Archive for March, 2010
Posted on March 29, 2010 by Atul
An often ignored discipline during outsourcing and/or globalization initiatives. This was published in Outsourcing Magazine (Malaysia).
Author – Atul Vashistha
Making globalisation work: Do the communications right!.
Making globalisation work: Do the communications right!
BY Atul Vashistha
Communicating effectively with your internal and external stakeholders is an important part of successful globalisation initiatives. That’s important because opinions, if they become negative, can turn into behaviours that threaten to derail an initiative. Positive opinions, on the other hand, can turn into behaviours that contribute substantially to an initiative’s success.
Internal communications
When communicating with internal stakeholders (including all of your organisation’s employees, from the C-suite to the frontlines), focus on goal, path and potential outcomes and follow these five best practices:
- Begin your communication early: Start at the onset of your initiative-planning phase. Then, communicate often. Most successful globalisers have periodic briefings about the progress of the initiative as well as ad-hoc proactive communications.
- Resist empty communication: When organisations try to communicate, but don’t really end up saying anything concrete, the outcome can be worse than not communicating at all. When you communicate with your employees, you raise their expectation that they will learn about how the globalisation initiative will affect their future; don’t let them down. They’ll learn not just about why it’s important to the firm but also the WIFM (What’s In it For Me).
- Forget persuasion as the primary objective: Your principal goal in communicating potential outcomes to your internal stakeholders is not to bring them over to your way of thinking; it’s to help them understand the importance of the initiative to the company and how they will personally be handled. Instead of trying to persuade your employees, let an “opinion leader” – a leader within the company who’s well respected and trusted – speak of the initiative and its potential outcomes. Trust and open communications is key.
- Be honest: Of course, you want to position your globalisation initiative in the best light. But resist the temptation to sugar-coat potentially negative outcomes for your employees. Instead, communicate the whole range of possible outcomes – both positive and negative and how you intend to handle it.
- Cascade messages: Allow a variety of people to be part of communicating your message to the organisation’s internal stakeholders. The CEO, HR managers, line managers, and business unit heads are all good candidates for the job of communicating with your employees.
External communications
No less important than an organisation’s internal stakeholders are its external stakeholders. There are two potential problem-points for your company’s external relations: the perception of the general public and the experiences of your customers.
Clearly, managing customers’ experiences is critical to a company’s success. But managing the perception of the general public is critical, as well, as public perception has a lot of power to fuel customers’ buying decisions as well as political pressure on domestic organisations.
In the public realm, globalisation, outsourcing, and offshoring have once again become four-letter words.
And in the customer sphere, there has recently been some backlash against companies that have globalised services, as some customers have experienced service issues associated with offshore centres (call centres, most notably). Some enterprises have even begun to scale back customer-facing offshore operations as a result of the negative customer feedback. But overall the industry continues to grow.
Yet reining in global services operations is not the only – nor likely the best – answer. If services globalisation were better communicated to organisations’ external audiences, it would likely be met with a higher level of acceptance.
That’s E-Loan’s philosophy, and it has paid off well. In early 2004, the online lender launched an offshore outsourcing pilot programmeme for its back-office processes. In keeping with the company’s “honesty is the best policy” stance, the company discloses the details of its offshore programme to its customers before they complete their applications, and gives them the option of opting out and instead having their application processed domestically.
According to E-Loan’s Chief Privacy Officer, 87% of the organisation’s customers choose the offshore option, for the faster processing it provides. “The results of our programme support the idea that when you make the effort to explain the ‘what, where, and why’ to consumers, they are comfortable with it.”
Effective communication requires strong commitment from key management and a deliberate, well thought out strategy to address the concerns of internal and external stakeholders. The reward for getting the communication part of the initiative right is that internal and external stakeholders will help propel the initiative forward, rather than conspire to hold it back.
Posted on March 27, 2010 by Atul
This trend to establish operations in key locations is important or else offshore outsourcing firms cannot effectively serve global clients or compete effectively against the original global players.
Genpact Expands its Presence in Romania | Business Wire.
Five years after entering Romania, Genpact establishes additional center in Cluj-Napoca to accommodate its growing presence in Eastern Europe
BUCHAREST, Romania–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Genpact Limited (NYSE: G), a leader in managing business processes, today announced it would expand its presence in Romania by acquiring a new facility in the Transylvanian city of Cluj-Napoca.
“We are extremely excited to continue investing and expanding in Romania, which has proven to be a fantastic source of talent for our business and our clients for over 5 years of presence here”
Genpact, which has over 38,600 employees worldwide and a global presence in 13 countries, entered Romania in 2005 with its operations center in the country’s capital, Bucharest. In 2007, Genpact established a center in Cluj-Napoca as part of its strategy to invest in Tier II cities. Encouraged by the availability of local talent, infrastructure, and cost-effective operations, Genpact is now building additional capacity in Cluj-Napoca – one of its most dynamic locations in Europe. The new Cluj-Napoca facility is expected to be operational by July 2010.
“We are extremely excited to continue investing and expanding in Romania, which has proven to be a fantastic source of talent for our business and our clients for over 5 years of presence here,” said Patrick Cogny, CEO, Genpact Europe.
“Over the last two and a half years, the service delivery centre in Cluj-Napoca has expanded its capability to cover the entire spectrum of Finance and Accounting services – including Procure to Pay and Order to Cash, Record to Report – Order Management and Customer Services. The expansion positions Genpact well for growth in scope and scale for existing and new clients in Europe looking to make their business processes more effective,” said Ramneesh Mohan, Genpact’s Site Leader for Cluj, Romania.
