Outsourcing is an effective way for your startup company to expand its reach and accomplish business targets. However, it also comes with some challenges that you need to be ready to handle.
One of these is ensuring accountability in the work the outsourcing team does. That is especially the case when working with a remote team since you can’t interact directly. So, how do you encourage that value in your partnership? Let’s find out.
The Challenge of Accountability During Outsourcing
To better plan out how your startup business will bolster accountability, you need to understand the challenges that you can encounter. Overcoming these challenges will help you better integrate this value into your and your outsourcing partner’s work processes.
The Challenge Of Maintaining Control
A common misconception of many companies about accountability is that it is all about control. Thus, they often try to impose various metrics and rules to ensure that the team accomplishes what they have signed up for.
Image from Flexis.
However, this puts undue pressure on your outsourcing partner. While they are used to monitoring, they might find it limiting their work styles. It can result in low morale, affecting productivity.
The challenge lies in growing out of this mindset. Since startups are themselves hard-pressed to deliver results, they may have difficulties thinking of alternatives. There is also the challenge of being good examples themselves.
The Challenge Of Improving The System
Continuing from the above, companies can also become preoccupied with improving individual performances. For instance, they might focus more on identifying those who are performing poorly. Because of this, they might overlook the influence of the whole work system on these performances.
Image from ClearPoint Strategy.
Hence, improving accountability in outsourcing should involve improving your whole system. That will require you to do a comprehensive review of your processes and practices. From there, you need to determine how these influence the performance of the outsourced team. Because of the extensive work that they need to do, companies can struggle to implement it.
The Need For Emotional Intelligence
Some companies may also have a mechanical view of accountability. People just need to make sure that they do their job and that’s pretty much it. However, as seen above, there is more involved than just that.
And one of the things that they might overlook is the emotional aspect of accountability. Remember that the outsourced team is also very much human. Hence, they will have emotions that can affect how they perform their work.
image from Techtello.
Thus, you need to respond to their concerns more empathically. Here, you must be ready to listen to their stories and respond accordingly. It will require a lot of training for you to be more adept in reading their emotions.
Can Accountability Be Outsourced?
Since we are on the topic of outsourcing, one interesting question might come to your mind: Can you outsource accountability itself? That seems to be a reasonable proposition since you can pretty much outsource every aspect of your business.
However, that is not the case with the case of accountability. You can indeed outsource some accountability-related tasks, such as data management and human resource. However, the core task of ensuring that everyone can take responsibility for their actions still needs to come from you.
Thus, you need to actively seek accountability from the different teams that work with you. As the main decision-maker for the startup company, you have to see what is happening first. That will help you make informed decisions that everyone can commit to.
How Your Startup Company Can Improve Accountability During Outsourcing
Ensuring and improving accountability when outsourcing begins with setting up the partnership right. Your chosen partner should already have a clear plan to ensure that their work satisfies the contract. You would want to look at specific practices such as schedule handling and resource management. That will let you see how they make sure their work is on point. Check out their escalation procedures to see how they report and resolve those concerns.
Image from PDPC.
A particular document that you should also prepare is a statement of work. It details the specific deliverables that the outsourcing provider must accomplish. Make sure that all the parameters of these deliverables are4 are clear to avoid any confusion.
Creating More Value
In a traditional outsourcing engagement, your goal when evaluating business processes is to determine how to do them more efficiently. But if you have set up your overall outsourcing practices right, that part will come in automatically.
Thus, your next step in improving outsourcing accountability is finding out how to create more value from the partnership. The idea is to evaluate each business task not on the number of resources they used. Instead, you want it based on the value they create for both parties.
Alongside this value, you and your partner will also share the risks. That encourages both of you to be more active in protecting your shared interests. By seeing the sharing of these risks in a more positive light, both can better plan out how they mitigate these and boost the partnership’s success.
Aligning The Provider With Your Business
You have probably heard this one a lot of times already. To improve accountability, you need to align the provider with your business. But how does that work in practice? Here, we need to go back to the above idea of building a value-based outsourcing relationship.
Creating that value is not something you can do in the short term. You need to project what role your partner will play in your long-term business development. In this situation, both parties should talk about long-term accountability strategies.
For instance, you need to discuss what responsibilities they will likely have based on your projected company growth. You can also tackle what strategies they might employ in case of changes in your overall direction. All of these will give you a clearer picture of how they will handle long-term accountability.
Improving Your Management Strategies
Ultimately, increasing accountability in an outsourcing partnership is an evolving process. As you implement these strategies, see what works for both sides. It would help a lot for you to get regular feedback to also know any challenges they might face.
Image from Pramodrrao.
From those observations, you and your partner can devise new strategies. Here, the goal is to ensure that both sides can work comfortably while still delivering the best results. Note that there will be a lot of back and forth here, as you seek out a compromise. For that, we go back to the idea of using emotional intelligence to better weigh upon these compromises and decide whether to accept them.
Get MORE Of Outsourcing With The Right Accountability Partner
We at Virtua Solutions value greater accountability as much as your startup business does. As such, we have made it our goal to ensure that every client achieves their desired results with us. Contact us today and we are ready to help your outsourcing efforts in every way we can.