Outsourcing, Insourcing, Taking - or Avoiding - Responsibility

For some time, my colleague Ron wrote a column in one of the Business Journal papers, mainly about delivering quality service and bulding customer loyalty. One column that touched on outsourcing came to mind recently, even though he wrote it a couple of years ago.

You may remember that the 2004 election brought a lot of attention to outsourcing, with a good deal of energetic noise about the evils of shipping jobs overseas. Ron wrote a column that didn't attempt to decide whether outsourcing to foreign providers was sinful or virtuous per se, but that talked about the likely causes of dissatisfaction with outsourced services.

He described the typical company that delegates some function-- customer service, technical support, or other operations and services -- and is unhappy with the results. Specifically, he asked whether that company had put the proper investment into training the service provider they had hired. In other words, he suggested that when Company A hires Company B, far away, to take over some staff function, it is Company A's responsibility to make sure that the people of Company B know what they are doing.

I wrote Ron a quick note saying how refreshing it was to see his column, how often that crucial training step is an afterthought (or no thought at all) in a company. When Ron wrote back , he said he'd received quite a few highly uncomplimentary comments about his article, that I was one of the rare ones who thought he'd made sense!

Among the key purposes of training are establishing standards for performance, and giving employees the knowledge and skills to meet those standards. Sadly, many companies think that when they delegate execution to someone else, they are relieved of responsibility for thinking about these things. They confuse hiring someone to perform a service with "turning it over" to them. They forget that "what should be done" is their responsibility, and that only the "getting it done" part is really farmed out.

The point is, this same problem occurs internally, within a company, all the time. When a new product is launched, services are changed, procedures modified the staff in charge of the product or service or procedure frequently forget that it takes people to deliver the product or service, to perform the procedures. Getting the employees educated about how to make the change effectively is a trivial last step -- the way that the contractor who is building a new house for you thinks of painting the final structure as an easy last step.

The plan for the product launch or procedure overhaul is highly detailed until you get to the point where it says, "conduct training".

When you haven't thought about how to get "Company B" to do things your way, to your standards, before you sign on the dotted line, you have already degraded your service. Similarly, I've found, over and over again, that clients forget to figure out the message before they give me the job of delivering it. They can see the activity -- they are anxious to write "training done" on their reports -- but they have lost sight of the reason for the activity, such as, "employees more effective with customers, fewer complaints".

Naturally, I can help them discover the message and the best way to deliver it . . . if I get the chance. As a freelance instructional designer, I often struggle to get clients to embrace the need to think of training design as part of product design, to think of a plan for communicating change as part of the strategizing the initiates the change.

Outsourced or insourced, it is perhaps natural for people to wish you could simply dump the all important step of aligning employee performance with key corporate strategies on some department or hired developer. Life would be so much simpler, one less responsibility to face every day.

Too bad it doesn't work.