To bring back in house activities or functions that were previously outsourced means

To Backsource Or Not To Backsource: How to Avoid Your Outsourcing Project Failure

Software development backsourcing is the process of bringing an outsourced project back in-house as well as in-sourcing knowledge and best practices. It can also be referred to as a transfer of a project to a different provider if the current one fails to meet expectations and standards. As common as an outsourcing process may have become, part of the projects outsourced today will be backsourced. There is no unanimous opinion as to the exact percentage since different experts name different figures with estimations starting at 10%. In any case, companies usually opt to backsource and reclaim responsibility for the project for solid reasons, which are not limited to a provider’s failure to meet service level agreements (SLAs).

Why companies choose to backsource

This happens due to a variety of reasons including:

Contract issues

When a long-term contract expires, a company is faced with an important decision: to prolong the contract, to choose a new outsourcing provider or to bring the project back in-house. Organizations may decide to backsource because their cost-saving estimations had been too optimistic and the actual cost of the project development exceeds expectations. Often, the level of service outlined in the contract is significantly higher than the one the outsourcing company actually provides: the client may be dissatisfied with the professionalism, timing, or work ethics, and choose to terminate the cooperation.

Externally/internally generated opportunities and change in strategic directions

It’s true that outsourcing rates grow when the economy is at its downturn. Conversely, economic growth creates favorable opportunities for bringing outsourcing projects back in-house. While previously, the company may not have had the financial opportunity to hire and nurture new talent, the favorable economic situation or a stable influx of revenue may allow them to do so. Many companies prefer to bring their ongoing projects back in-house because they want to have full control of all the project-related processes. Others may want to do so because of security issues and concerns, especially if the projects in questions involve sensitive data.

Often, this decision will not be driven by dissatisfaction with the current outsourcing development provider, but rather by changes which may have taken place within an organization. Enterprises are evolving entities; over the course of the contract, the company strategy or philosophy as to outsourcing may have changed. Thus, the decision to reclaim the development project may be prompted by a desire to try different approaches, such as the desire to insource knowledge and expertise.

The change in company top management is one of the major drivers of the backsourcing process. When the new CEO, CIO or Head of Procurement joins the organization, they often reconsider outsourcing decisions made by their predecessors. This may result in a decision to terminate contracts with third-party providers and look for resources to support previously outsourced projects within the organization.

Check out how Roger Sarazin, OBDS VP of Products and Services, describes our engagement.

Loss of managerial control and security issues

One common mistake many IT outsourcing buyers make is lack of commitment and dedication to project development after outsourcing it to an external provider. Most of the outsourced projects are executed offshore/nearshore on a fixed bid or T&M basis which implies that the provider allocates staff and resources and holds full accountability for delivery of milestones. Alternatively, when companies outsource their software dev team to a remote location, they “wash their hands” and rely too much on the provider. That’s when they start losing project management control and having mess with their software development.

Dissatisfaction with the service provider

Last but not least, it’s often the service provider that fails to stand up to declared standards and/or SLAs. Sometimes, especially in offshore software development, mutual understanding could be difficult to achieve. Managing a remote dedicated development team, bridging cultural differences, and integrating offshore employees into a company’s ecosystem often involves major hassle, and companies may no longer feel ready to face these issues.

Cultural differences and knowledge mismatch

It’s a striking factor that can have huge implications for your outsourced software development. The outsourcing buyer and provider can be on different pages when it comes to their understanding of hierarchy, punctuality, mistakes acknowledgment, and accuracy and accountability over tasks.

Additionally, the provider’s lack of/poor knowledge of business and technology, methodologies and processes as well as the poor access to top-notch software developers and PM resources (which may be hard to observe at a contract negotiation stage) may lead to inefficiencies in collaboration, overheads, delayed delivery, etc.

How to backsource without selling your soul to the devil?

Don’t wait for your offshore provider to kill your project. If you feel something is wrong or your vendor lags behind in terms of quality of service/delivery, do bring your operations back home or backsource to a different one, someone professional and trustworthy, with a proven record of successfully completed projects.

If you aim to accumulate expertise in-house, set up your core team in-house and hire a provider to build an extended team for you offshore/nearshore to make sure you don’t lose managerial control of your project.

Today’s outsourcing is a far cry from what it used to be 5 years ago. It’s no longer about just cost saving and access to external talent pools. For companies looking to establish their software development as a long-term strategic function, outsourcing means an additional value through access to a proven expertise, methodologies and competencies that are hard to find/too expensive onshore, as well as budget optimization through leveraging provider’s libraries of code and reusable components, tools, frameworks and best practices drawn from servicing companies with similar technology needs/requirements.

Brace yourself that backsourcing won’t be a cakewalk, but do follow the rule of thumb that the longer you wait and keep giving your failed provider “a second chance”, the more financial losses and project damage you’ll encounter. So, having seen the first signs that your outsourced project is going down, start thinking about your plan B.

Bringing operations back in-house is expensive and time-consuming as you’ll have to:

All of the above will blow up your software development budgets so that you might not even be able to afford to complete your solution development without attracting additional investments.

However, backsourcing to a new provider can prove more efficient and cost-effective, as you’ll keep piggybacking on the new vendor’s internal capabilities and infrastructure and all you’ll have to do is to hand over your source code from a failed provider to a new one.

These 8 tips may be helpful to backsource or re-outsource your solution development as seamlessly and painlessly as possible:

Not to lose your project management control, I suggest you set up a dedicated development team with a new provider and assign a site manager (at least for the transition period) who’ll help ramp up your team’s performance, establish Scrum and other software dev practices, and oversee day-to-day communication within your team. In the future, it can be turned into a self-organizing team, but still, you have to spend enough time motivating, developing and retaining your offshore/remote employees, boosting and evaluating team performance and KPIs, etc. If you have at least 70-80% immersion with your remote project team, the chance is high you won’t screw your project and will eventually succeed.

And do you have any firsthand backsourcing experience? Please share it in the comments below!

Insourcing

What Is Insourcing?

Insourcing is the assignment of a project to a person or department within a company rather than to a third party. Insourcing is the opposite of outsourcing.

How Insourcing Works

In practice, insourcing is used to describe a task or function that a company could have outsourced to a third party. As a rule, insourcing provides companies with more control over decision-making and the ability to move more quickly and precisely, especially if institutional knowledge factors into some elements of the job.

Since the 1990s, companies have increasingly outsourced rather than insource, seeking cheaper labor in developing nations. To the extent that employees’ time costs a company more than it would pay a third party to do the same work, insourcing can produce higher expenses.

The decision also depends on the best allocation of resources across a set of tasks as well. Employees who are qualified to undertake a project if it is insourced might be more profitably deployed on other projects.

Insourcing Versus Outsourcing

Outsourcing involves hiring an external company to undertake a task, project, or ongoing function for an organization. The practice became widespread and controversial through the 1990s, as many businesses sought to reduce their expenses by hiring outside companies to perform ongoing tasks such as human resources management, customer service, manufacturing, and marketing.

With improvements in global communications and logistics spurred in part by the growth of the internet, outsourcing became a growth industry in developing countries where labor costs remained low.

