Outsourcing Statistics – Top Reasons Why Businesses Hire Remote Staff
Hiring remote staff has become a very cost-effective strategy that’s continually being adopted by a large number of companies around the world. The main reasons for leveraging outsourcing are the lower overheads, increased growth opportunities and a greater focus on service quality.
Other benefits include the additional savings made on technology and infrastructure when employing offshore staff, as well as the added flexibility when allocating staff tasks and access to an outstanding pool of talented professionals. Of course, the increased efficiencies and renewed ability to refocus on your core business areas, such as building your brand and investing in R&D are also advantages offered by this type of business model.
Outsourcing is a model that’s continuing to grow each year, in fact the global market was worth $92.5 billion USD in 2019 and by 2025, the global IT outsourcing market alone is forecast to reach $397.6 billion USD. However, despite all of these proven benefits from hiring remote workers, some business owners are still not convinced that it’s a model that will work for their companies.
Yet many companies actively outsource staff and rely on their contributions to grow and expand their businesses. So if you’re sitting on the fence or have totally disregarded the utility of this model for your company, here’s eight facts and statistics that might change your mind (unless otherwise stated, the following statistics have been gleaned from the Deloitte Global Outsourcing Survey 2020).
1. Business continuity and adaptability to the pandemic
Many businesses have continued to embrace the digital business initiatives that helped them, not only survive, but remain competitive throughout the COVID pandemic. This change to digital operations was already in the pipeline but the pandemic gave it a much greater urgency.
In fact, business continuity in the face of the pandemic has relied on companies becoming far more adaptable, flexible and willing to change. One of these changes has been achieving the right mix of in-house and remote staff, a strategy that has been eagerly adopted by many successful companies around the world.
2. Cost reduction is a primary driver to outsource staff
Reducing operating costs is always a key goal for any company and it’s not surprising that it’s the primary driver for hiring offshore workers. In fact, 70% of business owners currently outsource staff with the specific goal of reducing operating costs.
In 2018, however, the main motivator was actually moving away from reduced costs as the primary driver and trending more towards enabling speed to market. It’s quite likely that the COVID induced uncertainty in the economic market has refocused company objectives, resulting in reduced costs being seen as more important than speed to market.
3. Manage more projects with clarity and quality
Refocussing company objectives is an important motivator for hiring offshore staff. Evidence for this rationale was collected by the Clutch 2019 Small Business BPO Survey, where it was found that 16% of small business owners outsourced to free up employee’s time for other tasks, 12% to increase available resources and 24% to increase efficiencies.
These are important points, because using senior staff or specialist staff on mundane, repetitive tasks is a clear waste of their time, your resources and is inefficient. It’s a much better strategy to outsource staff and bring them into the fold, so they can perform these tasks rather than your experienced, senior in-house employees.
In addition, one respondent stated that they hired remote staff because it allowed the company to take on more work and complete more projects. Refocussing on expanding your business, whilst still maintaining high quality outputs is an important motivator for adopting an outsourcing model.
4. Flexibility is the key to productivity
The ability to successfully work remotely was, through necessity, championed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This led workers to realise that they didn’t need to go into the office to still be productive. It also led to the recognition that employees liked the flexibility of working outside the office with the added bonus that it resulted in greater productivity.
In fact, the Gartner 2021 Digital Worker Experience Survey actually found that 43% of respondents believed that flexible working hours led to greater productivity, 30% stated that they were more productive due to the lack of a commute to work and 27% said that it allowed them to work more hours. The bottom line is that more time to work, along with increased efficiency and flexible working hours are all key factors that lead to increased productivity when hiring offshore workers.
5. Speed to market is important
Whilst the Deloitte Global Outsourcing Survey 2020 found that cost reduction is the largest factor in adopting an outsourcing model, it also found that speed to market is important to 20% of business owners. As the Pandemic has so ably demonstrated, speed to market can make or break a business.
