Time Is Money: Outsourcing as a Profit Centre

How many times during a typical day do you say to yourself: "If only I could delegate this to someone." Chances are that it's at least once a day.

Most of us are dealing with the current economic downturn by trying to do more with less. The lucky ones are working with the same budget as last year but with increased productivity targets. The not so lucky amongst us are asked to increase productivity with a reduced budget. How can you make every dollar work like two? Two words: strategic outsourcing.

Start by taking stock of all of your duties and tasks. You might be surprised how long the list is. Once you have this list assembled, rank your tasks in two separate ways; the importance of the task and the time it typically takes to complete each task. Now, take your own salary and divide it by 2000 (this is the average amount of work hours in a year). This will give you an idea of your functional hourly cost. Multiply the hours per task by you hourly rate. Now you have an approximate task cost.

So we've got task listed by importance and cost in two separate columns. Compare the two lists. Are your high importance tasks the most expensive? If not, take a look at where the highest cost tasks fall on your importance list. Tasks that fall within the top ten on the cost side and the bottom ten on the importance side are great candidates for strategic outsourcing.

Maybe you can offload some paperwork tasks; maybe resume screening is taking up too much of your time, etc. Find out the cost of offloading these tasks to an outsourcing firm. If the cost of outsourcing is lower than your time cost plus the added productivity to your more important tasks, then you have a positive return on your investment, otherwise known as a profit.

With this tangible data, you can now make the business case for outsourcing pieces of your daily work, allowing you to add more value where it is most important. Not only will you be able to focus on the most important aspects of your role, you’ll also become more productive due to your lower levels of stress.

Interesting recruiting ad

Just came across this from boingboing:

http://www.denkiornot.com/

An interesting pre-screen where your are asked to pick which of a series of images you prefer, side-by-side. This will presumably allow Denki, a game production shop, to evaluate your design palate.

Thoughts?

D.

Increasing Your Personal Non-subsitutability

With pink slips flying around like spit balls in a 10th grade health class job security is less and less a plausible term. To really increase your job security, one must increase one's non-substitutability.

What can you control in your role?

Differentiation: Make sure to be able to articulate quickly and succinctly what makes you better at your job than anyone else. Look up a list of competencies (ie: learned behaviours) and figure out which ones you possess and which ones you need to work on.

Controlling tasks: What tasks are you responsible for in the organization? Which one of these tasks would halt the sales/production process completely if you weren't there to do it? Figure that out and make sure that you master that task.

Controlling labour: Traditionally this would mean striking or work stoppages but I like to take a different spin on this aspect of non-substitutability. No matter your job, you have control over how you DO your job. Are you happy or melancholy? Are you the office joke machine or the quiet wallflower? Make sure that you let your managers know how much you love what you're doing, how you're innovative and making great strides in process improvement. If you were a manager that needed to cut 50% of your staff in a certain role and performance was equal across the board, would you keep the happy, innovative person or the melancholic 9-5er?

Controlling knowledge: You might think that this means you keep your info to yourself and don't share it on pain of being replaced with someone cheaper. On the contrary, becoming a knowledge center and being the go-to person for all things informational related to your role will increase your level on non-substitutability. Go so far as to offer info session, lunch and learns, etc.

Take a hard look at your role and how you may be perceived in your organization. Focus on these four ways of making yourself stand out and you'll be more likely to receive a promotion than a pink-slip.

Client management: Learn from my mistakes

Have you ever had a client that just didn’t seem to get it, even after having signed an agreement?

It’s amazing sometimes that one can agree to a project without understanding the full scope of work to be completed. Is it up to the salesperson to ensure that the client is well-versed in the process?

Recently, a client of mine seemed to miss the point at the beginning of the project. He was having issues getting the consultant in to work, did not have her workspace ready for her first day and generally seemed to not understand the work flow process that needed to be implemented.

The consultant reported all of this back to me on a daily basis. First, she had confirmed that she was going to be in the office for a half day the week before she started. When she arrived that particular afternoon, no one was ready for her. The client wasn’t even in the office to greet her.

But I thought that this could be forgiven. You see, the client is a young executive. He is far from the greatest communicator but he is quite technically brilliant. He rarely returns phone calls, but then suddenly he calls out of the blue. His knack for absent-mindedly ignoring you is infuriating but does not seem to be intentional.

The consultant arrived promptly for her first day and found the door locked. No one had arrived at the office. She shortly received a call from the client letting her know that no one would be in to the office for another two hours.

Finally, in the office, she received direction from the client that ignored any need for process or preparation and asked her to get to recruiting senior-level roles. The contractor tried to explain to the client that she needed to do some ground work first.

Unfortunately, neither her phone nor her work station was ready, so she was working with pen and paper. The client had been very careful not to involve the contractor with his existing team. She had to introduce herself to people that she would meet in the hallway and try to break the ice while not stepping on the client’s toes. For some reason the client seemed to want to keep her segregated from the rest of the staff.

Luckily (for me), this consultant is used to working with clients that don’t understand the recruitment process (as that’s her specialty) so she didn’t take any of this to heart and soldiered on gaily. She put together a summary of what the client had told her about the open roles and submitted it to him. Not even 24 hours later he asked her in to an ad-hoc meeting with his entire executive team.

Turned out, her summary opened his eyes to the value of process and he was so excited that he showed it to his executive team that bought in immediately. Now he's given her full access to his team and all the tools she needs. The client has almost been too persistent in ensuring that the consultant is accommodated.

So what went wrong initially? Does this client simply communicate better in writing than verbally? Was he worried that his executive team wouldn't buy in to the project? Did he have doubts regarding the contractor’s abilities?

Whatever the reason, it's clear I - as the account manager - could have done a better job in terms of setting the consultant (and the client) up for success.

So, in the interest of learning from every experience, here are the top three questions to ask a client when scoping a project:

1. What is your understanding of the recruitment process?
   This will allow you to get a good understanding of the gaps you may need to fill in. Don’t ever assume, even if your client is an HR professional, that they have an interest in and or good understanding of the recruitment process.

2. In your mind, what does the consultant’s first day look like?
   Ideally, this question will draw out any inconsistencies between the client and consultant’s perspectives of their working relationship.

3. What is the best way to communicate with you?
   Clearly, had I better understood my client’s communication style I could’ve saved myself and my consultant a large amount of grief. Knowing how your client likes to communicate will go a long way towards getting quick feedback and keeping the client’s level of engagement high.