Allowing non-employees to have access to systems, particularly back-office systems, can create security risks.

Outsourcing brings with it a set of risks and additional overhead, however. Allowing non-employees to have access to systems, particularly back-office systems such as accounting, creates security risks. Even a company with a strong cybersecurity profile becomes prone to added risk when it allows unknown employees of a third-party organization access to its systems.

Furthermore, differences in international law can generate challenges with regard to drawing up contracts that adequately protect an organization in the event a vendor fails to live up to expectations.

Insourcing offers some companies a competitive advantage if they can provide more consistent, superior customer service by keeping the functions in house, even when it costs a bit more.

For complex projects, companies may find that insourcing requires less time and expense for training since employees are already familiar with an organization’s products, services, and culture.

Example of Insourcing

As an example, say a large snack company is putting out a new brand of candy. Its strategy includes a social media campaign that it hopes will help its brand catch fire.

The company has its own marketing department that has the product and industry knowledge to run the campaign. It already implements the rest of the company’s social media strategy although it has never actually launched a new product on social media. Should the company hand over the project to its marketing team or go outside?

Key Takeaways

If the marketing team is fully booked up with its current projects, the company may well decide to hire the outside social media outfit to launch the social media campaign for its new candy bar. For the initial phase, outsourcing could be the right choice. Once the campaign is up and running, the company may well reverse its decision and insource it.

To bring back in house activities or functions that were previously outsourced means

Outsourcing is all the rage right now. There has never been a better time to outsource work to other agencies in order to save money and/or time on projects that will give your business a boost. So what are some outsourcing examples for you to fully understand the scope of the trend?

Today, we will look at four simple outsourcing examples so that you can start to consider what things you may want to have performed outside your company, too.

Let’s dive right in with the basics first.

What Exactly Is Outsourcing?

In other words, it’s performing a business endeavor outside of the organization.

“Outsourcing involves subcontracting parts of a company’s value-chain, (i.e. steps in the design, supply, production, marketing, sales, and services processes) to other companies or contractors that specialize in those activities. Through outsourcing agreements, the client company hires separate companies to perform specific tasks in the value-chain on its behalf. Often, the work is performed under the name of the client,” reports Investing Answers.

“The kinds of outsourcing work performed vary widely across industry sectors. Some common outsourcing activities include: human resource management, facilities management, supply chain management, accounting, customer support and service, marketing, computer aided design, research, design, content writing, engineering, diagnostic services, and legal documentation.”

As you can see, you can outsource just about anything these days. From sales to HR, IT to manufacturing, everything under the sun has a way to be outsourced.

But should you outsource things? Or should you try to do them in-house, allowing you to have more control over the process and also cut out the middle man? This largely depends on your organization’s needs at the time.

So, when it comes down to it, outsourcing should be viewed as a tool. You should consider it when you need it. Ask yourself: will it save you time? Will it save you money? These two things are vital for businesses to succeed. By cutting costs and allowing staff members to focus on work that is more impactful, you can give yourself a boost.

Be aware, though, that outsourcing can also have it’s setbacks. To explore those, let’s get into the list of real-world examples.

4. Outsourcing Examples: Project-Based Outsourcing

Projects can come in all shapes and sizes. For example, say that you want to launch an ad campaign but do not have the creative staff onboard right now to pull it off in-house. Instead of starting an entire department for one project, it makes sense to work with a third-party to contract out that work.

This is a good idea because you can find an ad agency that are experts in their craft, making sure that you have everything you need to succeed. Agencies like these are all over the place, allowing you to have the pick of the litter.

This same example works for any project, not just a creative one. Say, for example, that you need an email system set up, or a POS system, or something like that. You can outsource this project in the same way you outsource remodeling your bathroom.

Just do your homework before you decide to sign on the dotted line.

This leads us nicely into one of the biggest outsourcing examples of this year:

3. Outsourcing Examples: IT

Whether it’s to develop a new app, maintain your current IT infrastructure, or really anything else that has to do with technology, companies all over the world have started to outsource their IT needs to outside agencies.

When it comes to development, outsourcing examples abound because, just like the previous example, you can rely on expert teams to make the product without needing to hire the right individuals to do so in-house.

This can save time and, without a doubt, it saves money. However, you still have to do your due diligence to make sure that the contractor can fulfill your needs and meet your expectations, especially when it comes to bigger jobs like development.

Most companies already outsource some of these tasks without knowing it. For example, many companies use Gmail for their email systems, allowing the brunt of the technical know-how to fall on Google instead of their own IT department. Sure, it takes someone on staff with a bit of experience to set up and use the Gmail platform, but it’s not nearly as technologically driven as setting up in-house mail servers.

2. Outsourcing Examples: The Professional Level

Though IT can be considered inside this section, too, what we’re talking about when we say ‘professional’ are the departments such as HR, legal counselling, accounting, payroll, etc.

With a suite of different options to choose from nowadays, many companies have started to have professional assistance from outside companies.

For example, payroll. Payroll in today’s world can be done using outside systems that track money in and money out, allowing you to pay workers on time, keep track of IRS documents, and things of that nature so that you don’t have to.

The same can be said for accounting and other paper-heavy tasks. Some organizations even outsource their HR practices, though this is usually when a company is starting up and needs to have their bases covered.

In fact, a lot of these systems are made for startups, allowing the business to remain as lean as possible while they make and launch their product. When businesses get larger and larger, it can make more sense to have these departments be in-house so that you can have more control of how they work. Also, accounting, HR, and other departments can typically help you work out your business goals in a strategic sense, making them more and more important as time goes on.

1. Outsourcing Examples: Manufacturing

Finally, we have manufacturing, which is probably the most known and most talked about form of outsourcing right now.

Huge companies often outsource their production because of the simple fact that it is cheaper to make things overseas. Just about every electronics company outsources their manufacturing. The same can be said for clothing companies.

For this type of outsourcing, companies need to pay close attention to quality. After all, just because you get it for cheap doesn’t mean it’s the right choice if your quality takes such a hit that it drives away business.

Outsourcing Examples: A Brief Recap

When it comes to outsourcing, you have a ton of options in today’s world. We’ve just covered the four major outsourcing examples here.

In the end, outsourcing all depends on what your business needs, how much they can spend, and how quickly they need it done. You may know how to perform a certain project, but will an outside team of experts be able to do the same thing for faster while you work on other things? Do you need to outsource your manufacturing because it’s the only way to get your product to market?

Some of these questions will likely pop up as your business grows. And it’s never been a better time to find outside, third-party help to bring those projects, products, and innovations to life.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing is the practice of passing individual tasks, subareas, or business processes over to a third-party and thereby receiving the results from outside of your own company. Services that your company was responsible for fulfilling will now be provided by a specialized service provider. These tasks are often a business’s secondary functions: tasks that must be fulfilled in order for a company to focus on its central activity.

What is outsourcing?

The term “outsourcing” refers to a strategy whereby corporate tasks and structures are given to an external contractor. These can be individual tasks, specific areas, or entire business processes.

