subject: How To Manage Outsourcing Part Ii [print this page] One reason for this behavior is that employees may feel threatened with the presence of the outsourcer and may feel insecure. This behavior may be their way of addressing their own insecurities. As a manager, it is one's duty to address the need to educate people as to why outsourcing has been chosen for that function. Management also needs to make its employees understand why there is no need for them to feel threatened by the third-party firm, and that instead they should strive to work together with the outsourcer for the accomplishment of the company's tasks.
Communication and control are also essential in managing outsourced relationships. Constant and open lines of communication should be maintained, so that misunderstandings in business dealings between the client and the outsourcer can be avoided. A manager in charge of liaising with outsourced assets should be patient enough to understand that it takes time to build-up a stable and working relationship with a third-party provider. Some difficulties and some adjustments in the beginning stages of the contract are to be expected, especially when both sides are still in the process of understanding and integrating each other's processes into one complete and effective system.
Because you are dealing with two different systems being placed into one, it is important for you as a manager to be able to come up with a structured approach in outsourcing. You should be able to define clear and informative goals to the outsourcer. People, after all, need clear and detailed instructions to get to work. In order for the outsourcer to understand what it should do, the company should be able to convey the direction in which the business is moving to with regards to the services being delegated to third-party providers.
There are instances that one can find a certain department in the company just slouching and doing nothing even though there is evidently work to do. Part of this is because management has given no clear indication as to what the job really is all about; hence, the department becomes confused and becomes ultimately non-productive, because of the lack of effective communication. From this example, you could infer that even in an internal set-up, management needs to utilize effective communication if it wishes to guide its business along the path of success.
A manager can also take advantage of the expertise of the third-party to effect changes within the company's existing internal system. Because of its outside nature, an outsourced firm can make expert comparisons of your existing systems to its own system or to those that it has outsourced for before, thus it is qualified to give recommendations for internal changes. In order to solicit these recommendations, however, management has to make sure that the relationship is on stable footing and that the outsourcer is comfortable with it. To do this, fostering good communication is essential and necessary.
