Technology has allowed more businesses to farm out tasks to professionals anywhere in the world. When you add the global availability and accessibility of extremely talented individuals, it makes outsourcing a very real and viable option for nearly any organization. The questions most businesses grapple with is when to implement outsourcing into the organization, what tasks or roles to outsource, and where to outsource. Maybe we need to be asking a different set of questions to determine outsourcing needs.
When to outsource
This question will be different for every company because it is based on demand, cost, and long-term vision. For many companies, this is when your current workload surpasses the bandwidth of the current workforce. Larger companies will do a cost-benefit analysis to understand the feasibility of outsourced labor and its impacts both in the short-term and long-term. Small businesses that just need a little extra help to take make their workload more manageable my look at a staggered approach. Looking into outsourced tasks through Upwork or freelancer for one-off projects is a good way for small business owners to dip their toe into the large pool that is outsourcing.
What to Outsource
You may already be outsourcing some business tasks, such as data entry, inventory management, payroll administration or background checks. These are more in the realm of highly repetitive tasks. In our modern age, and with the rise in remote work during COVID-19, we’ve learned that almost any task can be outsourced. But as we learned from Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park, just because you can do something, like outsourcing, doesn’t mean you should.
According to Gregg Landers, director of growth management at CBIZ MHM, the nation’s eighth-largest accounting and business services provider, outsourcing is categorized as follows The types of tasks that are best-outsourced fall into three general categories, they include:
Highly skilled, or executive, expertise
“You may not need to pay a CFO’s salary, but you could have a CFO-level person to come in a few times each month to provide financial analysis and ensure that the bookkeeper is handling the books well,” Landers says.
Specialized knowledge
IT support for your network. “You may not be able to afford or need a full-time IT person, and it is easier to change to an outsourced provider with the right skill set as your IT needs change,” Landers says.
Highly repetitive tasks
Accounts payable, data entry, and shipping inventory could fall into this category.
In each of these areas, there may be room for outsourcing or freelance work based on tasks. But there may be something more to the idea that the thinking behind such tasks can have more impact on that decision-making.
Where to outsource
Now, this is a little different spin on the direction. When we talk about hemisphere’s in relation to outsourcing, we think globally, like where in terms of location. Where in the world will we send this job to be completed. What we should be asking is what section of the brain should we outsource? Which hemisphere of the brain is more advantageous to outsource? And which do we keep in-house?
Synthesis and analysis
Synthesis and analysis are the two fundamental ways of interpreting information.
With analysis, you break down the whole into parts or components, looking at the pieces individually. Synthesis is the exact opposite; you combine the separate elements to form a coherent whole to see an overall pattern of how things come together.
The hemispheres
The human brain is made up of two distinct parts, the left brain, and the right brain. Each side has its functions and capabilities. Understanding the competencies and limitations of either side of the brain can help when making outsourcing decisions.
Left brain. The left handles sequence, literalness, logic, and analysis. The left brain can grasp details, but only the right hemisphere can see the “big picture.”
Right brain. The right hemisphere takes care of synthesis, emotional expression, context, and the big context thinking. The right brain is concentrated for synthesis. The right is also particularly good at putting isolated elements together to perceive things as a whole.
Left brain thinking is linear, quantifiable and thus more apt for outsourcing. The right brain thinking is non-linear, abstract and harder to quantify. It incorporates things like story, design, symphony, and meaning. Sometimes outsourcing creativity and design work to a marketing and design agency is beneficial given the strengths and weaknesses of an organization.
Symphony
Symphony is the ability to put together pieces, to see relationships between seemingly unrelated fields, to detect broad patterns, and invent something new by combining things nobody else thought to pair. It is mostly about relationships and empathy.
Michael Gerber, an author of the E-Myth series of business skills training books, did a study of executives at fifteen large companies, and just one cognitive ability distinguished star performers from average: pattern recognition. The “big picture thinking” allows leaders to pick out the meaningful trends from a jumble of unrelated information around them and to think strategically far into the future.
These star performers relied less on deductive reasoning and more on the contextual, intuitive reasoning characteristic of the symphony.
Weighing left and right
Left brain thinking deals with data analysis. But just having data isn’t sufficient. It’s what the data tells us. The ability to communicate the story that the data tells into a compelling narrative. Right brain.
Left hemisphere deals in logic. But logic on its own is meaningless. Unless it’s used in the context of a relationship. Logic with empathy is the ability to understand others and make emotional connections and forge relationships.
Google has democratized information and facts. It has lowered the value of those facts. There is nothing you cannot find an answer to when you “google it.” However, there is value in the ability to place these facts into proper context and to deliver them with emotional impact. Facts, left. Context, right.
When looking into your organization, do you outsource the tasks that require big-picture, abstract thinking, or the tasks that analyze thousands of data sets? Each organization will be different, but in the modern workforce, high value is placed on context, big picture thinking because of the mental processes to get there. Either way, you won’t have to go any further than the human brain to come up with the answer.
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