With outsourcing, one or more tasks or processes are usually given to an external partner. Under certain circumstances, however, some tasks be performed internally (in-house outsourcing). For example, if you have given a task to a different area of your company, or to a department which specializes in it, this is commonly known as internal outsourcing. In contrast, a task given in its entirety to an outside company is known as external outsourcing. The external company may be based regionally or may be a foreign contractor. The focus is on potential cost savings.

What are the reasons for outsourcing?

In addition to the hoped-for cost savings of outsourcing, there are other reasons for handing over certain tasks:

Different forms of outsourcing

There are different distinguished forms of outsourcing:

The subject matter and the duration of the service provided is recorded in a contract. The parties involved often agree on a service level agreement (SLA) to be able to concretely control the contractual relationship in terms of reaction times and service quality.

Outsourcing: examples of outsourcing tasks

Outsourcing strategies are used, for example, in the customer service, accounting, tax consulting, IT, and marketing departments.

Examples of possible outsourcing strategies:

These are just a few typical examples of outsourcing. In practice, a company today can outsource every step of its operations, whether in manufacturing or the provision of services, to an external contractor. Thanks to the networked world, it no longer matters whether the foreign company is located in the neighboring village or on the other side of the world.

The right approach

Do you think that outsourcing is the best strategy for your business, but you don’t know how best to proceed? Simply put, there is no single right approach to outsourcing a project. Just as companies are different to one another, so too are outsourcing strategies. However, the following best practice method has already proven itself in many situations:

Mistakes to avoid

Outsourcing is a complex process, which is why there can be mistakes in its implementation. Even comprehensive planning cannot guarantee a smooth process. Here we look at some of the most common mistakes so that you avoid them:

Outsourcing abroad: what is important?

Do you want to outsource part of your work processes and hire a company or service provider abroad? Be sure to consider these three factors:

Outsourcing: advantages and disadvantages

The decision to give certain functions to an outside service provider should never be taken lightly. Once the tasks have been outsourced, reintegrating them back into a company can be anything but easy. You should always first check that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages for your company before opting for outsourcing.

Advantages

Disadvantages

Core competencies: The company can focus on its core competencies.

Dependence: You make yourself dependent on the respective service provider. If the service provider gets into economic difficulties, for example, this can mean consequential costs for your company.

Cost reduction: The provision of external services is generally more cost-effective than the employment of specialized employees in one’s own company.

Loss of knowledge: One consequence of outsourcing is the loss of employee know-how.

Time savings: Small businesses and the self-employed need a lot of time to familiarize themselves with new areas of business. Outsourcing saves time and enables investment in other areas.

Data protection: Outside service providers may gain an insight into sensitive corporate data.

Improving quality: The use of outsourcing strategies often results in qualitative advantages. These advantages are due to the high degree of specialization of external service providers.

Expensive reintegration: If you have outsourced certain tasks, a later reintegration into your company can be very time-consuming. The implementation is expensive, time consuming and requires suitable staff.

You should not outsource the key technologies and competencies of your company to third-party companies as these differentiate you from other companies and competitors.

Outsourcing is gaining importance

Many companies resort to outsourcing strategies in order to purchase services cost-effectively and to be able to focus more on their own competencies. Modern production and logistics concepts are necessary for such measures to achieve the hoped-for success. The just-in-time production strategy is an example of such a concept. Materials are produced or delivered only when they are actually needed. In this way, a company can save on storage costs and only has to pay for the material costs during production.

In the course of globalization, through global logistics concepts and the constant development of the Internet, it is easier than ever for companies to hand over a more or less large part of their process to other companies. Those who use outsourcing properly can speed up workflows and improve their products or services, so it is possible to counter the growing global competition.

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Lean startup: reasons without risk?

Dropbox, Airbnb, Twitter – all these succesful companies have one thing in common: they became successful using the lean startup model. This method questions traditional business concepts and procedures, and instead promises greater flexibility and innovation. But what do lean startups mean for product development and company culture, and how can you benefit from these new ideas?

Joint Venture

Companies often work together despite being in competition with one another – in many fields and in many forms. The joint venture is one of these strategic cooperation models and enables cooperating companies to strengthen their joint presence in the global business world and to survive in a competition. But what does joint venture actually mean? What types of joint ventures are there? What are.

Bring your own device (BYOD) – the digital trend with pitfalls

In the party scene, you’ve probably heard of “BYOB“ or “Bring Your Own Beer” where guests are expected to bring whatever they want to drink. The term “BYOD” therefore also sounds quite positive. “Bring Your Own Device” means you have the comfort of working on your own laptop instead of having to get to grips with the devices provided by the company. Mobile workplaces have now become the norm.

The Complete Guide to Outsourcing

In late 2009, 3-time bestselling author, Tim Ferriss released a book called The Four Hour Work Week.

It was one of the first concerted efforts to bring business process automation (BPA) and outsourcing down to a smaller scale for everyday businesses and individual consultants.

That book has been both the best and worst thing to happen to remote work. Ferriss’s book started a trend that many companies, consultants, small business founders, and lifestyle entrepreneurs have been trying to implement since.

This has produced the unfortunate result of a significantly large amount of customers ‘trying out’ outsourcing without having any serious background on the sourcing process, remote interviewing, remote team management and operational procedures needed to become successful with remote employees.

This in-depth article will show you how and where to find the right resources you’ll need to properly start outsourcing within your organization and formulate processes for outsourcing in an effective manner.

Table of Contents

See how Time Doctor’s easy-to-use time tracking software can help your team be more productive.

How To Use This Guide

This smart guide is meant as a starting point for you and your business to use as a baseline framework. It’s the framework I’ve used to build numerous businesses.

Depending on your product/service and industry you will need to add to this guide and can take personalized notes along the way.

It can and should serve both outsourcing newcomers and veterans as a great reference guide and as you work through the process time and time again.

This guide starts with Outsourcing Basics. This section will define what is outsourcing, list the pros and cons of hiring freelancers for certain tasks of your business and identify specific tasks that could be ‘good’ to outsource.

The next section, Becoming More Productive, will focus on an often ignored aspect of outsourcing: your current productivity and organization levels. Just as larger companies organize and streamline their activities and business processes before automating and outsourcing, you too have to better define different areas of your business and personal outputs. This will save you time, money, and set a solid foundation for outsourcing successfully.

The third section, How To Source Talent, will introduce you to the newest and most trustworthy platforms that have been developed and used by millions of businesses since Tim Ferriss first wrote his book. I’ll show you how to define your company needs, how to craft a compelling job description to attract world-class talent and what the overall (recommended) process should be when looking to hire.

The fourth section, The Interview Process, will dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of how to run effective interviews. Since you’ll most likely be interviewing someone over the phone or through a video service, I’ll point out what qualities you should be looking for, what questions to ask, and how to set up a trial phase to make sure both parties are satisfied before anything becomes permanent (if this is what you’re looking for. The same process can apply to temporary freelancers).

The fifth section, The Training Process, will provide details on how to ensure that your outsourced team understands and completes tasks within a specific deadline and to required specifications.

The sixth section, Communicating With Freelancers, will walk you through tools and processes to ensure that your remote team delivers high-quality work and that you remain well-connected. Communication often makes the biggest difference in performance and final output.

