When business owners start to use outsourcing, and they start to use it often enough that it takes some work away from permanent employees, they may experience some resistance from their team. The main concerns being “why are you taking work from us, are we not doing a good enough job?” and “will we lose our jobs?”
To ease these worries, here are our three tried and tested tips to get your staff on board with outsourcing.
1. Start small and you will gain acceptance with outsourcing
The best way to bring your team on board with outsourcing is to actually show them how it works. Once they see it working and how well it will work, they will be far more willing to embrace it.
While using this approach makes your team feel more involved with the decision-making process, it also eases any concerns for employees who have worked with outsourcers before and have had a bad experience. Rather than subjecting your team to change, if you show them the ropes and how positive it can be, there won’t be as much push back.
2. Find a manager to champion the cause
There will likely be at least one real advocate for outsourcing within your team, one who can see the benefits of embracing it. Find this individual and then train them up to be your ‘expert’ on outsourcing.
Once you have a manager to champion the cause, someone who is involved with the work and the outsourcers day-to-day, they will help massively with getting everyone else on board. Not to mention, this will have a real positive impact on morale and productivity too.
3. Allow staff to fully voice their concerns
You don’t know what is going through your team members’ minds. Maybe they are just concerned about a loss of control and a reduction in the quality of work, or maybe it goes deeper than that and they are worried about the security of their own roles. Whatever your staffs’ concerns, make sure that they can fully voice them because if you don’t, the resistance will come out in other ways which may potentially sabotage the success of outsourcing the work in the first place.
To help your staff feel listened to, take the time to talk to them as a group and then one-to-one. Engage them in the process, highlight the benefits to them personally (e.g. less grunt work, allowing them to service clients properly etc) and then give them the chance to digest and to discuss any concerns that they have further.
Get your staff on board with outsourcing
As we said, you don’t know what’s going on through your team members’ minds when it comes to outsourcing, but you need to find out. You need to engage them in the process, listen and respond to their concerns, and help them identify the benefits to them personally so that they can start to look at outsourcing in a much more positive light.
If you do this, you’ll soon find that outsourcing will free your team members up to be far more productive and effective in the work that they do.
