 6 months.

Its almost as if we would benefit from joining an economic and political union providing a level playing field for overheads such as workers rights, pay, state aid and business conduct...who would have thought it!

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.

No, OP, you're clearly set in your thinking that this will happen.

Your argument makes no sense. A company buy out nearly always leads to a restructure, even if staff are very good. My mother fell victim to that when a US based company bought hers and introduced their own rules, culture, and workforce that suited them. It happens. No one is irreplaceable, but equally we're realistic.

This has nothing to do with WFH or the pandemic. A buy out or redundancies might occur at any time, regardless of where individuals are based to perform their day to day work. There is far more that comes to this consideration than the outdated concept of presenteeism which you appear to be hung up on.

@Alongcameacat

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 am with my company for nearly 20 years now. During this I survived 3 waves of re-organisations, mergers and redundancies. The branch I work in the UK went up and down in staff numbers due to stopping certain projects, centralising jobs in HQ and having duplicate jobs due to mergers. I seem to have skills, like my German mothertongue and additional training, which seem to kept me secure.

I think certain jobs can be done outsourced, I actually have customers who outsourced successfully because it is done in a long-term planned way and not just to save money by shifting everything to a cheaper location.

It is important to develop skills which means you are employable and make you more desireable to be kept employed. Too many are just relying on doing their job without looking to improve themselves.

As someone who worked with a company that outsourced work my experience has been the higher educational and experience requirements are, the higher the offshore salary is. Factor in delays due to time, quality,nuance etc you tend to find those roles either are a non starter or are moved back very quickly.
Offshore Outsorcing countries are global businesses so have lots of their own costs which bump the cost up.
What can be offshored is high volume, repetitive tasks, but even that has to have the added cost of managing, quality checking and relationship building costs.
Considering most UK businesses are shrinking, the volumes of the repetitive tasks aren't likely to be enough to make it cost effective.
There was a huge trend 5 or more years ago to offshore work and at least 50% of those companies have since brought it back. So even if the 'price' looks cheaper at the outset, there's costs in the end that outweigh that price.

Honestly, it not the offshoring people need to think about. That's been happening since the 90s and oddly enough, a lot of even supposedly "low skilled" customer-facing work such as call centres have come back into the country. People, linguistics and social knowledge all matter. I have worked exclusively online for three years and I have just been hired by a global company who already have a presence in India, China and elsewhere. Cheap is not always a consideration.

However, anything that is repetitive can be done by a machine. The real revolution is happening quietly right now and has been unfolding since the 1960s. It's AI machine learning and it will disrupt every sector. Companies won't offshore, they will automate. For people with creativity, empathy, analytical skills and the like, it's going to be brilliant. Fortunately, that's most of us, but it will mean adaption.

World Economic Forum: automation will displace 75 million jobs but generate 133 million new ones worldwide by 2022.

I do find senior managers tiring to deal with!

So very true @GnomeDePlume!

@Alongcameacat

Admin and IT can be done from home. Lecturing can be done from home. And countless others.

Surely that is a large cohort of the current WFH?

I wasn't presuming that ALL WFH are at risk but a large number are at risk.

Many of the jobs currently WFH rely on advanced/native speaking/writing/understanding English skills with the ability to understand nuanced cultural, political and other contexts. This is not something you can easily come by in other countries, with the exception of maybe the US, Canada, Aus where salaries are already high. Many of the jobs that could be outsourced have already been outsourced - believe me.

We are forgetting that lots of people are already or are about be made redundant, so will likely accept lower salaries in the months to come just to remain in employment. There will be no need for companies to look abroad for cheap labour.

Online medical consultations could be outsourced to doctors internationally.

Yes, they could. Where there is no need for physical contact, routinised healthcare could be outsourced - and it would be excellent for the healthcare system and allow concentration of resources where it will do most good.

There are very exciting projects around self-taken smears and other tests that might just require a fingertip blood sample. They are well-received by people who would otherwise not want to take the time to go for a screening or for whom it's too difficult to make care arrangements.

COVID-19 has stimulated a mass of research into home diagnostics and remote monitoring. A lot of this would tie into remote healthcare very well.

Of course, there are some clinical encounters that require you both to be present in an adequately resourced facility. But for everything else, this could be an outstanding time to transform self-management of long-term conditions with additional remote support - support that is currently too expensive to offer.

Supportive oncology would be a reality rather than a pipe-dream if it were possible to make it easier to consult people remotely. (Understandably, many of the people who need palliative/supportive oncology are too unwell or frail to feel up to travel. Nobody is prepared to fund a clinician's day to visit one or two patients.)

Many clinicians and HCWs are fungible - there are many who are not. Nonetheless, remote healthcare would open up opportunities for improved care if we were willing to fund and support it properly.

Regardless of whether more work is outsourced overseas I think there will be much more thought now to focus work in the UK but in cheaper parts of the country. If office or manufacturing space is cheaper in another part of the country and with lower salary expectations, why wouldn’t employers consider it.

@Notthetoothfairy

Absolutely no chance whatsoever with what I do but I can see it happening more with the kinds of roles which are already sometimes outsourced to other countries e.g. customer service for large companies.