The seventh section is about Paying Your Outsourced Team. This will give you a great idea of how much you should pay your freelancers. The section will also provide details on some useful online money transfer platforms for paying offshore freelancers.

The eighth section, Scale Your Outsourced Team, will give you the means and the methods to quickly scale up your outsourced team while ensuring a smooth expansion process.

The ninth section is dedicated to Process Design. This will help walk you through the theory of how to design, build, and implement effective business processes to help make your business more effective.

The last section, Building Redundant Processes, will focus on actually applying the theory from the last section to help you create processes that will streamline your operations and make automation of simple or repetitive tasks possible.

Outsourcing Basics

Every growing company needs to hire the workforce on a continual basis. However, internal hiring can lead to higher expenses in terms of renting office space, furniture, insurance, utilities, and labor cost.

Outsourcing is a good alternative to the internal hiring of the workforce. It enables to keep expenses at a minimum while giving a company access to a skilled workforce. This section will talk about the basics of outsourcing and its pros and cons.

What Is Outsourcing?

Outsourcing in business is when you hire a consultant, an agency, an external service provider, or a freelancer virtual assistant, to handle some tasks of your business or work on specific projects.

After the Great Recession, several companies in the United States were forced to outsource teams as well as entire departments to save money and their bottom lines.

Outsourcing could involve part-time freelancers or contract workers who work for you full time through a consultancy, agency or external service provider.

Outsourcing is often used by businesses of all sizes as well as solopreneurs to handle more business and execute work that requires skills unavailable within the organization.

This article will take you through the process of making sure that you and your business are ready to either outsource different components of your regular operations or set up an outsourcing framework to enable you to handle a bigger workload.

What Should You Outsource?

When deciding which process to outsource, ask yourself three questions:

There are certain essential yet time-consuming tasks in every company which is repetitive in nature like data entry, competitor research, and database building. These can be easily outsourced. If you can hire a freelancer to do these tasks, you will get more time on hand to focus on the core competencies of your business.

Other tasks such as financial analysis and website development that require specific skills can also be outsourced to specialized agencies or freelancers if your team is not equipped to do them.

Specific Jobs You Can Outsource

As we saw earlier, certain tasks have the fundamental characteristics that make them ‘good’ to outsource. Here’s a list of jobs that you could outsource to a freelancer or external service provider:

1. Social Media

It is impossible to grow your brand, connect with your audience, or find clients without a robust social media strategy.

You can outsource the task of creating and scheduling social media posts on a day-to-day basis to freelancers or virtual assistants (VAs). They can create reports based on performance data and provide recommendations. Your VA can also update you on current consumer trends and conversations on social platforms. You can use this data to understand whether your business is moving in the right direction or not.

Social media tasks can get overlooked by business leaders since their importance is not as vital as account management, product development or sales. Outsourcing your social media functions can give these tasks the attention they deserve.

2. Market Research

Freelancers can do simple research for different aspects of your business like identifying potential customers, finding industry events you should attend or gathering market data.

Such research process is usually tedious and time-consuming. If an entrepreneur has to spend time and energy on market research, she won’t be able to focus on running her business.

Therefore, these tasks can be outsourced to dedicated freelance research assistants who can compile the research data into compact and easy to digest reports.

3. Content Creation

Another time-consuming activity that leads to building a company’s online presence is through a company website and blog. To provide great value to potential customers, businesses need to invest in churning out regular blogs, articles, infographics.

Unless you want to invest in a dedicated in-house content creation team, hire freelancers to ghostwrite and edit content on your company blog. Your SEO and SEM functions can also be outsourced.

4. Finance and Accounting

The earliest processes to be outsourced by companies were finance and accounting. Now, many companies even outsource their entire finance department since an external agency or consultancy can provide additional expertise in strategic functions like budgets, forecasts, and internal audits.

According to an Ovum study, the most common services to be outsourced within accounting was payroll accounting, accounts payable and account receivable.

5. Personal Assistance

Your Virtual Personal Assistant can handle all your mundane daily tasks like scheduling appointments, answering calls, or booking flight tickets. This will give you more free time to maintain a healthy work-life balance even as your everyday tasks get done efficiently.

6. Customer Service

Customer service has for long been synonymous with outsourcing. As a business grows, it needs larger customer support reps to connect with your clients and resolve issues. If its an in-house team, such a regular expansion incurs additional operational costs. When you outsource your customer service needs to an external agency, you can provide increased consumer satisfaction without incurring a huge cost.

7. Human Resources

Almost half of all business now outsource their HR department.

These external agencies or RPOs (Recruiting Process Outsource) help startups hire talent. With their expertise, RPO services can ensure a low turnover rate. These services screen through resumes, interview potential candidates and shortlist suitable talent for your company.

Depending on the type of business you run, you can choose to outsource various processes of your business.

To help you make a better decision, here are some pros and cons of outsourcing.

What Are The Pros And Cons of Outsourcing?

There are many benefits to outsourcing. While you may not be able to reduce your work week down to four hours, you will find gains in:

Outsourcing will also enable you to focus on your core activities and improve overall efficiencies.

But, it also has its downsides.

You can see all of them in detail here: The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing

How To Avoid Common Outsourcing Mistakes?

Here are some common outsourcing mistakes that you need to look out for before you decide to hire that remote team.

Don’t Cut Costs for Critical Tasks

As mentioned earlier, outsourcing is a great way to reduce costs. However, there is a flip side to hiring cheap talent. A low-paid freelancer will dramatically affect the quality of the output. If you are a software entrepreneur, you should not hire the cheapest freelance engineer. Since the critical part of your business is dependent on engineers, it’s prudent to hire the absolute best who can reliably perform all the tasks.

On the other hand, tasks like sales database building could be an area where you can cut costs as an entrepreneur.

You must carefully decide where to cut costs so that you can stretch your outsourcing budget without putting important areas of your business at risk.

Have a Trial Run

Another mistake entrepreneurs make while outsourcing is not having sufficient knowledge about the task you are outsourcing. You don’t have to be an expert in that skill set, but you should know enough about the role to be able to gauge the competence of the agency or freelancer.

After interviewing a qualified candidate, have a trial run where you give them a small task to see how they perform and whether they can do the task according to your specifications. This may take additional time and money upfront, but it will save a lot of trouble later on as you would have hired a competent resource.

Give Detailed Instructions

If you leave projects or tasks up to the interpretation of your outsourced team, it may never be completed up to your specifications, or it may take many attempts to reach your requirements.

To avoid any misinterpretation, be as specific and detailed as possible when outsourcing a job. For instance, if you want a logo created, send examples of 10 designs that you like with an explanation of what you like in each design. Then tell the freelance designer your vision for the logo and ask her to make something from these specific descriptions.

Another important thing to remember is to always set a clear deadline for each task. Your freelancer will have other commitments and without a clear deadline, other projects may take precedence over yours.

Communicate Frequently

Poor communication is the root of all outsourcing mistakes. If you communicate clearly, accurately and frequently with the freelancer, most of the above-mentioned mistakes can be avoided.

Ask your freelancer to send you an email at the end of each day with a project progress report. The report can be as short as one sentence, but it will ensure that you know how far the project has progressed. They should also inform you of the challenges they have faced, and what they need from you to complete the task.

