How much is that next hire really going to cost you?

Recruitment fees, advertising, training, downtime to your existing team while they train the new person, IT, office space / furniture, internal HR costs …. and the list goes on. Recruitment agency fees are dependent on the market but we regularly see fees of $7.5k plus all the related (and hidden) internal costs and the risk of bringing on a new hire.

Is this the best way to spend your money and your time? Don’t get me wrong, this can be a worthwhile investment if you really do need additional staff – But do you? … really … are you sure?

Have you really checked out all your options or have you fallen into the trap of repeating the same action over and over again? Albert Einstein defined Insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” … then again, perhaps you weren’t expecting a different result.

Times are changing and technology is opening up new opportunities that change the way we have traditionally done things in business. You owe it to yourself and your business to look for the “right option” for your situation. As part of this process you must look at in-sourcing as a viable option – using the experience, talented, available people you already have in place.

Take a closer look at your existing organisation … Could you use your resources more effectively?

Have a look through the articles on our blog and see the benefits that can be realised by in-sourcing.

Despite the variety of talent that many modern firms are blessed with, managers find themselves seeking outside help on a regular basis. This is especially surprising considering that advanced degrees – and therefore higher levels of education – are more widespread than ever before.

Outsourcing is often heralded as a method of increasing profitability, because it supposedly keeps the head-count down. The wisdom goes that, with certain non-core work, the company can maintain its flexibility by not taking on employees in these less critical areas.

But the drawbacks to outsourcing are obvious. Clearly, every time you send work out, you give up some percentage – perhaps most, or even all – of the profit of that work. Sometimes companies actually intentionally accept losses on outsourced work, because the rest of the contract or job is so profitable. And that might even make sense if you don’t have the employees to do the work.

But what if you do have those employees? Even small companies today can have hundreds of employees working on vastly different projects. What if there was a way to dig through your own company quickly and see if you already have people with the skills and time to do the job?

That’s what we call “insourcing.” Certainly, it is more profitable to take advantage of an underutilized employee than to outsource a job and take a loss on it! That’s a clear advantage of insourcing, and that much is obvious. But there are many other advantages to insourcing, especially for the long term.

One of the biggest advantages is cross-fertilization in your company. Getting people from different departments, offices, and backgrounds to work together can pay huge dividends in the future. When people from different backgrounds exchange ideas, they get new insights into both their own and each other’s work. This kind of cross fertilization fosters “brain-trust” building in your company.

Another great advantage is that managers will often discover that other divisions and departments have skill sets they weren’t aware of. This can lead to developing new projects. And even if no totaly new skill sets emerge during an insourcing project, getting people together has its own merits. The fact that they know each other and know they work together can allow employees on both ends of the relationship to seek or develop new projects that require the others’ skills.

A final long term advantage is employee retention. Your company goes to a lot of time and effort to hire the best employees. You work with them to develop them and help them fit into your long term plan. Insourcing gives you a chance to build on that investment and develop it further.

Insourcing is a great way to make sure you fully utilize all the intellectual assets already at your disposal before you farm out work – and profits.

Tips for success in a recession

Protect your present accounts. As your competitors see
their sales and profits decrease during the recession, they’re very
likely to try to poach your customers. The best way to keep from losing your customers is to make sure that you have good communication with them. You, as a business owner need to
meet with as many of them as you can, to make sure that you’re meeting their needs. If you’re running a larger business and this is impossible, then you need to assign this task to the most senior, reliable people available.

By using in-sourcing for increased efficiency, grabbing new markets,
and maintaining your present customer base, you may be able to emerge
from the recession with stronger profits than you had during the boom
times that preceded it!

When you outsource a project you give up control. Perhaps the person you gave the project to will be offered a full time job right after they accept your project. In an ideal world they would either meet their commitment to you before starting there new job, or at the very least they would immediately notify you that they are going to bail out on you. An outside person often has no real investment in your project’s success. If an easier,higher paid or more fun project module comes along, they are likely to work on it first, and leave your project on the back burner, resulting in delays that can hold up the rest of your project. Many projects modules require substantial communication between the person requesting the work, and the person actually performing it. If you have to replace your outside contractor, then all the time you spent communicating with them, and training them to work on it, will go for nothing.