The deteriorating supply chains during the pandemic took many business to the wall, so any solutions that hasten the speed to market of their products will be gratefully embraced. Hiring remote workers is one of these solutions, whether to perform routine business tasks, freeing up senior or specialist staff to work on your business goals or to hire expert production or logistics managers. Companies that outsource staff and refocus on increasing the speed to market of their products find less competition in the marketplace and enjoy better profit margins.
6. Access to tools, processes and agility
Deloitte Global Outsourcing Survey 2020 found that approximately 15% of business owners stated that access to tools, processes and agility were important to their adoption of the outsourcing model.
Slowing of the market along with a decrease in the efficiency of supply chains has led to a change in business goals and increasing customer expectations. In turn, these adjustments have resulted in a need for agility by business owners, specifically relating to how they integrate remote or offshore staff into their business model.
The acceleration towards acceptance of the outsourcing model became inevitable, given the emphasis on speed to market, quality products, increased flexibility in working hours and lower costs. Business owners needed to consider how they would provide their remote staff with access to the tools and processes they required to remain productive in their roles.
The Deloitte Global Outsourcing Survey 2020 found that the solution was cloud integration with 68% of business owners using the cloud to save costs and provide offshore workers with easy and affordable access to the tools and processes they needed. In fact, approximately 90% of business owners saw the cloud as one of the primary drivers of their uptake of the outsourcing model.
7. Generate more profit and cashflow
The ultimate goals of any business are to generate profit, grow revenue and improve cash flow. Neil Patel provides a very good overview of how small businesses can achieve these goals using the outsourcing model. Essentially, it’s far more cost-efficient to hire offshore staff to perform the more mundane and repetitive tasks, whilst keeping your core competencies in-house.
In other words, hire people to do your payroll, taxes and bookkeeping, even act as your PA or HR manager, marketing manager or social media specialist. This allows both yourself and your senior in-house staff to focus on more revenue raising tasks, such as creating a better product or improving your services.
Some companies, however, hire remote staff who are specialists in their area, because they need their expertise but find the costs of hiring the traditional way far too expensive. This is another very good reason to outsource staff in the Philippines, because we have a large pool of talented and highly qualified specialists who can be hired very quickly and at a saving of at least 75% on the costs when hiring locally.
You can also hire remote based IT specialists, website developers, cyber security experts, call centre staff and a host of other specialised staff that would be too expensive to hire locally. If you want a strategy that leads to more profit and increased cashflow for your business, then adopting the outsourcing model is a proven solution that actually works. If you’re still not convinced about the efficacy of hiring remote staff – then why is IBM the biggest outsourcer in the world?
8. Outsource time sensitive, lower impact business processes
As previously mentioned above, the Clutch 2019 Small Business BPO Survey found that 24% of small business owners adopted the outsourcing model to increase efficiencies. This same survey also found that 52% of small business owners intended to hire offshore workers in 2019.
For any businesses, efficiency is a priority and one of the biggest ways to achieve this goal is to free up experienced in-house staff from mundane or repetitive tasks. This allows them to focus more on your core business, than performing repetitive tasks, such as payroll activities or dealing with office administration tasks. This means that outsourcing lower impact, business processes to experienced offshore staff is a popular way to increase efficiencies.
Another reason to outsource staff is because you have projects that need to be completed by a set time and need additional help to meet these deadlines. In other words, you have time sensitive projects that need to be completed and outsourcing can help you to meet these deadlines.
It’s also easy to take on more projects when you have the additional help of remote workers. That’s because you are confident that you can cope with the extra work and meet the contractual deadlines. You can even hire a remote based project manager to oversee some of these projects. It’s worth considering that when other companies turn down work because they already have a full schedule, the ability to take on additional work because you have sufficient staff available gives your business a significant competitive edge.
The fact that this edge is due to hiring offshore staff using a strategy that not only saves you money but also results in more revenue and profits, is in anyone’s mind, simply a good business decision.
For help finding the right mix of remote staff in the Philippines for your company, contact Outsourced today.
