Inflation has numerous effects on the world of business. One of the most notable outcomes of inflation is the unpredictable changes in the demand for a company’s offerings. During times of inflation and recession, it is common for individuals to have limited cash at their disposal, resulting in a decrease in demand. One of the difficulties faced during times of inflation is the rise in expenses associated with conducting business. The problem is exacerbated by the persistent shortage of skilled workers.
The impact of inflation on the workforce can create obstacles for companies, potentially leading to missed opportunities and failure to meet important deadlines. Businesses are greatly concerned about the shortage of available workforce, as it leads to disturbing consequences, and when coupled with inflation, it exacerbates the decline in productivity. Imagine being an employee who doesn’t see any increase in their earnings to match the rising cost of living, or worse, having their salary reduced as a result of cost-saving measures during an economic downturn. It’s no surprise that such individuals would feel a noticeable decrease in job satisfaction, motivation, productivity, and loyalty. The potential outcomes of all these factors can have dire repercussions for the long-term viability of businesses.
Outsourcing business services offers a practical solution to tackle the workforce shortage and manage the increasing expenses of running a business during inflation.
Outsourcing always has lot of hiccups when we hear it from our peers and friends, but it is not as bad as we think. If outsourcing is done properly, it will not just help you beat inflation but also result in an increase in your ROI (return on investment). It has lots of challenges and negative outcomes if not done properly, but it has fruitful outcomes if done in the right way from the beginning.
Let’s read this topic to know more about outsourcing and how you can benefit of outsourcing your work which is not your core business or specialty by choosing a trustworthy outsourcing partner.
What is outsourcing?
In simple words, outsourcing is an agreement between two companies when the client company agrees to obtain various services from the service providing company. You can outsource almost all types of work that you do in your business but mostly people outsource their digital work, website work, and other software development work that they are not qualified enough to handle or handling in-house costing them a lot.
There are many different types of outsourcing that you choose from. They are local outsourcing, global outsourcing, and remote outsourcing. Let’s discuss more about these in the next topics.
What is local vs global outsourcing?
Local outsourcing stands for outsourcing a part of your business to another party locally in your country. You can outsource your manufacturing or software development or accounting work etc. to neighborhood companies who are specialized in doing that or to someone in another city or state. However, the company is in your country only. Just opposite to local outsourcing, a global outsourcing means, you can outsource your work to anywhere in the world irrespective of borders, time zone, location, language, or culture. In global outsourcing, you have a big pool of talent, expertise, or service providers that you can hire from.
What is remote outsourcing?
Remote outsourcing is nothing but similar to global outsourcing where you have a mediocre to manage this whole process and make sure that you as a client get 100% delivery from the vendor company. Some big corporations go into this way to make sure that they get the best ROI.
Drawbacks of running your digital department if you are not an expert or is not your core work.
Staff Management – 90% of the businesses hav staffing. A business can’t run without a team. If you are running a business as a one-man army that means you are a freelancer. Everybody knows that human management is the most complex part of operation in any business. You already have an accountant, bookkeeper, product marketer, sales team, etc now consider one more department to manage which is your digital department team which handles your online store in Shopify to do day to day Shopify development, DevOps and/or other digital marketing and social media work. You know what you want to build on your IT business say a SAAS product or a mobile app, but you don’t have experience in doing that or expertise in managing that.
On top of it, you have below issues that are the most frustrating in the human resource department:
1. High Cost – this is the biggest primary reason why someone outsources. In-house employees are always on a higher payroll than the outsourced staff or team.
2. Increments, and appraisals – no matter whether your business grows or not, an employee needs an increment and appraisal in different intervals. His expectation is genuine, but your business is not growing so you need more time. In most cases, if you don’t do this, they keep finding new jobs and go away. This puts you in a bad situation with incomplete projects on day-to-day work.
3. They need a vacation – every employee needs a vacation. You will approve their vacation no matter how many deadlines you have or how important your business season is right now.
4. Unscheduled Leaves – You have a deadline, and someone is on unscheduled leave because of an emergency in his family or so on. Now he is on 3 weeks of leave, and you are suffering from not launching your most important killing feature in your Shopify store or on your mobile app?
5. Hiring Process – if you do not have a human resource assistant in your company then this is another responsibility that runs in all seasons. You will have to advertise a new job, filter candidates, interview them, hire the best, then onboarding them, then knowledge transfer, and so on. Then they start their work and after a couple of months or a year, they leave because they did not like the work pressure, less money, or something else. Now you are again in circles to find a new employee to fill up that empty position. How exciting is this for you when you are busy with these things but not in the core business?
6. Tantrums and behavior of the employee – no matter how good your employees are or how good you are with them, there is always something to look at.
7. Micromanagement of the team – you have to micromanage your employees for any assignments they are doing. You can’t relax because you don’t know if they are going to meet the deadlines if the new feature is launching on time or coming with lots of bugs and surprises. You will always have to micromanage your employees.
