Are you being pushed to move your talent offshore?
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One of the coolest things I did just before the pandemic was dive into the digital nomad lifestyle. I had some leave to burn, so I went and lived in one of these shared housing communities for a week, which is where all the digital nomads go. The talent you find in those places just blows your mind. You go to the coffee shop downstairs and there are these people working, throwing ideas left, right and center. You could sit there for a year just to steal ideas and you can't find that energy anywhere else.
I spoke to a professor from Stanford who has been doing some research on the return to office and hybrid work patterns. He's done a lot of longitudinal tracking of what people want to do and for knowledge workers, about 30% don't want to ever come back to the office; 20% want to be in the office five days a week. Then, everybody in between wanted a two- or three-day or formula for hybrid working. One of his points, which I never thought about, was that as we get more adept at remote work and we have more people that say they’re not coming in, there might be a renewed interest in outsourcing. It'll become more appealing, because if you're going to deal with remote workers anyway, then there are cheaper workers out there who are willing to come in and work collaboratively in small clumps. They also may not have the same entitlement perceptions that people have in North America.
I'm finding that I need to offshore because I can't find talent. Of course, you can always find talent if you throw endless amounts of money at it, but at some point that becomes untenable. We looked at all large global cities to find three or four, and then picked one to become the new IT hub. It was funny to see how they picked cities, because the choices were all over the place. It was also interesting to see all the different universities and what kind of tech talent they focus on developing in those cities.
My business is very hands-on and in-person, so I'm not sure that an offshoring model could work. But the thought has started to cross my mind for the help desk, because I can't retain that skillset; that person is the first one to burn out.
I've tried to convince our HR department that if we're going to have remote workers at all, we shouldn’t just recruit here when we’re having trouble hiring. But we don't do national recruiting to attract people in the Midwest who may be stuck, for example. I think back to when Jet Blue started up, because they outsourced their call center to moms in Utah who needed jobs to do while their kids were in school. They let them work remotely and set them up with phones at home. They grew the company incredibly fast that way because they took advantage of what they knew. Why aren't we advertising in places where we know there are such economic issues? But I can't get our HR to think that way yet. I just barely got them to approve our first full-time remote employee working in a different state; the only reason that worked is because he was here until his wife took a job in a different state, so they let him stay. They're finding out now that they don't even notice that he is not here anymore. A number of people were surprised to find out he's not here.