People have all sorts of schemes for making money online that don’t always pay well. But what if a big income matters to you? Is there any direction you can point your resume to where you can become a virtual worker at the same time you earn decent money and apply your web worker smarts to solving problems that transform companies?
Here’s my suggestion: Try the outsourcing business. Go to work for the service provider. Before you pinch your nose and yell, “Yuck!” hear me out.
As we all know, frequently, when companies start to tank, executives and boardrooms look to outsourcing to save the balance sheet: “Get those jobs off the books and hire an outside firm to do the work!”
What You Do Is the Core Value
So why not simply go to work for the outside firm in the first place? Your expertise — whether it’s in IT, accounting, customer service or HR — will get you further at a service provider because that is the core business. Plus, the best ones don’t simply do the same work for a reduced cost (otherwise known as, “Your mess for less”); they help companies transform processes to make them more efficient and effective.
And many of those organizations work matrix-style: Bring together the team that can get the job done, then disperse and move onto to the next initiative. Oftentimes, that translates to working in a virtual environment.
Plus, these companies are hiring. IBM’s consulting and services division posted 114 jobs in the last month; HP Global Services shows 110 openings in its “Outsourcing Management” category. ACS has 1,299 jobs in the US. Even India-based Wipro, the “Bangalore Tiger,” is hiring in the United States — 39 jobs at last count, among them positions for a mortgage domain consultant, a hosting administrator and a consulting lead for media and entertainment — locations not specified.
No, It Won’t Be Cutting Edge
To get the real story on how virtual work takes place in outsourcing outfits, we interviewed Sean Thakkar, who has held posts at both Gartner (which does consulting work as well as research) and Unisys and recently took an executive position with ACS.
According to Thakkar, half of Gartner’s staff works from a home office; at Unisys the number is between 30 and 40 percent.
Yet, in spite of the fact that these two companies have employees spread all over the globe and are presumably in influential positions with the clients they serve, neither is particularly cutting edge with its virtual worker operations. They outfit staff with requisite notebook computers running standard office applications, cover phone and internet expenses, and provide teleconferencing and whiteboarding services. People use IM, cell phones and email to stay in touch with their team-of-the-moment. Unisys uses SharePoint to collaborate on documents. When personal meetings take place, they usually happen at the office closest to where the prospective or current client is located.
However, none of that diminishes the most important element in the Bedouin lifestyle: flexibility. And that, he said, he could never have working out of a corporate office.
Even in the Trenches, a Taste of Flexibility
But Thakkar is an executive. What about those in the trenches? Were they chained to a computer all day — albeit one tucked into the back bedroom?
“If there’s a person in a virtual environment that has to deal with process within a functional area of that organization, then that process monitoring is very much of a time-sensitive nature,” said Thakkar. “I can understand the need for somebody to be in front of their desk or connected to the organization [via IM].”
Yet even in those situations, he insisted, where somebody was answering help desk calls from home, for example, “if the phone doesn’t ring, they can still be doing other things in the house⦠They could still have that time flexibility.”
In fact, during his time with Unisys, he said, some managers were starting to allow jobs to be performed from home as an employment retention tool, particularly in the area of call center staffing, where employee churn easily reaches 35 to 45 percent.
“How do you compensate for something where it can be an abusive environment?… This was one of the ways,” Thakkar said. “With ACD – automated call distribution — you can start sending calls to a designated number.”
No matter what level the work was at — executive or help desk — Thakkar is convinced that he and his co-workers get a lot more done virtually: “There are benefits to being in the office, but I believe I’m much more productive telecommuting.”
What do you think about going into the outsourcing business as a means to a virtual end?
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