“My current staff may feel a little bit threatened by having someone off shore”. If that’s happening – it is more the fault of the employer.

Topic – Busting the outsourcing myths

Mentor – Mark Engelmann

• Shows a lack of leadership
• Needs a “change management” plan
• Focus on the benefits for staff

Transcript:

Kevin Turner: It’s Thursday morning, good morning and welcome to RE Uncut, I’m Kevin Turner and the show each and every morning produced in association with PropertyTree from Rockend, PrintForce, LockedOn, Beepo, and View. You can contact any one of our sponsors by using any of the buttons on all the pages on our RE Uncut. And by the way, if you’ve got a question or a comment about the industry, fire it into us and we’ll get it answered for you either in the show or we’ll do it directly. Just email me at kevin@realestatetalk.com.au or leave a message on today’s show. View, one of our sponsors, they connect and they empower buyers, sellers, and agents with data analytics and property information. You will get the complete view right there. View. Let’s get underway with today’s show.

Ad: More thoughts now from this week’s mentor.

Kevin Turner: One of the things I’m constantly told about outsourcing when we go to talk about it is oh, I don’t know that my current staff would like me doing that sort of thing. We are talking to Mark Engelmann this week, Mark is from Beepo, one of our supporters, one of our sponsors and we’re demystifying getting rid of some of the myths about outsourcing. So far we’ve looked at staff having poor English skills on Monday, on Tuesday we had a look at the quality standards being compromised, and yesterday we talked about data security. Absolutely critical. So if you’ve missed any of those, go back and have a listen to them.

Mark, I want to pick up this morning on this issue of my current staff may feel a little bit threatened by having someone off shore. That’s not necessarily a Beepo problem, that’s more the fault if I could use that word of the employer I would’ve thought.

Mark: It’s really interesting. I think to some degree it may show a lack of leadership on the employer’s part. It’s simply when engaging with an outsourcing provider and building an optional team, that’s simply a project in your business that needs a good change management plan that works really well and if that change management piece is successful in your business then this current staff should not feel threatened at all.

And one thing that we always talk to our customers about who have this concern is ways in which they can position the idea of having an outsourced team and I think a lot of people feel threatened because in Australia we have this island mentality in that we live on this big island, effectively in the middle of nowhere in terms of the world, and we’re just not used to working with people from other cultures and from overseas. And that, culturally, I think makes people feel uncomfortable.

What I often say to employers is, you need to get your staff to understand that what you’re doing is something that’s going to help them, it’s going to free them up, it’s going to get them focusing on those tasks in the business that they enjoy doing, those high-level revenue generating tasks that are engaging and at the end of the day that that person in Australia in your team was likely hired for. And what we tend to see is that when you hire someone, you hire them and there’s a great vision about what they’ll be doing in your business. But because of all of the admin burden and the compliance work, they end up doing a lot of paper based work and moving forms around. It’s that sort of non-revenue generating, admin burden type work that you send to your offshore team.

And so in a real estate business for example, heavily compliant industry, lots of paperwork, lots of forms. Take a property manager for example, if you went to your property manager and said, “Look, I want to take all of that process orientated work off your hands so that you can focus on growing the rent rolls, getting more listings, talking to our tenants and landlords more,” I would think that a property manager would jump at the opportunity …

Kevin Turner: Jump. Absolutely. Yeah.

Mark: … to do what it was that they thought they were going to get into in the first place.

Kevin Turner: Yeah, and I think it can be a mistake too to think of your outsourced person as just someone who’s going to do menial tasks. It’s a very important role. It’s a support role. It allows you to get on and do the more productive things and I think that’s how you can sell that the your existing staff, Mark.

Mark: Yeah. Totally. And I think from a business’s point of view, if you go into outsourcing thinking that it’s a cost-cutting …

Kevin Turner: Yes.

Mark: … programme, then you’ve stepped off on the wrong foot straight away. What outsourcing is is it’s a tool, it’s a lever that you can utilise in your business to grow your business and to provide that support to your existing team so that they can provide better customer service, provide a better sales environment for your customers, and grow your business, not cut costs.

Kevin Turner: We are discussing the myths about outsourcing with Mark Engelmann, an opportunity for you to get across and see Mark and his team at the Beepo offices in Clark in the Philippines on the 12th and 13th of June, it’s a study tour. You can get all the details by going, using any one of the links on any one of the pages on RE Uncut and book in for that study tour.

We’re going to round this series out tomorrow when we come back, Mark, and talk about clients not liking the fact that you are outsourcing. Another big subject and that’s the one we’ll tackle tomorrow when Mark comes back. Thanks, mate, talk to you then.

Mark: Thanks, Kevin, see you.

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Jet: The great artist Leonardo da Vinci says, “It had since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” I’m Jet Xavier, have a great day.

Kevin Turner: Thanks, Jet. That’s it for today, thanks for your company, look forward to catching you up again tomorrow morning.