8. Extra cost – No matter what, you will always have to bear the cost of medical insurance, employee pension, office space, desk, computers, internet, tea/coffee, and so on. The more you think, the more other factors are there that increase your monthly cost of doing business.
Benefits of software or product development outsourcing
1. Low Cost – Outsourcing compared to in-house resources always costs you less. In some cases, it costs you 40% less.
2. No Increments and Appraisals – whether the inflation increases or whatever happens, you do not need to do any increments. It’s your outsourcing company’s responsibility and decision to give the increments and appraisals. However, in some cases, we have found that the increment of the seat (generally known as the staff) is done 10-15% a year.
3. Scheduled Vacation and Replacement – Whenever the person who is working on your project plans a vacation, your account manager plans a backup for you for that time. That means you will have no downtime in your business.
4. No unscheduled leaves – even if the outsourced employee is on leave, it’s the responsibility of your outsourcing partner to give a backup to cover the downtime.
5. No Involvement in the hiring – it’s completely your outsourcing partner’s responsibility to work on every part of the hiring process. You still have the option to make the final selection and choose the right employee you think is best based on the criteria you have set.
6. No employees’ tantrums and behavior – we all know that employee management is the toughest job in the world. Sometimes, they are not in a good mood to do anything, and you don’t know why. In these situations, an outsourcing setup is the best when you have given the whole management to a different company. They manage their employee, and their employees work for you. Wow, what a combination.
7. No micromanagement – You will have access to an account manager and project manager. They both work on your project and do the micromanagement with the team and save your time doing the same. You save this time and invest in some other work that the business demands. However, you are always free to talk to your outsourced team anytime you want or any specific details you want to provide.
8. No extra cost – There is no extra cost of employee medical, pension, bonus, or anything else. This is all covered by the outsourced company.
9. Quality & Experience – You have a global pool of global talent that we find and employ on your project. All these staff are best in their previous jobs and have executed successful projects. Hiring them on your project guarantees us top-quality work and tons of experience.
10. Scalability – this is always a plug-and-play type setup. When you want to add or reduce team members, simply let the company know and it gets done easily.
11. Easy Replacement – It’s always a headache when you get a resignation letter from your existing employee. Huh, once again looking for new portfolios, filtering, interviewing, hiring, onboarding? Outsourcing saves you from this.
What BIZSPICE can do for you?
Accelerate your software development and digital agency roadmap requirement with our vetted nearshore tech talent. We can set up a full team of experts (talents) like software or SaaS developers, Shopify theme and store developers, mobile app developers, DevOps, digital marketers, and lots of other types of expertise on any small to medium size project of 4 to 20 team members at any point of time. These are the benefits that you get from us on any projects:
1. Reasonable charges – our charges are the most reasonable compared to the industry.
2. No yearly increments up to 3 years.
3. Free Project/ Product manager assigned to every project.
4. A free account manager assigned to every client.
5. Access to all the project management and team handling tools for free
6. Regular meetings with clients to give the status and reports.
7. Meeting deadlines
8. Complex Situation Support – support from other peers and leads to tackle any big, unexpected problems, queries, and so on.
9. Emergency Support – we give 24×7 emergency support. (in some situatiosn it is charged extra)
10. Covering your time zone – we make sure to give you as much support as possible during your business hours but remember working during your business hours is not an ideal situation, we work when you sleep. Also, development needs peaceful time to do quality development. We always make sure that we have regular scheduled client calls and emergency support in all situations when needed. The end of the result matters.
Why does someone choose to outsource?
1. The primary reason why companies choose to outsource software development is to save costs.
2. They can focus more on their core business.
3. Less time to manage the digital team.
4. Less Expertise in tackling problems or understanding them.
5. High costs and liabilities
Tips for a Successful Outsourced Software Development Partnership
1. Define your requirements clearly with the software development team or your outsourcing partner.
2. Always start a trial project, give them some assignments, and then only go for a long term.
3. Do focus on their progress rather than micromanaging the developers.
4. Make a consistent way to communicate with them.
5. Create a cross-functional team with various skill sets.
6. Stay in line with the latest trends and technologies in the development.
7. Choose the engagement model that fits your requirements and budget.
8. Estimate the development cost to avoid budget overrun.
9. Always sign the non-competition, non-disclosure agreements with the outsourcing partner.
10. Agree or part of the agreement to own all the intellectual property, research, and code work.
11. Ask about their security policy and how they manage the internal security, device, and network security.
Not just you, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, and lots of other Fortune 500 companies outsource and subcontract lots of their departments, projects, and work to different companies all over the globe.
So, do not hesitate, to ask all the blunt questions related to the security of your business, clear your project requirements, checkout our service offering page or start talking to an outsourcing partner like us (BIZSPICE), and start the journey of your success.