In an effort to save costs and add flexibility, image companies are increasingly trying outworking or teleworking, having labour supplied from the homes of employees or contractors. It seems like smart work practice, but its a long way short of proper outsourcing.
Here are three reasons why you should choose outsourcing over outworking:
1. Whilst you may save on office space and electricity, that may be about all you save with outworkers. IT support is often still needed, and staff working from home often have to be reimbursed for internet and/or telephone. That cost is taken care of by an outsourcing company which runs all systems at high levels of efficiency.
2. Outworking doesn’t shelter you from the costs of a fluctuating workforce. That is, that staff will continue to come and go, requiring expenditure on recruitment and training – the latter likely to be much more difficult without space in your office where the staff can be given supervised training. Recruitment and training are just part of the service with outsourcing, managing the workforce is a huge chunk of what outsourcing companies do.
3. Productivity and quality are hard to keep under control when staff work unsupervised from home or as single contractors. That isn’t the case with outsourcing, where efficiency and quality are crucial to the contract being renewed and the good running of the outsource company. Even if they’re not, you are sheltered from any inefficiency by fixed prices. Depending on the payment regime, there may be no link to productivity for outworkers. While shifting staff to home offices may work well for a while, it is easy for that to slip when there are no watchful eyes or performance measures.
To find out more about outsourcing metadata, keywording and other image services, click here.