Also, have a video chat every week. Face to face communication is equally important to build a rapport with your freelancers.

Becoming More Productive

If you aren’t more productive, you can’t make anyone else more productive. Being more productive will help you to design efficient processes for outsourcing parts of your business.

Double YOUR Own Productivity

There are 3 specific things you need to do in order to (at a minimum) double your productivity. These are:

We’re going to go through each of these individually.

Setup Rituals

A ritual is something that is so pervasive in our lives that we just do it without thinking about it.

You need to set up your own morning ritual in order to be most productive. Now getting started will be the hardest thing, but once you get going, it’ll develop into a habit and become natural to you.

Some of the best ways to make sure you’re set for a morning ritual are:

Effective Planning

You need to not only plan your day, your week, your month but the next 3 months. This will help you determine not only if you’re hitting your big goals, but also how effective you are at doing so.

I use 3 tools to help frame my planning.

Place your major milestones for the next quarter on it and put it in a very visible place.

These 3 tools will make sure you never miss any deadlines again and help you visualize what you need to get done.

Determine Goals

Write out your biggest goals for the next 4 months.

It doesn’t matter how crazy they are – you just need to take a few minutes and write it all down.

Set Milestones

Now that you have a few goals set, you need to attach and break them down into a series of milestones.

By holding yourself accountable to smaller milestones of an overall objective, you’ll be able to accomplish more little things and feel motivated and productive to keep going.

Pro Tip:

To really be productive you need to figure out how much time you think you’ll need, then cut it down by 25%.

Action:

Be sure to set milestones and allot a specific amount of time for completing each one. Add these milestones to your calendar.

Get Into A Flow State Focus

This might sound really complicated, but it isn’t.

It’s really astounding to think about the number of people who think they’re really productive but have no idea how much time they spend doing what.

Flow State Focus is a term coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and suggests that people are happiest and therefore at their most productive when they are in a flow of uninterrupted concentration and absorption.

While everyone’s a bit different you can achieve a better flow state of focus by doing the following things:

Action:

Try to achieve flow state focus while reading this guide.

Be in a comfortable environment, have everything you need in order to work and then get to work.

How To Source Talent

The first way to outsource business activities is to retain a company that offers outsourced services. These companies have employees on their payroll who would work on your projects. Examples are BPO companies (Business Process Outsourcing) for outsourcing low-end tasks, KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing) for outsourcing more specialized tasks, software services companies, digital marketing companies, design agencies and so on.

Therefore, if you don’t have a budget for retaining a company, you will need to outsource to individual freelancers.

Outsourcing to freelancers get you some very productive people at a very competitive rate, but it does require a bit of work and structure in order to be able to find the right person for your company.

This section will cover three main aspects of sourcing a freelancer.

Where To Find Talented Freelancers

Upwork

Upwork is the most popular platform to hire freelancers. There are also plenty of small agencies on Upwork. The website helps you hire professionals for customer service, web development, accounting and more. Whatever your requirement, create a job listing and browse through the candidates for the most suitable workers.

Check out our comprehensive Upwork review to know more about the platform.

Fiverr

FreelanceMyWay

Hiring a freelancer can often be a big risk. It’s difficult to know if they are up to the mark. Fortunately, FreelanceMyWay does a thorough background check on freelancers before they are allowed to list themselves on the site. This platform allows you to outsource your web development, content creation, marketing projects and more. They even provide an option to pay your freelancers only after they achieve their preset goals.

Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk is really great for very small tasks (typically something less than 5 mins) and you can get data back quickly. If you have a survey, for example, you can generate hundreds of responses within the hours for pennies each.

Where To Find Virtual Assistants

While the above platforms allow you to hire freelancers for specific projects, there are other specific platforms to source virtual assistants. Here are a few platforms where you can hire a VA:

VASumo

VASumo helps you outsource your most time-consuming jobs to trained and skilled assistants. The service supplies you with an experienced virtual assistant directly. Some of the jobs that you can outsource include – web development, graphic design, business administration, and digital marketing.

Prialto

Virtual Assistants can also be utilized for major executive tasks. Prialto allows you to hire experienced assistants that can help grow your business. Their VAs can assist you with relationship management, sales, and time management.

WorldWide101

Worldwide101 focuses on producing virtual assistants that are skilled, reliable, and of the highest quality. Most of their VAs are multilingual, so you can get access to local expertise and expand into new markets. They aid you with project management, social media management, multilingual customer services and more.

For more options and detailed reviews, check out our article on the top virtual assistant companies.

Top Countries To Outsource

Here are the top 7 major countries you can tap for high quality yet reasonable freelancers.

1. India

According to the 2017 A.T. Kearney Global Services Location Index, India is the top option for outsourcing your business. Indian BPOs services handle 56% of the world’s business process outsourcing.

Outside of the US, India has the highest number of English speakers. Lack of language and communication barriers make India attractive for outsourcing. India has the largest technical and professional talent pool in the world. With 3.1 million graduates added to the workforce each year, you have access to the highly educated workforce.

Here is some key process you can outsource to India:

2. Mexico

The IT industry in Mexico is making remarkable progress and becoming globally competitive. Mexico is the southern neighbor of the world’s largest economy and because of its proximity to the US, similar time zone, and ease of travel it is more convenient for Americans to travel and attend regular meetings and have face-to-face interactions with their software partners (such as Scio)

Nowadays, businesses are finding a more skilled workforce for high-tech manufacturing in Mexico.

Being a part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexico offers more Intellectual Property protection compared to other countries that also offer low labor cost. Plus, there are no travel restrictions between US and Mexico.

Here are some software development solutions you can outsource to Mexico:

3. Malaysia

Malaysia is the third most-desirable outsourcing destination after India and China. Despite its 1.7% market share in the Asia-Pacific region, its strong business-focussed government leadership makes it a hub for foreign investment.

The country has set its focus on information security, minimal custom controls, attractive tax incentives, relaxed monetary exchange controls and attractive incentives for R&D.

In Malaysia, a large number of graduates earn Bachelor’s degrees, specializing in Marketing, Accounting, and Finance. Malaysian freelancers have access to high-speed broadband and fiber optics connection ensuring seamless and uninterrupted working conditions.

Here are some of the business processes that you can outsource to Malaysia:

4. Philippines

Ranked 7th in the Global Services Location Index, Philippines has overtaken India as the leading call center country.

What sets the Philippines apart from other countries is its high literacy rate and great communication skills. The country’s low cost of living allows you to hire Filipino freelancers for a fraction of the expense in the US or Western Europe. Government investment in the infrastructure into IT processes and Business Process Management has also increased over the years.

Here are some of the key processes that you can outsource to the Philippines:

5. Bulgaria

Bulgaria has the lowest salary amongst EU nations of around 235.62 Euros per month, making it a cost-effective option. Many European business leaders prefer to outsource to Bulgaria as it is located 2 hours away (by air) from every major European capital. Bulgaria’s workforce has excellent communication skills with 85% of the population fluent in English, and another 45% of the workforce fluent in a foreign language.