There is another problem with outside contractors -unlike employees, they are not already on your payroll. This means that every little job they do for you costs you money.

While your regular employees have to be paid, everything they do does not always cost you money. Take a moment when you are driving past a construction crew to watch them in action. More often than not, one or two of them are working, while three or four others stand around watching them. This is not because they are lazy. It is not even totally because road construction is a hard job, that few people can work at constantly, especially in the heat. There is another reason that they stand around- it is simply that person B cannot perform their task until person A performs theirs.This type of situation occurs in almost every type of business, from fast food restaurants to advertising firms, to manufacturing firms. There are many other reasons that keep people from working constantly, from seasonal and hourly work load variations, to waiting for project approvals from above.

The reason that most operations can’t always make use of the unproductive time that their employees have, is that often those employees are in a different department, and sometimes in a different building. With a good intranet or even a decent internet connection, existing employees can be used to complete project segments in departments other than their own. What you need is software that allows you to list the tasks you need done, and employees to ‘bid’ on jobs they want to perform.

Don’t worry that they will feel put upon when they lose their non-working moments. Good employees like to work. The worst thing about many jobs is often sitting around trying to look busy. Your employees have a vested interest in completing the tasks in a prompt and quality manner. They know their careers depend on it! You will also find that worker satisfaction will actually increase, because people are choosing the tasks that they want to do the most. With the right software, you keep full control over who is actually allowed to perform any given task, and you have total control over tracking the whole project!

With insourcing you take advantage of the skills, knowledge and training that your employees already have and you may also discover a person with talents you didn’t know about -a person you can promote.

I think you’ll have to agree -’insourcing advantages’ beat ‘outsourcing advantages’ , hands down.

The conventional manager accustomed to managing within the confines of an office feels very much like a fish out of water being asked to manage a team that is spread across different offices and regions. The good news is that you can easily learn the skills required to manage a remote workforce.

The first thing you will need to do is to develop a plan for your team. This plan should be very detailed and cover everything including how you will be communicating, how decisions will be made as well as conflict resolution. Your goals as a team and what every individual’s role and responsibility, in achieving that goal, will also need to be decided.

This ground work is very important so do not rush to complete it without ensuring that everything has been covered in a satisfactory manner.

Communication is key and you should go out of your way to get to know the members of your team. Admittedly this may prove to be difficult but try your best to have face to face meetings with as many of them as you possibly can – Video conferencing is the next best thing. When you have met somebody it makes all future communication via email and telephone much easier.

When managing a distributed workforce, regular meetings to monitor progress are important. Check in with members as often as possible, much more often than you would if you were handling a team in the confines of the same physical office. Also, remember to pass on information about the latest developments when you contact your team members – it’s easy to do and key to helping everyone feel involved.

You also need to make full use of our meetings. Carefully work on your agenda and ensure that everybody gets it well in advance and prepares adequately.
Postpone the meeting if certain members are not ready because you do not want to hold a meeting that is anything but extremely productive.

As a manager you will always need the ability to quickly assess people and find out what their strengths and weaknesses are. This will help you get the best from your team at all times, regardless of where they are. When managing a remote workforce this is even more critical if you are to be successful.

The truth is that technology has made distributed workforces even more viable in the work place. Seeing a colleague’s face on a video conference session is much better than just hearing their voice on a conference call and helps build a stronger bond between the two of you.
This will naturally impact on your effectiveness as a team in accomplishing tasks that you need to collaborate in and also in reaching goals that will lift your organization to greater heights of success.

Corporate Culture Is Important to Your Business

Take time to study the most successful and admired corporations in the world and you will quickly discover that a vast majority of them have one thing in common, a strong corporate culture. More so the kind of businesses that have made history by bringing to the market life-changing products and services. In other words true revolutionaries in the corporate world will always stand out with strong customs and traditions. Apple Inc. and their controversial casual dress code in their early years come to mind here.

Why is a strong corporate culture so important? Actually there are many reasons.

