THE GREATEST CHALLENGES FACING BUSINESS AND HOW TO SOLVE THEM

THE business environment in which we operate is dynamic; with the only constant being change. Adapting to this change is critical if businesses are to remain successful in this highly competitive environment. With this in mind, I will share some of the key challenges that businesses of all sizes are facing.

These are all challenges that I have had to face in my role as a CEO of a growing Australian business and ones that we have had to meet head on to remain competitive.

The global labour market

The breakdown of geographical communication barrier has allowed organisations to take advantage of the competitively priced global labour market.

Businesses of all sizes can access talent for skilled and unskilled roles at a fraction of the cost of local employees. Although this is not the most significant driver for offshoring, reduced costs allow businesses to reinvest the funds into other areas of the business.

The question you should be asking yourself is, are you leveraging the power of the global labour market? Are your competitors accessing it?

Growing revenues without increasing fixed costs

The goal of any business is to grow without increasing fixed costs. Bearing in mind the costs of adding local labour to service your desired growth, providing operational support in the form of office space, IT and human resources support, while maintaining fixed costs can be a challenge.

Offshore workforces are just one way businesses can grow revenues without increasing fixed costs. Your company can hire highly-skilled offshore employees who are then provided full support in a serviced office. This, in turn, reduces your overheads as your business is simply liable for a monthly, fixed service fee - it's as transparent as it gets.

Empowering your local employees

It's an amazing statistic, but in a recent Harvard Business Review article on employee productivity, it was identified that employees can spend, on average, 41% of their time on activities that offer little value and could easily be performed by others. The article states that "we instinctively cling to tasks that make us feel busy and thus important, while our bosses, constantly striving to do more with less, pile on as many responsibilities as we're willing to accept".

Employees that are dragged down into low-value work are, in my experience, more easily distracted and less engaged. One way to overcome this is to identify the low-value tasks and consider offshoring them to cost-effective labour solutions. Not only does this allow your local, and costlier, employees to focus on high value tasks, it empowers them. They're able to focus on the tasks that matter, while low-level and process intensive tasks that would usually take up their time are performed cost-effectively offshore.

Adding capability

The local labour market is incredibly competitive, especially for digital and technology roles. Thus, many skill sets and capabilities that are required to service clients effectively are unattainable. This is due to high local wage costs or the lack of a sufficiently skilled talent pool.

This may mean not expanding your capabilities to meet the market or having to source expensive contractors. Capabilities such as data analytics, application development and website development can take your business to the next level. Although these roles are hard to come by locally, the offshore talent pool is vast, and of course highly skilled.

You can add the capability you need to keep up with constant change.

Expanding Flexibility

We live in the age of now - customers want instant responses and service 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Businesses need to meet this need to continue being competitive. With the constant advancement of social media and an increase in customers using online channels to interact, companies need to adapt.

Doing this locally may not be possible. However, many businesses are using offshore teams to service customer requests and queries 24/7. Businesses can add social media monitors, customer service staff members and online chat capability to support this need without impacting significantly on the bottom line.

Leverage the power of offshore resources to take your business to the next level

Ultimately, companies are facing more challenges than ever in trying to remain competitive. Many approaches can be adopted to tackle them head on and one of these is via the use of offshore resources.

Offshore teams are now more viable than ever, but there is a perception that offshoring is difficult to implement and manage. We want to debunk that myth, which is why we've launched 'The Art of Offshoring' - a four-part educational series aimed at taking you through the entire offshoring process from learning what it is right through to implementing and managing your team!

It may sound complicated and hard to implement, but there's plenty of ways offshoring can benefit your business.

To learn more, secure your spot today for our upcoming introductory webinar to offshoring.

Would you like to participate in an industry first survey looking at the state of offshoring in Australia today? Share your views with us and receive a copy of the report once it has been completed. Click here to complete the survey.

This article was presented by Diversify Offshore Staffing Solutions.