Here are some processes you can outsource to Bulgaria:

6. Brazil

Brazil is currently ranked 5th on the Global Services Location Index. It is known as a ‘software powerhouse,’ with several cities housing global services.

The country’s technical colleges are top notch, and several companies have established offices close to major university campuses for new talent.

Brazil’s low cost of living and low foreign exchange rate as compared to the US dollar makes it an attractive option of outsourcing. Many companies have reported a low turnover rate when hiring Brazilian to outsource teams.

Here are some IT development processes you can outsource to Brazil:

7. Ukraine

Ukraine is a leader of software development in the Eastern Europe region. The country is included in the Forbes rating of countries with the most engineering graduates. Relevant education helps Ukrainian developers solve even the most complex tasks.

The country ranks 2nd in Eastern Europe by the number of developers (165,000+). They work in 11,900+ IT companies.

Here are some of the key processes that you can outsource to Ukraine:

The Process Of Hiring A Freelancer

Now we’ll get into the actual process of getting that freelancer through different platforms.

On Upwork you’re going to have to create a profile in order to register your company. Then you’re going to want to upload your project description to the site and wait for bids.

For Mechanical Turk, things happen pretty fast. You need to sign up, define the task and then submit it to the network where multiple people will all “complete” the task.

With Fiverr, you’re going to want to register, browse through hundreds of freelancer profiles, and select the most suitable one.

Action:

Choose who you want to work with and take action.

Choose which type of outsourcing you’re looking to have done and then register with your preferred platform.

How To Write A Job Post

Once you register on the freelancer job platform, you must create an effective job post that can attract attention. Here’s how to do it:

Business Information

Before you write the job post, take some time to write a description for your company on the various freelancer hiring platforms. When a prospective freelancer finds many freelance project postings, they rely on the information given by each company to figure out which project and company suit them well. If you want to stand out from your competitors, use your business description to tell them why they should work for you.

You need to explain what your company does, which type of customers you serve, and what products and/or services you offer.

The Job Description

The Job Description is less about helping you find the people you want and more about filtering out the people you don’t want. On sites like Upwork, the people you want will find you.

So let’s start with some key points about Job Descriptions:

Action:

Follow the tips above to put together a job spec that is to the point but allows for a wide range of applicants to apply.

The Selection Process

In this section, I’m going to take you through the actual selection and interview process and what to look for in all the candidates that you got from the last section. Many of these points will also be useful if you choose to retain an agency. You can use these tips to screen the people that an external service provider or agency is proposing to keep in your outsourced team.

Since there’s a good chance all your interviews will be happening over the phone or via video chats, I’ll also show you how to identify the right characteristics you want to hire for as well as what some good questions to ask your interviewees are.

3 Qualities To Look For

The 3 main qualities you want to quickly identify in the ideal candidate are Action-Oriented, Reliability and Skill Level. (These are in order of importance)

Action Oriented

This can be discerned in the initial testing period. I’d rather have someone give me an example of how they screwed up rather than have done nothing waiting for directions. So give people liberty to take action, even if the end result isn’t quite what you expected because with outsourced talent, you’ll both be working on different schedules and you don’t want them waiting for you to come online to fix a little problem or give more direction.

Reliability

Monitor your new team members during their test period. Again, tools like Time Doctor or ClickUp can indicate how much of the workload is being accomplished.

Skill Level

This can be determined pretty quickly during the initial interview or a practical test. Test the candidate with some quick tasks in different areas.

Stages Of The Interview Process

There are 3 main phases of an interview process.

Initial Testing

This is the fastest way to filter out candidates. Give them an initial test to complete and you can immediately see who is serious about getting the job. It should be an hour long and you should make sure they have a 48-hour window to complete it (to compensate for time difference).

The most important thing to look for is clarification questions. This might seem like a conflict with the Action Taken quality from the last task, but sometimes the action to be taken is to ask questions.

Here is an example test I’d give to a graphics designer. (I call it the gif test!)

Hi, I’ve included a PSD image and I’d like you to make the following changes.

If you have any questions or need clarifications MAKE SURE TO EMAIL ME. If you don’t understand anything about this task, you need to clarify them with me before starting the test.

Excited to see how you do!

So, seems like a pretty simple test. However, (and this is the point of the test) I don’t send the candidate a PSD, I send them a GIF.

This is done purposely because a successful candidate would:

Pro Tip:

You need people to tell you when you’re wrong

The point of the test is to see if candidates will ask questions and will correct you when you’re wrong

Action:

Come up with a test

Come up with a test of your own for your specific position. Make the test very simple and have your candidates try it. If it’s longer than an hour, pay them for their time.

Interview Questions

After you’ve gotten candidates past their initial testing stage, we now need to interview those candidates. This can be done through a platform or through Skype. If you’re just interested in completing a small task or project, then this stage isn’t necessarily needed, but if you’re looking for a longer-term hire, it’s critical. You’re looking for a few critical things.

Do they have their own computer and a stable Internet connection?

Do you hear background noise in the call? If so they might be working out of an Internet cafe which usually won’t work.

Are they confident in their answers? Can they speak English properly? (critical if you’re having them write content or interacting with customers)

Possible questions to ask:

Action:

Do at least three interviews

Make sure you do at least 3 interviews with 3 candidates you really like. Ideally, they should all be fantastic candidates on paper.

Trial Stage

By this point, you should have tested candidates, interviewed them and now have 2-3 candidates that you think might be a good fit. You might even have 1 candidate that you think is a winner and you want to hire that person right away, fight that urge.

Testing and an initial interview usually only account for 10% of the candidates overall fit for that position, that’s why I suggest you try what I call ‘real world interviewing.’ You’re going to take this person (I always suggest you try two or more) out for a day of work.

Track them using some kind of tracking software like Time Doctor and give them all the same tasks. The results almost always surprise you. I’ll see some candidates that don’t appear to be the strongest candidates during an interview that work incredibly well and candidates who seem to have all the right answers during an interview work out horribly during this process. Once they’ve gone through the day look at both candidates and make your decision.

Action:

Try a real-world interview with two or more candidates

Make sure you get at least one day on a trial with candidates. Make sure you also pay them for their time.

Common Hiring Misconceptions

As you kick-start your search for a freelancer, steer clear from these common misconceptions that can affect your hiring process:

Cheaper Talent = Quality Work

Some entrepreneurs hire freelancers for the lowest rates possible but expect the same quality of work that you get from expensive freelancers.

Paying a lower rate may seem like a good financial decision in the short run, but it always costs more in the long run when your low paid freelancer delivers poor quality work or does not complete projects on time. It is better to spend a few dollars extra to ensure you have the best people on your team.

Hiring Only One Freelancer

It may seem simple to hire one virtual assistant to do all your jobs than to maintain a team of freelancers handing different aspects of your business. However, it’s a risky situation because your lone VA can quit anytime. You would then have to scramble and find new freelancers to fit their role.

If you hire VAs for different tasks, you are in a better position to replace one assistant with another. You will also benefit from hiring specialized VAs or freelancers for specific tasks.