A strong corporate culture forges teamwork and unity in the organization especially in those situations where everybody is under pressure and suddenly working in very difficult circumstances. It may not be easy to envisage how important this is when everything is calm and normal, but we know that in today’s uncertain world the unpredictable and unexpected are bound to happen all too frequently and without warning. These are the times when a business can either survive or come crumbling down like a house of cards. While there are a number of factors that will come to play in these instances that will help decide the fate of the organization, a strong corporate character will always play a key central role in saving the company.

But even in the day to day normal operations of the business, employees of an organization will perform much better and be more productive if they feel a sense of belonging to the corporation they work for. This beats being detached and getting into the treadmill of the nine to five job which is bound to make them insensitive to customer needs and requirements. They will also be unlikely to feel responsible for what they are doing and its’ contribution to the well-being of the organization. Rather than just the mere words of a company mission statement, corporate values have a much bigger impact on new employees.

Insourcing to identify the spare capacity within your existing team and then sharing the work across this resource pool negates all of that delay. Your existing staff are already familiar with your systems and processes, even if they come from a different office or country. This means they can be up and running almost immediately to keep your business performing to its maximum potential.

Another distinct advantage to working this way is that your existing team will have their own contacts within the organization that may well provide quicker ways of getting results and increasing performance.

Leverage off what you already have in place, invest in your own company and improve your performance!

In the current age where fraud is becoming more and more commonplace, it is now more important than ever to secure your I.P.

One place to start is by keeping as much of it as possible internal to your business where it can be safeguarded correctly. You have worked hard to develop it, so consider using insourcing to keep this valuable knowledge within your organization rather than outsourcing it and risking possible security breaches.

The good news is that with an insourcing solution that helps you to identify your additional resource, from across your entire organization, you now have access to a resource pool that is already paid for. This is huge because it means this work can now be undertaken at minimal additional cost while keeping your I.P. secure … Win-Win!

Insourcing is a smart option help secure your I.P.

By keeping the work “in-house” and using your existing workforce, you have the significant advantage of being able to retain the control within your business rather than trusting (hoping) that an outsourced or contracted workforce will give you the quality results you need. These other options all have a place; it’s really just a matter of identifying the right situations to implement each option.

When you need to retain a high level of control over the output then insourcing is a serious option to consider. Because you are utilizing your existing workforce to complete the work, they are already familiar with the standards of work required and often times will have an inherent understanding of the background behind the tasks they are now undertaking.

This provides an instant advantage because it means you can integrate them into your regular business / project meetings and teams very easily, whether they are from your local, National or Global offices.

At times, you will need to get people together in a single location, which may require some travel or short-term secondments. However, in most situations the work can be undertaken and managed remotely by utilizing technology that you already have in place (or can implement easily) e.g. email, Skype, video conference, share point etc.

Communicating directly with the person completing the work and maintaining regular updates gives you the ability to influence the timeliness and quality of the outputs you require … a level of visibility and control that is not often available with other solutions.

Insourcing provides a real option for you to maintain high quality results – You keep the control within your business and get the results that you need to succeed.

If you have a strong corporate culture then your staff are your single biggest asset, so it makes sense to keep them in the team for as long as possible.

Insourcing can help by providing new opportunities for your team. It’s all about identifying your available resource pool from across your organization (which will change constantly) and spreading the workload among them. Working this way opens up many new opportunities for your staff and can provide much needed assistance to the ones that are already over worked.

Some of the new opportunities for your staff can include;

• Become involved in new projects / work across the entire business – involvement with the wider company due to increased visibility across your entire business rather than confined to your local office or department.
• Make contacts across the entire organization – start to communicate across the entire company.
• Opportunity to travel – a lot of the work can be undertaken remotely but some assignments may require short-term secondments to other departments / offices across your organization to fulfill the requirement.
• Improved collaboration – opportunities for people to get involved in collaborative, results focused teams from across the business.
• Balance workloads – de-stress your overloaded staff by providing them with some help from across your business – allows a better work / life balance.

Spreading the load and having staff that feel as if they are contributing without being burnt out provides for a much happier and productive workplace …. Leading to a greatly reduced level of staff churn in your business.

Take a close look at this new option and build a stronger team!