“The employees Genpact will hire in Cluj-Napoca this year will include economics graduates, accountants, and language professionals – for jobs ranging from accounts payable and order management to customer collections, and high-end accounting and controllership,” said Iulia Nare, Genpact’s HR Manager for Cluj, Romania.
Currently, Genpact provides Finance & Accounting, Procurement, IT Helpdesk, and Customer Support services from Romania to more than 20 clients from Western Europe and the United States. This year, the company expects to create several hundred new jobs in Romania, being one of the most active local employers in 2010.
About Genpact
Genpact is a leader in managing business processes, offering a broad portfolio of enterprise and industry-specific services. The company manages over 3,000 processes for more than 400 clients worldwide. Putting process in the forefront, Genpact couples its deep process knowledge and insights with focused IT capabilities, targeted analytics and pragmatic reengineering to deliver comprehensive solutions for clients. Lean and Six Sigma are an integral part of Genpact’s culture and Genpact views the management of business processes as a science. Genpact has developed Smart Enterprise Processes (SEPSM), a groundbreaking, rigorously scientific methodology for managing business processes, which focuses on optimizing process effectiveness in addition to efficiency to deliver superior business outcomes. Services are seamlessly delivered from a global network of centers to meet a client’s business objectives, cultural and language needs and cost reduction goals. Learn more atwww.genpact.com.
Posted on March 26, 2010 by Atul
Rebuilding Haiti: Samasource’s Part.
Rebuilding Haiti: Samasource’s Part
Share
Samasource’s engineering team (Eric Nguyen and Alex Onsager) travelled to Haiti at the end of April to establish our first microwork center in the country. Read about the earthquake, Samasource’s investment in Haiti, and our workers’ part in an innovative emergency SMS system.
The Aftermath
The human toll of the January 12th earthquake is staggering, with over 200,000 dead. As Alex and I travelled in Haiti, our everyday interactions would often belie this tragic fact. On the surface, people were doing their best to piece together their lives. Only on occasion would the recent tragedy break through to the surface. People we were speaking with would sometimes suddenly find themselves telling us about a lost child, neighbor, or lifelong partner.
The trauma is ongoing. A huge number of people have had to abandon their homes, since even buildings that are still standing can’t be trusted. Vast encampments have sprung up in all of the city’s open spaces. In the meantime, huge numbers of people have left Port-au-Prince, seeking the relative safely of neighboring towns.
Unfortunately, the Haitian government is struggling more than ever to serve its people. Aside from the vast neighborhoods that were leveled by the earthquake, there was nearly uniform destruction of all of the government institutions in the center of town. This included the national palace, supreme court building, government ministries, and police headquarters. Almost every institution struggling to serve Haitians today was reduced to rubble.
Posted on March 13, 2010 by Atul
12 Mar 2010 09:05 GMT – IAOP Survey Finds Corporate Social Responsibility Increasingly Important in Outsourcing Contracts POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y., March 10 – Corporate social responsibility (CSR) will increasingly become a more important factor to companies in awarding outsourcing contracts, show results from a survey conducted by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals(R) < /span>(IAOP(R)). The newly released electronic survey of IAOP's global membership found that 71 percent of respondents view CSR as becoming more or much more important in deciding future outsourcing contracts by companies in all industries around the world. On a five point scale, both outsourcing providers and buyers rated the importance of CSR at 3.9. In addition, 70 percent of outsourcing customers and providers said they plan to increase their CSR activity in the next three years, with small- and medium-size providers having the strongest intentions to increase CSR. Other key findings of the IAOP 2009 CSR Survey include: Ø Many leading service providers have a CSR emphasis encompassing activities in human resources, community involvement and the environment. Ø Significant percentages of outsourcing buyers may consider the CSR capability of a service provider when making an outsourcing decision. Ø Outsourcing buyers consider employee practices as the more important CSR criteria, putting labor, fair operating practices and human rights higher than consumer, environmental and community involvement. Ø India was ranked as the most popular developing region of the world that companies outsource to as a social responsibility, followed by Southeast Asia. "The growing importance of CSR cannot be ignored," said IAOP Chairman Michael Corbett, who heads the CSR subcommittee of IAOP's Advocacy & Outreach Committee. "If companies want to win in outsourcing deals, they have to be focusing on CSR practices that are good for people, the community and the environment." The survey results also suggest that the outsourcing industry is already a leader in CSR. An earlier study by Bill Hefley, Ph.D., found that leading outsourcing service providers named to IAOP's prestigious Global Outsourcing 100(R) list have a significantly stronger emphasis on CSR than other applicants. The full survey results were released at the association's annual conference, The 2010 Outsourcing World Summit(R), where socially responsible outsourcing was a well-received educational track among the 550-plus professionals attending. The research was led by Bill Hefley, CDP, Certified Outsourcing Professional(R) (COP), clinical associate professor, University of Pittsburgh and Director, ITSqc LLC; and Ron Babin, associate director and assistant professor, Ted Rogers School of IT Management, Ryerson University. A research white paper with the findings and case studies is availa ble at IAOP's online knowledge center, Firmbuilder.com. About IAOP The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) is the global, standard-setting organization and advocate for the outsourcing profession. With more than 100,000 members and affiliates worldwide, IAOP helps companies increase their outsourcing success rate, improve their outsourcing ROI, and expand the opportunities for outsourcing across their businesses. www.outsourcingprofessional.org. Contact: Kimberly Maneeley +1.845.452.0600, ext.104kim.maneeley@iaop.org
via www.pressreleasenetwork.com
