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With employee disengagement costing businesses $2 billion a year1, it’s no surprise that the businesses of today are highly invested in improving their staff wellbeing, motivation and satisfaction levels. A popular solution: outsourcing.
In this blog we go through why improving staff satisfaction is important for business success, how onshore employees are affected by outsourcing and the additional advantages offshore teams can bring to your business.
Why improving staff satisfaction is crucial to business success
If you’ve placed an advertisement for open job opportunities within your business or read up on job market trends in the past year or so, you’d understand the concept of a ‘war for talent’ or are familiar with terms like ‘The Great Resignation’, ‘The Great Reshuffle’ and ‘The Great Re-evaluation’. As a result of this knowledge, you’d understand why keeping employees happy and satisfied in their current jobs is paramount in today’s world.
If not, here is a quick rundown. Employees are now in control. What used to be a job market dictated by employers and their demands for talent has now done a 180-degree flip. Essentially, candidates now understand and know their worth and they aren’t afraid to ask for compensation and look for positions that give them the recognition they deserve.
Whether it be the work-life balance epiphanies of the pandemic or employees just ‘having enough’ of feeling underappreciated, the staff of today are demanding more and the businesses that are forecasted to succeed, are meeting those expectations.
Where staff satisfaction comes in should be pretty common sense based on these points. Improving staff satisfaction and employee engagement is a surefire way to keep quality talent loyal to your business and from a business point of view, highly engaged employees increase profitability by 21%2 and sell 20% more1.
Not to mention the time and cost savings for your recruitment function with talent shortage risks at a 15-year high4, the biggest challenge for around 76% of recruiters5 currently is attracting quality candidates. Around 87% of HR officers are reporting little to no qualified applicants6 are applying for the positions they are currently trying to fill.
So with the average job opening remaining unfulfilled for around 28 days7 and recruiters, on average, spending almost 33% of their work hours just sourcing quality candidates, the bottom line repercussions of poor staff satisfaction could set your business goals back months at a time depending on how many jobs you need to fill.
The solution, improving staff satisfaction so that your existing employees don’t want to leave. Instead, when you have to advertise for positions, you’re recruiting newly created roles. These positions are then supporting new business growth opportunities and are expanding your existing, qualified, motivated and engaged teams.
While there are many ways to improve employee engagement and staff satisfaction, a solution that has been helping businesses maintain motivated teams is outsourcing.
How are employees affected by outsourcing?
Outsourcing can help you to identify roles and tasks that would be best suited to send to an offshore employee. These tasks can differ from business to business. Some may find the repetitive and time-consuming tasks the easiest to identify and send offshore like data management and administration support. Others may want to hire additional outsourced employees to support higher-level tasks within financial advisory services or with digital marketing expertise.
Whichever area or function you choose to outsource, you are introducing ways to help with the workload your existing team currently has. Hiring extra hands as a way to support your onshore employees means they have someone they can reach out to for assistance. They feel that you, as their employer, value their time and want them to make the most of it. By offering them outsourced employees as a means to become more efficient and make deadlines more feasible, you're improving their job satisfaction immensely.
How many times a day do you catch yourself thinking: “if only I didn’t have to do this one activity, I would have much more time to be working on nurturing client relationships or working on a scalability project…” The punchline here is that your employees are all thinking the same thing but in their own way as it relates to their job description.
You’re not looking for ways to create a copy of an existing role through outsourcing. Instead, you are creating a position that acts as an extra pair of hands and allows your existing employees more time to focus on what really matters, on what they do best and what motivates them.
Will existing employees feel threatened by outsourcing?
If your outsourcing strategy is created and implemented properly, your existing staff will have nothing to worry about and everything to look forward to. Instead of eliminating local positions, outsourcing allows your existing team to do more of the tasks they enjoy doing. This will result in increased staff satisfaction and retention.
What are the advantages of having offshore employees?
While outsourcing can improve your staff satisfaction, there are other benefits outsourcing can have on your business.
- Reduced costs: outsourcing allows additional work to be completed, at significantly reduced costs, especially when outsourcing offshore to a lower-cost economy, such as the Philippines, where employment costs are up to 70% less.
- Access to expert support: outsourcing specialists are highly trained professionals who can offer insights, advice and add value to each stage of the outsourcing journey. The process involves recruitment, onboarding, training and ongoing management.
- Support business growth: outsourcing can also free up funds that can be used to reinvest back into the growth of your business. With the additional support of outsourced team member(s), you can increase the capacity for your business to take on more work.
- Improve business flexibility and availability: outsourcing can provide businesses with the flexibility to meet changing resourcing requirements in response to fluctuating customer or market demands. Outsourcing in low-cost economies can also help many businesses extend their hours beyond 9-5 pm, 5 days a week and potentially support 24/7 operations.
Whether your business is struggling to scale and grow, or wages are increasing due to economic changes, business leaders should seek to invest in strategies that will enable sustainable growth like outsourcing.
What should you outsource?
It’s about understanding what your core and non-core capabilities are. Which tasks or functions take up the most time, which are repetitive in nature and which are preventing your team from focusing on what matters most - profitability and business growth.
In this blog, ‘What to outsource: a complete guide’, we take you through how to identify the tasks most suitable to outsource, what jobs roles are most commonly outsourced and the real-life success stories that demonstrate why outsourced teams are a worthwhile investment.
Reference:
1 https://elmosoftware.com.au/resources/blog/the-cost-of-employee-disengagement/
2 https://news.gallup.com/poll/241649/employee-engagement-rise.aspx
3 https://www.peoplemetrics.com/ex-blog/calculating-the-cost-of-employee-disengagement
4 https://go.manpowergroup.com/hubfs/Talent%20Shortage%202021/MPG_2021_Outlook_Survey-Global.pdf
5 https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/resources/ebooks/65-hr-recruiting-stats-2018/
6 http://www.nfib.com/surveys/small-business-economic-trends/
7 https://resources.glassdoor.com/rs/899-LOT-464/images/50hr-recruiting-and-statistics-2017.pdf