Hiring Freelancers as Temps

Many entrepreneurs hire freelancers as a temporary workforce to handle a single project. However, hiring freelancers on a long-term basis can not only help you scale up faster but also ensure a higher level of commitment from that freelancer since he knows that this client is going to give him work over a substantial period of time. Long-term contracts with freelancers also ensure you get better quality and priority from the freelancer.

The Training Process

An effective training system is essential to ensure that your outsourced team can understand and complete tasks within a set deadline and to required specifications.

All large companies that outsource their projects to BPOs or KPOs take their offshore teams through regular formal training programs. You should do the same if you want to ensure that you get high quality and productivity from your team.

Here are a few ways you can train your team members:

Hold Video Conferences

A video chat is a great way to introduce yourself to your team. You can take them on a virtual tour of your office, introduce them to colleagues, and engage with them face-to-face.

You can use video conferencing to show your freelancer the exact specifications of the task. However, freelancers from countries with poor internet bandwidth can struggle with common platforms like Skype or Google Hangouts. In such cases, use video chat services like Agora.io that provide a strong and clear image for low-bandwidth situations.

Make the most of video chat training sessions by recording them for future use. You can use footage from the session to produce step-by-step tutorials, FAQs and other aids to help your outsourced team.

Create A Training Manual

Creating a comprehensive document that details all processes and guidelines can seem time-consuming. But it is an effective method in the long-run. A training manual eliminates the possibility of repeating training instructions for every new freelancer that joins your team. If your outsourced agency or freelancer has a question, they can refer to the training manual.

You can host this document on file sharing platforms like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

Your training manual should include:

Assign Knowledge Building Tasks

During the first few weeks, give your VAs or freelancers access to a wide range of company-specific files to read in their free time. This will help them understand your business, your mission, company values, and work practices.

Check in on their progress in a couple of days. I like to quiz my virtual assistants on what they learned, and how they can use this information to better their work.

Communicating With Freelancers

This is actually the hardest part of the outsourcing process – establishing a clear and concise communication system between you and your outsourced staff.

Create A Wiki

Some kind of a process database is critical to communicating with freelance workers. Make sure you have a central place where you place all of your operational procedures (we’ll be getting into how to do that later on).

At Time Doctor, we built our own wiki. You can go that route or you can just start with simple Google Documents that can be shared in the cloud.

Action:

Figure out how you’re going to communicate procedures to your team

Wiki, Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net, take a look at them all!

Sending Effective Emails And Messages

For outsourcing to be effective as it can be, clear and concise email communication between both parties needs to be established.

In fact, rather than use email to communicate with your team, if you use Slack, add them to your team. Alternatively, using a social project management tool like ClickUp allows you to communicate about specific tasks without email.

When your worker is 5,000 miles away – you need to be able to quickly communicate exactly what you need doing in simple and concise terms.

When you’re communicating through emails, slack or even a social project management tool, keep these points in mind:

Leveraging Project Management Tools

A project management tool of some kind is necessary with freelancers in order to keep all resources, task lists and progress centralized. Here are a few of the top ones to consider:

ClickUp

The most feature-rich social project management tool where nearly every feature is free. ClickUp allows you to visualize your projects in multiple formats such as lists, Kanban, calendar views, etc. The custom fields feature makes the tool extremely flexible and allows you to easily adapt ClickUp to your company’s specific needs.

Basecamp

The classic team task/project management tool. Great if you want a simple tool with very basic features.

Asana

One of the most popular project management tools which help your team stay on track of multiples projects and tasks.

For more options, check out our list of top project management tools.

Other Important Tools

Time Doctor

Time Doctor is a feature-rich time tracking app which serves the following functions:

Track Hours Worked

Keep track of the exact number of hours each freelancer/ FTE has spent on each task, project or during a period – day, week, month, etc.

Calculate Billable Hours

Automatically calculate billable hours so you know automatically how much each freelancer should be paid.

Track Web Activity

Track web activity to make sure your remote team members don’t waste excessive time on personal tasks during work hours and bill you unfairly.

Manage Distractions

Keep team members more productive by helping them manage distractions such as social media and entertainment sites. If your freelancers open such sites while working on a task, Time Doctor will automatically detect it and generate a pop-up to confirm you if you are still on that task. Managers can check web activity reports to see which websites they were visited during work hours.

Google Drive

Kind of a hybrid between Dropbox and a basic project management tool, Google Drive basically pulls in all the Google Docs tools and keeps everything up-to-date in the cloud. Multiple people can collaborate on the same document simultaneously, which makes it incredibly useful for distributed teams.

Create Common Chat Rooms – Slack

Tools like Skype or Slack can provide chat logs within specific groups or “rooms” in which you can include specific people.

This way your in-house employees, as well as freelancers, can always come back in to read text logs and keep on top of what happened in other working groups or time zones.

Action:

Set up a company chat room

Have a company chat room set up for all your employees, including freelancers and virtual assistants. If you have a larger team, set up division chat rooms as well so you can enable and keep track of the chatter across teams.

Paying Your Freelancers

How Much Should You Pay?

Here are the median salary rates in different countries according to Payscale:

Asian countries offer cheaper rates than Eastern Europe and the USA. However, Eastern European freelancers are worth the additional investment in certain domains, as they have greater technical expertise and have the advantage of being multilingual.

While these are the median rates, the actual rates can differ depending on the task and hiring platform.

When it comes to hiring Filipino freelancers, entrepreneur Chris Ducker suggests the following monthly rates –

The bottom line is that you can decide your own hourly rates, provided they fall under the market guidelines.

How can you ensure that you are paying your freelancers fairly?

Keep track of the time spent by your freelancers and virtual assistants and then multiply it with the predetermined hourly rates. Time Doctor’s payroll feature automatically calculates payout based on the hours tracked.

How To Send Payments Overseas?

In this section, I will give you a brief overview of some useful online money transfer platforms:

PayPal

PayPal is undoubtedly the largest online payments processor in the world. A large number of businesses and people are already on this platform. Chances are that your freelancers would already have a Paypal account.

Features

Payment Fees

Recommended For

Payoneer

Payoneer is a global payment and money transfer service.

Features

Payment Fees

Recommended For

Skrill

Skrill (previously known as MoneyBookers) is an electronic payment solutions service based in the UK.

Features

Payment Fees

Recommended for

Xoom is a fast online transfer service owned by Paypal.

Features

Payment Fees

Recommended for

Wise, formerly Transferwise

Wise, formerly Transferwise offers low-cost overseas money transfer services.

Features

Payment Fees

Recommended For

How To Scale Your Outsourced Team

As a small business owner, you will need to decide when to scale up your business. Here are some indications that you need to add more manpower:

Along with your in-house team, you would need to scale up your outsourced team. Here’s how you can ensure a smooth expansion process:

Have A Selective Hiring Process

When you are scaling quickly, there are some things that shouldn’t be rushed. Invest time in interviewing each freelance or FTE candidate, test their skills and hire them on a trial basis.

It’s important for the success of your company to only hire freelancers or FTEs who have a track record of excellence. Make sure you don’t skip any important interviewing and vetting steps. Otherwise, you may hire low-quality workers who need to be replaced a few months down the road.

You might need to invest in an RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) service that can supply potential candidates during the scaling process.

