Offshore Teams – 4 Steps To Enhance Outcomes

By: Nicholas Hastings, hammerjack CEO

It’s always  critical to review staff workloads and task management no matter where your staff are located. Do your employees have the support resources to maintain output as customer volume increases over the coming months? Are new staff members performing to the expected level? Are high-priority items neglected in favour of daily minutiae and administration? The decisions you make (or don’t make) now could mean all the difference to your bottom line at the year’s end.

Diligent time and task management is the key to performance for all staff. Without the appropriate infrastructure, even the best core personnel can find it impossible to juggle multiple long and short-term responsibilities. All team members, ownership and management included, need qualified support players to act as a pressure valve. As business activity increases, you can delegate the menial tasks and maintain focus on the big picture.

Our expert staff in the Philippines offer this vital support at a sustainable cost. They are qualified, skilled and onboarded seamlessly by the hammerjack team. The efficiencies created for your team will allow them to thrive, saving you time, money and hassle in the long term.

Let’s get started. 

Step 1: Regularly Review Roles and Responsibilities

Staff need to know what your expectations are. Likewise, you need to know which team member is responsible for achieving each goal. It sounds simple enough, yet details can get lost in the aether as the business changes. Team members get shoehorned into different responsibilities as a short-term fix and then get stuck. A receptionist becomes half accounts department, half human resources. A Director of Operations becomes a part-time graphic designer. While it’s noble for these staff to respond to a problem that needs solving, it prevents them from doing their actual job effectively.

Before implementing a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) program, you must review all roles and responsibilities (including your own). Perhaps even you have fallen prey to wearing too many hats as the operation has grown. Try and do too many jobs at once, and you won’t do any of them very well. You can’t identify where the extra support is needed until you create this sense of clarity regarding who is responsible for what.

Conducting a review of roles and responsibilities in good faith with your team may allow the space they need to reach out and request support. They might appreciate the opportunity to speak openly on tasks that clog their time and stifle their potential. You may realise how much administrative work is cluttering their week. Such an exercise demonstrates that you are committed to listening. It shows a desire to improve the experience of the people who work for you, which promotes retention and culture.

This review of roles must be a regular event within your business, conducted yearly at a minimum. It keeps the whole team, on and offshore, aligned in what they need to accomplish. They can set clear goals, focus on big-ticket tasks, and propel the business into its next growth phase. Meanwhile, you will have a clearer picture of where additional support from offshore experts could make the most tangible difference.

Step 2: Commence Dialogue With An Experienced BPO Provider like hammerjack

While conducting a review of roles is a good start, a problem can be hard to find if you don’t know how to look for it. There may be simple solutions just outside of your field of view. Commencing a dialogue with my hammerjack team brings our extensive experience into the fold. We’ve assisted partner businesses of all sizes, across a broad range of industries, in identifying pockets of inefficiency and workload mismanagement. Our track record speaks for itself.

While many owners are experts in their field, that doesn’t make them an expert in business administration. They may not immediately see that the targeted implementation of an offshore Accounts team member for invoicing and data entry could unleash the potential of their CFO. Management may not recognise that a personal Virtual Assistant to manage calendars and events could create significant time advantages in their work week. We know where to look. We have consistently designed sustainable staffing solutions for our partners, which gives us the edge. You can leverage that experience to identify problems you may otherwise have missed.

Moreover, we foster a sense of trust with your essential core team members. They can thrive knowing that our offshore experts are there to support them in their work, not replace them. In time, they can develop a newfound confidence in delegating tasks to our skilled team members, allowing them to flourish and mature within your business. Partnering with hammerjack will ensure that the critical lines of communication are open, creating cohesion and a unity of purpose.

Step 3: On-Board Offshore Staff The Right Way

The object of the exercise is to create efficiency and increase productivity. A sure-fire way to prevent that is to implement offshore staff without the infrastructure to communicate clearly and manage tasks effectively.

The offshore experts also need to understand the intricacies of your business. Setting and forgetting offshore personnel as a slapdash cost-saving exercise will only create confusion and resentment. To create a sustainable long-term solution for time and workload management, you must ensure that your onboarding and team management systems are up to scratch. Beware of other offshore staff providers that may neglect these crucial aspects.

You need to trust that the appropriate information makes its way to the right employees – that everyone understands the chain of command. Offshore team members can’t add genuine value if the entire program is half-baked. There is a multitude of apps and back-end systems that may provide the answer, but which is ideal for your business? It can be overwhelming for owners and management to filter through all the offerings, wasting time and effort in an unfamiliar space. You need not do it alone.

Knowing which systems to implement is made simple with hammerjack as a partner. Our objective is to see the whole program through for the long term, which includes onboarding our offshore staff professionally and diligently. With our breadth of experience, we can pinpoint the best cost-effective systems that will transform your interactions with all personnel – remote or local. Not only will you allow the offshore team to add maximum value, but your core staff may also reap the benefits of these updated systems. Leveraging the right tech, the whole team can realise even greater productivity.

Step 4: Scale Your BPO Program To Account For Peaks And Valleys

Offshore BPO solutions can offer a clear advantage in improving time management due to their inherent scalability. Our experts are there when you need them, as you need them. If revenues decline, you can reduce the offshore team to a skeleton crew until the cycle upswing resumes. As customer numbers increase, with the collections, data-entry and invoicing tasks that follow them, our expert staff can re-engage seamlessly to provide that essential workload support.

If you work in partnership with one reputable offshore staffing provider, such as hammerjack, you create efficiency over time. Because we lay the groundwork the right way, we develop an intimate understanding of your business and its particular needs. As revenue swings across the year, we can act quickly and confidently to deliver your team the support resources. We offer critical agility as unforeseen circumstances arise, potentially meaning the difference between surviving and thriving. Where possible, we reconnect businesses with our offshore experts who’ve worked with them before, allowing them to slot back in effortlessly.

Allow the hammerjack team to consult with you and guide you, so you can take the guesswork out of how to respond to changing business conditions. Offshore programs should be complimentary to your efficiency, not an impediment to it. This principle extends to the management, scaling and logistics of the program. It loses value if you waste precious time agonising over what to do and when. We are on hand to provide guidance and experience, allowing our partners to manoeuvre effortlessly as the headwinds change.

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So, does an offshore BPO program provide the key to levelled-up time and workload management? It depends on how well it’s constructed. If cobbled together hurriedly without thought or reason, offshore staff may only add to the headaches for ownership. If the appropriate communication and task management infrastructure isn’t in place – you’re setting the system up to fail from the outset. There must be transparency and accountability.

However, if a BPO program is executed thoughtfully in partnership with the hammerjack team, then the sky is the limit for you and your core staff. Simply follow the steps and allow our expertise to inform your decisions. You’ll have access to scalable support solutions across multiple departments in your business, from collections to bookkeeping, IT support, administration and more. You’ll create focus, cohesion and trust among your core team, driving the business forward as one towards a bright future.

To unlock the potential for your business, speak to the hammerjack team today.