I agree with this

There are obviously jobs that can be done abroad...maybe even the majority

But not all jobs

I feel people who are saying this don't understand what many wfh roles do. We're not all just working in call centres or doing admin. I'm not saying for a moment my role or that of friends and family are irreplaceable. But for example I manage creative projects so need good knowledge of creative, community and education sector. Plus good relationships management skills. My partner works in communications and strategy in health care again a role needing very good sector knowledge and relationship skills. It would be rude to say someone from India or Eastern Europe for example could not have these skills or experience. But they would need to be well educated and have 10 plus years of experience in the sectors we work in. So firstly the pat then couldn't be very low. But I'm also not sure how you would gain this knowledge experience and judgement from being entirely wfh. It's my 10 plus years in the sector not working from home which enable me to do my job now from home.

Depends. Might also give new opportunities to work for companies abroad. DH already this in recruitment. He works for lots of corporates all over the world from his little U.K. office, often beating locals to the job.

The people here who are feeling secure in their white-collar jobs seem to be older and in niche roles.

From what I have seen, though, it’s the bottom of the pyramid - the graduate intakes - that is being dismantled. In “big” accountancy the practice was that new graduates would join, take exams whilst trundling round doing routine auditing work which would give them experience/be cheap for the clients. Now that work can be done online from a bedroom. And the exams too. And by fewer young people who can be anywhere, not necessarily in that particular area. The same with legal firms. Dn was hired as a graduate trainee, and she has been furloughed and is expecting redundancy.

“There is current research showing robotic diagnosis can be more accurate than human.....not suggesting that we move away from human doctors but medicine is changing.”

I don’t doubt that but the patient would have to visit the robot in some sort of hospital, which would then surely have to be operated by an actual person on site. Not someone in another country.

It'll be flexible working. You'll go into the office 1-3 days a week to hold meetings, network, face to face updates and training regimes. You can't do that from a different time zone the other side of the world. Numerous firms have tried it and it doesn't work. BA caught a real cold with it, cost them £millions.

Carycy, you've got it spot on. Those who are ambitious and advance their qualifications throughout their careers will likely find the market for online consultancy services in their professional field has just opened up even more, and they'll take these opportunities (subject to all the applicable legal/contractual/regulatory considerations).

There seems to be a confusion on this thread between non-professional WFH jobs (which have for a long time been at risk of extinction due to outsourcing and automatisation) and professional WFH jobs which are a completely different pair of boots and will remain needed locally, in every country, not just the UK.

You have jumped to conclusions. I agree with WFH. It creates a much better work/life balance especially for families with young chiildren. It is a legitimate concern as I know somebody jobhunting currently, The person is highly skilled and has previously been headhunted or walked into roles within weeks. This time however, there are simply no leads. Companies may not be recruiting and unemployment is high but recruitment agencies are shaking their heads saying they are very very quiet. Person was offered a role in Central Europe for half the salary. It is really concerning.

Struggling to understand how this is related to WFH?

Sounds like this person is quite senior. The economic effects of the pandemic have meant that many jobs have been lost. The more senior you are, the fewer jobs there are available. When some of those have been lost stands to reason it will be harder to find one... doesn't really matte or if people are in and office or not.

I don't think this means the jobs this person is looking for have already been moved abroad...

In answer to why my job wouldn't be outsourced abroad, I work in a midsized company with a particular culture that is core to the business, and outsourcing to some generic service provider abroad wouldn't fit with that.

This is seen as more important than cost in my company.

I'm SO fed up of this. I'm almost sure the Tory Party will use it as a threat to get back to the office. People working wfh are wfh. Just over half of my team is and coordinating work is hard enough without thinking of different time zones. I'm in the office by the way. But the virus hasn't gone away and cases are rising. If we go back to normal too soon, all those months of lockdown will have been in vain. We cannot open everything up too quickly. Let schools and Universities open first. And stop the hysteria.

I am Canadian but live in the UK. We have been vaguely talking of moving over but sorting jobs is complicated. We were just saying the other day, if my husband never needs to be in the office, could he work from home over there (pain about the time difference though!) until he found a job locally? I know someone else who has just got a job for a Canadian company working solely in the UK. They never would have got the job 6 months ago.

Not everyone who works in an office type job is based in a city. I'm an accountant but my office is on an industrial estate in the Midlands. No posh coffee shops, dry cleaners etc have been harmed by me WFH.

A lot of comments on this thread do indicate that a lot of people don't know much about what a lot of office jobs actually entail. A lot of straight data input jobs went a long time ago.

Accountancy, my field, has changed beyond recognition across the time I have worked in it. Departments have shrunk, been centralised but the need for information (as opposed to data) has grown.

Being in the right time zone for a start, we have Indian colleagues, (the India lockdown caused a massive headache, we suddenly lost a massive part of our workforce so it has possibly indicated that other countries could be more problematic from a business stability standpoint).

However, your customers are uk and us, India is in to evening when the us wakes up. UK and Europe are ideally in between to bridge the US\India time zones.

Lots of companies employ people wfh across all time zones already and are still employing in the US and UK, if it was just a case of India is cheaper they would already have done it.

How would it work in terms of security clearances? Some civil service jobs only allow UK nationals to apply. Pretty hard to do developed vetting on someone in India.