Use Multiple Recruiting Methods

While you can use a recruiter to do all the heavy lifting of finding new candidates, you should also actively recruit on your own. Sometimes it’s better to know your freelancers before you hire them.

Nick Francis, CEO of Helpscout, spends 20-30% of his time searching for remote talent. He uses sites like Angelist, StackOverflow, Anthology, WeWorkRemotely, and GrowthHackers to find potential freelancers.

This approach can work if you have a fair understanding or experience of the job role.

Create An Onboarding Process

When you hire a new freelancer, there is bound to be a lot of paperwork. You have to sign contracts, conduct company training for the new joinees, and other general information that needs to be shared with an outsourced agency or freelancer.

If your onboarding process is streamlined, it will make this entire process of adding new freelancers a simple job.

Consider using a tool like Process Street to map your hiring and onboarding process in pre-defined steps and checklists. This will save you tons of time as well as give your new team members an excellent impression of your company – always important to ensure high engagement and motivation levels.

Your onboarding process should consider the following details:

A clear onboarding process allows you to integrate your freelancers with the in-house team with ease.

If you don’t have a solid onboarding process, you might run into problems within a few months.

Your freelancers might produce deliverables that vary from your expectations. You might realize that someone you hired recently isn’t legally allowed to work in your company. It can cost your company a lot of time, money and rehiring to recover from a shoddy onboarding regime.

Prioritize Communication

When you hire multiple freelancers or virtual assistants, you need to ensure they all are on the same page. It can be difficult to communicate while working remotely, so you need to create a checklist of tools that can fine-tune company communication:

Effective communication also depends on the integrity of your work process. Set clear expectations of when projects are due, who to report to, and who to come to with questions.

A large percentage of executives (86%) believe that ineffective communication and lack of collaboration are major causes of workplace failures.

Streamline Productivity Tools

Your freelancers may have access to various productivity and communication tools. However, it’s better to standardize and streamline the entire team’s tools.

Ensure that everyone receives your messages and assignments, communicates with team members, and send deliverables using common platforms.

For example, all your teams and departments can schedule tasks and duties using a single project tool like ClickUp and communicate easily through Slack. Both these apps allow you to check your outsourced team’s progress from any device.

To track productivity and log in project billing time, you can introduce your team to Time Doctor. This tool has several features to accurately track actual time spent on tasks so that you are sure that your remote team was actually working and not wasting their time during work hours.

Process Design

Process design is all about having the critical elements and resources in place to help your outsourced worker perform at the same level you want them to.

While there is a bit of training involved with any job, it’s much harder to manage the quality and flow from abroad. Unlike traditional jobs, the material must be available in a consistent and clear format to ensure that no matter who is doing the job – or from where – they are achieving similar results.

How To Build Your Process

There are 4 rules for building your own processes:

Action:

Try this on one process today

Go ahead and write up a process guide, send that guide to your employees as well as freelancers, ask them what needs to be changed and go through the top three D’s till you get it right.

Refining Your Process

Once you’ve set up all your procedures, you’re going to want to some organic training process.

Organic means that you don’t just institute them, but that they come from your staff. All our procedures are treated like laws that have to be followed, but if you think you have a better one, we’ll review it as a team and add it in.

We even offer bonuses to all employees including any freelance members who spend the time creating a great process that gets added to our daily operations.

Virtual Training Is Different

The number 1 problem that I have encountered while consulting for big firms that outsource work, is that they think everyone else is the problem but them.

Be open to the possibility that you are the problem. Let that sink in for a minute.

If your staff is failing you and you’ve done everything else in this guide up until now, the way you’re communicating processes to your staff may be the issue. There’s a fair chance that the problem lies with you and you need to change in order to make your staff more successful.

Remember that training somebody in person is very different from training somebody 10,000 miles away. It requires a different management philosophy and when you end up running into problems (and you will), step back and instead of blaming the worker, ask yourself how you could better communicate what you want done to your team.

Building Redundant Processes

In the last section, we covered some of the core theory of Process Design. This section will be dedicated to actually implementing the theory and making sure your new freelancers are able to follow the redundant processes created.

The 4 Main Types of Redundant Processes

Redundant processes are things you should be doing all the time and in the same format in order to keep things moving smoothly.

There are 4 main types or categories of redundant processes that we use:

Content Creation

Social Media

Development

Effective Forum Posting

Forum posting helps to both bring clients to our website.

Step 1: Go to Google and search for your chosen keywords.

Step 2: In the search results, look for forums in which you can write a comment relating to your chosen keyword. You may need to register a new account if you haven’t already done so.

Step 3: Comment on the chosen forum with a meaningful response. You can include a signature with a link back to your site (if the forum allows). Repeat this same process for any other related forums in the search results. Do this on a daily or weekly basis to continue to drive traffic to your site.

Generating Leads Through Twitter

Lead generation is the MOST important task in our business. Think of leads as oxygen. We need it to survive! Here is how you can do it:

Step 1: Either open a new twitter account or check the note section below to see if you have been assigned a twitter account to manage.

Step 2: Go to Twitter Search and search for the keywords that are of interest to you.

Step 3: Those tweets that are relevant to the product or service we are selling should be first added to our twitter followers and secondly should be responded to as an @reply.

Step 4: Respond to each twitter account individually with a unique response;

Step 5: Go to friendorfollow.com each week, delete those twitter accounts who have not added us to their list of followers.

If a customer responds through a PM or an @reply: Restate your desire to help them and answer their questions, always place the url in your reply or PM so that the person can visit the site.

Pro Tip:

Make sure your responses are natural and directly address the tweet, you do not want to spam accounts as this may get the account banned.

YouTube Lead Generation And Optimization

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Billions of people view YouTube videos every year and it is a central component of a well-rounded traffic generation technique for any online campaign.

Today you will be learning the fundamental components of how to optimize a video so that it ranks on YouTube.

Step 1: Log in to your YouTube account and/or create a YouTube account (check the notes below to find out if you have a login).

Step 2: Search for the seed keywords that have been assigned to you by your project manager and expand on those keywords in the YouTube keyword suggestion tool.

Step 3: Create appropriate YouTube videos from these keywords.

Step 4: Collect the descriptions and tags for the top videos that come up for the keyword you’re trying to optimize for.

Step 5: Provide the urls of the videos you have uploaded in your daily accountability report and the keyword you’ve optimized each video for.

Check That Work Is Done

Now that you’ve seen some examples of redundant processes you need to make sure they’re getting done.

Again, a tool like Time Doctor will help you make sure that things are getting done on a daily basis.

You should also set up a weekly report.

Quarterly reports then become more of an outlook report – this is what we accomplished this quarter, what do we need to accomplish next quarter and how do we position ourselves for that?

Conclusion

Outsourcing can help you focus on your core competence. It saves you money, time and helps you scale. Which business processes will you start outsourcing? Let us know in the comments.

Lauren Soucy is the VP of Marketing for Time Doctor, the world’s leading time tracking and productivity software. She has 15+ years of experience in marketing at fast-paced companies. Her first passion is SEO, she can’t start her day without coffee, and she enjoys spending time at the beach with her two boys and her husband.