Jul

26

According to the Harvard Business Review, a few key essentials can give a project team a fighting chance for success.

What makes a project team work well and succeed can seem like a mystery but a project team with the following defining characteristics can be guaranteed with better chances for success:

A COMMON PURPOSE. Teams form as a result of an outside mandate. To work together effectively, the teams’ members need to rally around a meaningful purpose each member has embraced as his/her own.

COMPLEMENTARY SKILLS AND PERSPECTIVES. It’s detrimental for everyone on a team to have the same skills and perspective. When members have varying technical and functional expertise and bring different approaches to problem-solving and decision-making make for a more successful team.

MUTUAL ACCOUNTABILITY. The process of agreeing on a goal together will forge trust and build the team’s accountability to one another. One cannot coerce commitment.

Jun

7

Over the past few months, management at my company has been discussing the recent trend of Filipino employees working from home. We have noticed a significant spike in the number of Filipinos who are now working at home either in a full-time capacity or part-time after their regular office hours.

During our interview process for new applicants, we see an ever increasing number of employees with at least some experience working from home. Since this has been a topic of discussion in our office, I thought this would make and interesting topic for OutsourcingOpinions.com.

As I was formulating my thoughts for this topic, an email notification popped up from one of the groups I belong to in LinkedIn. It said that Raffy Pekson had posted a new topic called How to Employ At-Home Agents for your Business. In this timely article, Raffy lays out key factors that should be considered when employing at-home agents. His intention is to teach people the factors that need to be considered to make this a successful venture, however in laying out his road map, he very accurately describes almost all of the pitfalls that I myself had laid out in my outline for this article. He mentions issues such as internet connectivity, culture, and maturity.

Read more

Jul

19

As we all know, the past 12 – 24 months have been the roughest economic times most of us will ever see in our lifetime. Large corporations have had to make the difficult decision to lay off thousands of employees just to stay afloat.  Small businesses haven’t been so “lucky”.  These businesses are typically dependent on a smaller number of employees who already wear multiple hats within the business.   For them, a decision to cut staff means that they now have trouble providing their services and in many cases just end up closing their doors.

So how can some of these small businesses survive? Outsourcing! Unfortunately, many small business owners aren’t aware that they too can take advantage of outsourcing or they don’t know where to start. Others may even fear outsourcing because it is something so foreign to them (pardon the pun).  But taking that leap into outsourcing might mean the difference between survival and demise. And being able to manage your costs will not only help you survive the recession but when the economy starts growing again (which it will) you will come out more profitable then you were prior to the recession.  So the key for these small businesses is to arm themselves with knowledge about how they can leverage outsourcing to their advantage.

With a little creativity, these small business owners can take a look at the functions of their employees and try to consolidate all of those roles that can be done remotely.  They can then create job descriptions for these new positions, and look to outsourcing companies who provide dedicated employees to fill these roles.  These types of companies will allow you to take advantage of the cost savings of outsourcing while maintaining control over your employee.  But small business owners should make sure they do their due diligence when selecting an outsourcing partner. They should look for companies who have western management, redundant business-grade internet, back-up power sources, etc.  They should also be sure to speak with a principal of that company before making their final selection to make sure they feel comfortable with their new business partner.

When times are tough, a little creative reorganization can go a long way to helping you survive.  The global marketplace isn’t just for large corporations with vast resources anymore.  Use those resources to not only survive the recession, but hopefully to also come out more profitable.

Jeff Hintze
COO
Phil-Am Outsourcing Solutions, Inc.

Jul

12

Dear Reader,

Thank you for your participation at OutsourcingOpinions.com.  I’m excited to be an integral part of this website with the launch of its new Expert Corner.

The main goal of Expert Corner is to give readers direct access to a real person who has working knowledge in outsourcing. You will be able to interact with me by clicking on the link found under my profile picture. I will then post my response as an article here on this page.  Ideally, this interaction will help our readers gain more knowledge about outsourcing and how they can take advantage of it, especially in these tough economic times.  In addition to answering questions submitted by users, I will occasionally be posting articles on topics that we hope will be of interest to you.

I’m honored to have been chosen to work with Outsourcing Opinions as their outsourcing expert and look forward to interacting with all of you.

Jeff Hintze
COO
Phil-Am Outsourcing Solutions, Inc.

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