Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/136276
APAC Forum Would I have argued for the case to in-source some of these outsourced services? The answer again is: no. The challenge is that we sometimes mysteriously raise the bar when it comes to expectations of our outsourced partners. I am not sure whether, if things were to fail on our end, we would hold ourselves to the same exacting standards that we have demanded of our partners. Looking back, I felt that we could have done certain things better in engaging our outsourced partners to make it a more effective partnership. They would be among my top bits of advice for any such engagements today: Be inclusive. One of the bravest things that my former manager (an American international assignee) did when I was working in at the U.S. multinational was invite the HR shared services team (an outsourced arm) to attend our Asia Pacific HR allhands meeting in Thailand. He received a lot of flak from corporate headquarters about his fiscal prudence in including the outsourced services staff. This inclusive gesture, however, paved the way for a stronger partnership between the in-house employees and the shared services team. We saw the lighter side of each other in a less formal, face-to-face environment, understood some of the miscommunications that had taken place, and healed some of the past wounds that were perpetuated by emails and phone calls. During the next couple of months, things changed. Once a case of a not-in-my-backyard syndrome, when things went wrong, we pointed our fingers to the shared services team with a sigh of resignation. Now, we proceeded to brief the shared services team, provided them with the right context, and advised them on how they could handle certain fuming stakeholders better. Be aware of cultural differences. The outsourced shared services team based in Australia was staffed by different nationalities from Japan, Korea, India, and China, as well as native Australians. Sometimes, it can be trying when our cosmopolitan workforce listen to someone on the other end of the line speaking in a seemingly strange accent. The truth about the Asia Pacific environment is many of us are not native speakers of the English language. Some of us were critical of the shared services team without realising that we could also be less lucid in expressing our needs and queries to the shared services team. Be realistic. Over the years, I've also noticed the slightly higher churn in their staff turnover. We might be frustrated that we have to deal—now and then—with our partners' new staff and to "re-educate" the requirements of our organisation all over again. What we often fail to realise is that outsourced partners do face tough customers in us: the ones who expect the best in service delivery; the ones who could not tolerate a single blip; the ones who expect a turnaround time in less than X number of hours; the ones who sometimes may lose our cool and yell at the messenger of bad news that something could not be done due to policy or system constraints. All these contribute to the meaningfulness of the job for the staff of our outsourced providers. In most organisations, the negotiation of the service level agreements with the appointed outsourced partner is usually concluded at a corporate level or with the COEs. Quite often, most organisations communicate poorly on the base line deliverables the outsourced vendors are supposed to deliver. Even if they are communicated, there are the usual people movements within our own organisation that necessitated the periodic re-communication of what our partners could or could not deliver. It begets the same question I asked earlier: Do we hold ourselves to the same performance standards if the service is delivered by ourselves? I do not have a definite answer, but I am inclined to think that our own natural defence mechanisms will automatically surface if some things went wrong through our delivery. I think most HR organisations have gone a long way down the outsourcing path, almost to a point of no return. The HR outsourcing industry has matured, and our partners are now able to deliver deeper and more sophisticated services. With scale in their business, they are able to deploy technological solutions that reduce their reliance on manpower. Be it the public or private sector, requests for additional HR headcount continue to make justification dificult with our senior management. Our internal stakeholders would be more delighted if we could also engage them in deeper HR issues such as organisational development, employee engagement and retention, talent management, and succession planning. But once an outsourced partner is appointed, we must ensure that the partnership works as if left unaddressed on a timely basis, that it might snowball to bigger issues. For a partnership with our outsourced vendors to flourish, we must be inclusive in our approach and consider them as one of "us." In a cross geographical context, we need to be aware of the dynamics of cultural nuances and its interplay. I have also seen bigger geographical patches demanding for the outsourced vendor to station locally recruited staff in their respective countries. It is a question of cost and scale, and it may not contribute to the operational efficiency of the outsourced partner. Lastly, we really ought to understand the baseline deliverables that our partners have committed to deliver. It might mean that as HR professionals, we also need to periodically inject our line managers and employees with a reality dose and manage their expectations appropriately. Seng Fong Ow is currently the divisional director of the National Human Resources Division, Ministry of Manpower in Singapore. SPRING 2013 | www.hroglobal.com [17]