Supporting Your Core Staff Using Offshore Resources
Approaching growth in a time of tightening margins requires foresight and expertise. How do you support and augment the team as customers return, without overblowing costs? Further, how can core staff juggle ballooning, menial, day-to-day administrative work, while keeping their eye on the high-priority ball? Overextension by way of a knee-jerk domestic hiring spree is a real threat, as the wages for skilled service providers within Australia have recently sky-rocketed, and if revenues dip at the same time the budgetary impact can be devastating.
Often, the issue is that your staffing needs appear to rest halfway between solutions. Say you have a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) currently struggling to create optimal workload balance as customers begin to return. They evidently need help, however you know that the wages of an additional, full-time, onshore team member may pose a real cost risk to your bottom line. Two onshore team members is too many, one is not enough. It is within this context that skilled, cost-effective offshore role players, such as our highly-qualified professionals in the Philippines, can add enormous value, if implemented correctly.
There is a system to follow to ensure that the help arrives where it is most needed, and it involves the understanding of a few key questions.
What Is My Core Team Currently Responsible For?
You cannot accurately assess the areas of your business that require offshore support unless you have a fully transparent understanding of the roles and responsibilities of your core staff as they currently stand. What are the day-to-day tasks that they need to take ownership of? What are the big-ticket, macro agenda items that they need to execute in order to move the business forward in meaningful and intentional ways? Have any of these answers changed as the business has expanded and grown?
Intimate knowledge of each team member’s role is power when allocating support resources to assist them. Beyond that it’s useful simply in creating project transparency for the individual. The only way a team member can execute a complex strategy or task effectively is if they know exactly what’s expected, and the processes therein. Give them clear information: the deliverables they need to take responsibility for, the project timeline/deadline, and any relevant guidelines or regulations that must be complied with. From this position, both you and they will be better equipped to judge whether or not it is within their capacity to achieve those goals. Every worker has their limitations. Giving them a comprehensive understanding of what is expected from the outset allows you to be proactive in supporting them.
As experts in providing tailored offshore Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) staffing solutions to businesses of all sizes and industries, engaging our hammerjack team in this role-review process may provide insights you might not have even considered. We especially see both ownership and management consistently overlook the aptitude of offshore role players in performing administrative or back-office tasks – such as the logging of expenditure, database management, calendar organisation, or bookkeeping tasks. Your core accounts and administrative personnel can have their workplace experience transformed through the select implementation of role players that declutter their workload. The menial tasks are removed, creating the space and creativity desperately required by bigger agenda items, and doing away with that nauseating sense of lurching rapidly from one task to the next.
We have the expertise gained from executing this process seamlessly for so many varied partner businesses. This extends throughout the process – from the reviewing of roles, through the pinpointing of areas of clutterage, to the tailored selection of qualified offshore role-players. We then onboard them into the partner business, synchronising them with your workflow, creating ease of transition and the breathing room for key decisions and tasks. It’s a liberating process for the business and team – reinforcing your confidence in them and recognition of the help they need to operate at their best.
What Support Tasks Can An Offshore Team Member Accomplish?
As you review the roles and responsibilities for your existing team, you must also gain understanding of the full scope of capabilities offered by offshore skill providers. The sheer breadth of tasks, roles and projects accomplishable through their select implementation is staggering – practically limitless. When looking through the prism of supporting the existing team, we can narrow down towards areas within partner businesses that we most commonly see needing that additional infrastructure.
Bookkeeping – A world dominated by day-to-day clutter. The paying of wages, the logging of expenditure, the compliance to tax regulations, super funds, and the rest – there are so many administrative tasks and menial items that it can scramble even the most diligent core back-office staff. Even once dealt with, it’s only a matter of days before these tasks cycle back around to the front of the queue again, creating a feedback loop of short-term priorities. If left unattended, the business runs the risk of litigation, ASIC troubles and disgruntled workers.
We’ve transformed the bookkeeping operations of multitude partner businesses through the seamless integration of a hand-selected outsourced skill provider in the Philippines, focussing on the execution of exactly these kinds of tasks. The weekly payments, the implementation of MYOB or Xero, the compliance with PAYG and GST and so on. As these tasks get diverted from core staff, their efficiency and productivity has invariably increased. They can focus upon the high-priority items that require complex and detailed solutions. They can consider the long-term pricing strategy of goods or services for your business, the markets you’re expanding into, and the associated competitive architecture. The decision-making capacity across the business improves, as the level of time and energy dedicated by core personnel increases.
Collections – The following up and collection of outstanding payments from creditors can be a time-intensive and laborious process, however you need that cash flow to ensure that your own outgoings continue to be met. Rent and wages still require addressing, and a default or late-payment from a significant trading partner can heighten your risk exposure suddenly. It’s an absolutely necessary task, that simultaneously adds nothing to the progression of your growth strategy or business model. If core team members spend their whole week focussed on collecting outstanding payments, that time can’t be dedicated to the proactive tasks – the gaining of new clients or business, or the development of the product or service.
A qualified offshore team member from hammerjack can absorb this essential collections work – standardising the process according to your business, and creating more predictable cash flow. All the while, your core accounts team have greater clarity of mind and purpose, enabled by the extra time-flexibility, and the removal of distracting clutter. Time-to-payment improves, team morale increases, and the business creates the ideal conditions for scalable growth. Crucial to this is the onboarding process provided by hammerjack. If your core players have to spend their hours overseeing and quality-controlling BPO staff, it diminishes the time and cost efficiencies considerably. We’re not a set-and-forget outsourcing partner. We ensure that the procedures, and communication feed, are properly implemented to deliver real value from the outset of the relationship.
Virtual Assistance – Management, ownership and top-level personnel need to stop and take notice: you cannot be everything, all at once, to your business. There are only so many hats that any one individual can wear, and without support infrastructure nothing gets the full attention it requires. There’s no need to be a martyr. An outsourced Virtual Assistant (VA) is the resource that could destress your workload, organise your schedule, and create consistency and balance in your project management. Calendar organisation, third-party supplier communications, team culture events – the possibilities are practically endless.
Through careful selection of the most appropriately qualified and well-suited VA personnel from the Philippines, tailored to the tasks that most clutter your week, our hammerjack process empowers you to perform at the apex of your abilities. The organisational, menial tasks are delegated, your productivity increases, and the high-priority tasks get the attention that they deserve. From this position, the business from the top-down develops a greater confidence in your capacity to lead the whole operation forwards, according to a clear vision.
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While the above examples may present some examples of how an offshore resource could empower your key personnel, the breadth of possibilities extends far further than those mentioned. The only means by which you can truly grasp the support available to you is to engage in a conversation with our hammerjack specialists. Beyond simply putting a backside in a seat, as so many providers do, we seek to develop an intimate understanding of your business, and its specific requirements, to truly tailor our offshore solutions to suit you. We create the environment that allows your core staff to perform at their genuine best. Speak to our team today.