For years, the concept of outsourcing has been growing in popularity. As companies look for more affordable ways to help their companies grow and thrive, outsourcing has emerged a valuable tool. Not only do you get a more cost-effective way of accessing talent than you would from simply sourcing and hiring new staff, but you can access a wider variety too.
With outsourcing, you have the freedom to discover amazing professionals all over the world and leverage their skills remotely. You can even increase or decrease your contract over time, bringing new members of staff into your workplace as and when you need them.
Of course, outsourcing won’t always be the right solution for everyone. Here’s how you can weigh the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing for your next project.
The Advantages of Outsourcing
For most people, the benefits of outsourcing far outweigh the negatives. Ultimately, around 300,000 jobs in the US are already outsourced, and around the world, opportunities are constantly exploding. Particularly since the pandemic, outsourcing has become extremely valuable for things like managing high demand in customer service or technical skills.
Here are some of the most significant benefits of outsourcing:
- Access to more experts: While most companies will have a fantastic core team full of professionals with crucial skills, there’s always a chance they’ll need additional talents for specific projects. Access to a larger number of experts with certain talents from all across the globe ensures you can tackle any challenge going forward.
- Speed and efficiency: One of the best reasons to outsource instead of simply hiring a new professional, is you can reduce the time associated with finding and recruiting a new team member. Instead, you simply access the skills you need online or through the web from an agency, and start improving your productivity in a matter of days, not weeks.
- Improved productivity: Because you’re accessing specialists to handle critical tasks with your outsourcing strategy, you’re not overburdening your existing teams with additional jobs outside of their required role. This means your team members can focus on the work they should be doing, and they’re less likely to make mistakes.
- Reduced costs: Outsourcing doesn’t just save you time over hiring traditional employees, it saves you some significant cash too. This is particularly true if you’re working with freelance professionals through the cloud. There’s no need to spend extra money on office overheads, and you don’t have to worry about hiring professionals for longer than you need them.
- New opportunities: With outsourced professionals, you can leverage specialists with new skills who can open the door to new opportunities. For instance, you might be able to offer a new form of customer service, or around-the-clock technical support. With professionals helping your business from around the globe, there are endless opportunities.
- Peace of mind: When you outsource tasks to a reputable company, you get the peace of mind that comes with knowing all of these employees have been thoroughly vetted. This reduces the standard risks usually associated with bringing new team members into the company and testing them over time.
- Scalability: With outsourced professionals, you can leverage all the support you need when and as you need it. This means you only pay for the support you need and nothing more. You can increase your investment if you like or stop working with your contractors for as long as you want to.
The Disadvantages of Outsourcing
Of course, as amazing as outsourcing is, there are some potential downsides too. If you need absolute control over your project, you may struggle to get that with outsourcing. So long as you know and trust who you’ve hired, however, you might find this problem isn’t too significant.
Other potential downsides include:
- There are security risks: Working with outsourced professionals means opening access to your business to a wider number of people. This can have its issues when it comes to security. Just make sure you’re taking extra steps to improve security and privacy wherever you can. For instance, reduce access to sensitive data where possible, and make sure your employees always use secured connections.
- Time frames can be awkward: If you’re working with professionals from different countries, in various time zones, this can make things a little more complicated. Additional time frames to think about can often leave you confused when it comes to staying ahead of deadlines. However, there are various tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack that can help you to stay connected with your employees and track their schedules.
- Initial onboarding: Even if you don’t need to go through the same time-consuming onboarding processes with outsourcing agencies as you do with traditional staff, there are some initial stages where you need to get your staff up-to-date with what’s going on in your business, what your company’s values are, and so on. During this stage, it can be difficult for things to get lost in translation if you don’t prepare the onboarding experience as much as possible.
Perhaps the biggest risk of outsourcing your crucial work to another agency or professional is the threat of choosing the wrong company to work with. Accessing the wrong assistance means you expose yourself to greater security risks, more mistakes, and a poorer quality of work.
There’s even a chance you could end up working with a team taking on too many clients at once, which means your work doesn’t get the attention it truly deserves. The easiest way to fix this problem is to take extra time to seek out the support you need and examine the company for signs of reliability.
Outsourcing the Right Way
While there are risks associated with any kind of business strategy, outsourcing generally has a lot more advantages to offer than disadvantages. All you need to do to reduce your chance of problems, is to make sure you’re outsourcing correctly. Please contact us to learn more about how M+ is supporting its customers and how we turn disadvantages into decision positive criteria.
