Until recently, the concept of offshoring has been the domain of the large enterprise. This becomes evident when you begin hiring and a key insight that anyone offshoring quickly realises. Offshore team members are accustom to working for very large organisations, where they typically have one or a very limited number of tasks that they do repeatedly. Consequently, the talent pool you’re recruiting from, while large, is often made up of candidates who are specialised in a “single lane” mentality.

An onshore candidate’s skillset is more likely to be T-shape, where there may be a deep knowledge on a subject, but a broader inherent ability to complete tasks outside of the field of expertise. This is bred into our culture through the prevalence of the Australian SMB. Most workers, at one time or another, have worked for or been exposed to the small business culture of “all hands on deck”.

Success comes from identifying like-minded tasks and processes that are being performed by current team members and seeing role separation as the divergence of repeatable, “low value” tasks from the more bespoke, “high value” tasks. Jamie Beresford

In a smaller business, there is much greater need for team members to be able to ‘switch lanes’, take on a variety of tasks, from low level to high value.

Successful offshoring is not about picking up entire roles and moving them offshore.

Success comes from identifying like-minded tasks and processes that are being performed by current team members and seeing role separation as the divergence of repeatable, “low value” tasks from the more bespoke, “high value” tasks.

To be clear, low value tasks are no less vital to the operation of a business, otherwise you wouldn’t need to do them at all. But they don’t deliver as great an ROI to the business. Think filling out details in a CRM vs meeting with a potential client. Both tasks are important, but the latter adds much more value.

In the following weeks we’ll be sharing some more detail about creating a culture of process in your organisation to ramp up your productivity offshore.

1. How to reduce the strain on your key people by spreading the workload more evenly amongst your team.
2. Increase the tangible value of your firm with documented process.
3. Remove your IP from people’s heads and into a sharable platform.
4. Increase new team member ramp up times and the time burden of training.
5. Improve your workflow efficiency and drive performance with mathematical measures of throughput and quality.

Go global!
Jamie