Offshoring and Admins
OfficePRO magazine,
August/September 2004
Some office professionals benefit from this controversial business practice, which may signal admins’ next professional evolution
BY ANYA MARTIN
If you call tech support for Earthlink, one of the largest Internet providers in the United States, chances are you will find yourself talking to someone in India. Calls to customer service reach the Philippines. Even some Delta Air Lines ticketing calls are being routed to a call center in Bangalore, India.
Outsourcing of American jobs overseas is all over the news. Lou Dobbs, host of CNN’s Moneyline, has devoted so many shows to the topic that his program could be retitled Offshoring-line. The topic has become a major buzzword in the U.S. presidential race, too.
According to a recent article in INC. Magazine, “Politicians in at least 18 states are drafting legislation that seeks to restrict and even punish companies that offshore.”
Meanwhile, U.S. President George W. Bush and Republican commentators are saying that offshoring of jobs to cheaper labor markets has had little effect on job losses in the United States and actually has the potential to boost the nation’s economy in the long term.
In Canada, offshoring hasn’t reached the same fever pitch, because manufacturing and professional salaries dip below those in the United States and Canadian firms haven’t been as quick to embrace offshoring. However, Canadians have actually been the recipients of offshored jobs. According to an April 2004 white paper from PricewaterhouseCoopers, if Canada “can build its advantages as a ‘nearshore’ outsourcing provider to the U.S., and even European firms,” Canadian IT jobs could increase by 165,000 by 2010. But if nothing’s done, Canada could lose up to 75,000 IT jobs.
So it’s no surprise that the topic of off-shoring is buzzing on admin message boards and in chat rooms. If you’re asking yourself how offshoring will affect your job, you aren’t alone. But there’s no need to panic. According to experts on both sides of the offshoring fence, admins who embrace the global economy actually may find their jobs becoming more, not less, indispensable.
Manufacturing to White-Collar
Manufacturing jobs have been moving overseas since the 1980s. However, much of the current alarm about off-shoring has come from its spread to the white-collar sector as advances in technology and communications allow many more tasks to be accomplished remotely. These innovations have been coupled with a rising number of college graduates with technical skills in countries such as India and China, who are willing to work for lower wages than American grads.
“What we have to recognize is that employers are continually looking for ways to improve their bottom line— where can we get things done in the cheapest way possible?” says Roger Her-man, a principal with Greensboro, North Carolina-based The Herman Group, a firm of consulting futurists concentrating on workforce and workplace trends and their implications.
As author of Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People, Herman has predicted a future talent shortage for U.S. employers. “[Offshoring] is getting a lot of attention because the workforce has been such that there haven’t been a lot of jobs available, but that’s changing and in process right now,” he adds. “More and more jobs are becoming available, and the key is to have your skills so strong that you can pick and choose the jobs you want.”
So far, the main job categories out-sourced overseas are computer-related, especially programming and coding, as well as call centers for tech support and customer service.
Few Statistics Available
Economists disagree widely on the actual threat of offshoring both to jobs and to the U.S. economy. One problem is the lack of solid statistics on how much off-shoring is actually occurring. Studies vary widely on the impact of offshoring on American jobs.
For example, a recent U.S. Labor Department layoff study suggested that the number of U.S. jobs being lost to off-shoring actually is very low. According to the study, companies sent only 4,633 jobs overseas in the first quarter of 2004, accounting for less than two percent of a total of 239,361 layoffs for the quarter. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “In more than seven out of 10 cases, the work activities were reassigned to places elsewhere in the U.S.”
However, numerous economists immediately questioned these numbers, suggesting that they underreport the amount of offshoring happening by only including a limited sample of large companies with layoffs of 50 employees or more.
Due to the lack of reliable data tracking of offshoring of services, numbers of jobs being sent overseas are probably both under- and over-estimated, says Josh Bivens, an economist for the EconomicPolicy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based progressive think-thank.
“If a company decides to create a new call center outside the U.S., that job never existed in the U.S. before and it’s not going to be picked up by a mass layoff report,” he adds.
Herman notes that some companies that experimented with outsourcing have been bringing jobs, such as accounting, finance, and data entry, back to the United States because of language and culture obstacles.
“Another issue around these skills is that these countries have good educational systems, but the training they receive is relatively rigid—recitation rather than creative thinking,” he adds.“ As a result, people are getting the work done fine if it’s totally routine, but a lot of work in the administrative functionrequires creative thinking and the need to communicate effectively.”
Other factors that may discourage off-shoring in the short term include the fact that firms often have to interview 100 people to find a suitable candidate in terms of technical, language, and culture skills, Herman says.
“They also have 40 percent turnover in administrator positions in those countries, wreaking havoc with employers’ attempts to get people trained and getting the work done,” he adds.
For Bivens, the threat isn’t so much in jobs lost as in the impact of offshoring on wages. As the economy improves, companies will hire more employees and create new jobs, but labor shortages in the future will be influenced by what happens with offshoring—which, despite some bumps in the road, ultimately is here to stay, he says. Wages for U.S. manufacturing jobs have declined due to the availability of a cheaper labor force abroad, and while no one knows what the future holds, white-collar workers, including admins, also may experience a similar stagnation of wage growth in the years ahead.
“People notice layoffs a lot more than wage growth, but suppressed wage growth may be the real outcome of this and how it’s going to affect the U.S. workforce,” he adds. “Jobs will come back; people will be employed as long as the economy doesn’t completely circle the drain.”
Tracking Administrative Jobs
Lacking hard statistics on offshoring, to answer the question of whether administrative jobs are being offshored, one has to rely on anecdotal info. However, while many accounts exist of computer programmers and customer service and tech support call centers being moved over-seas, fewer examples of offshored admin jobs exist.
Herman estimates that four percent or less of jobs outsourced overseas are administrative. Indeed, it seems like the one administrative skill being offshored to any degree is the one that admins are doing less and less of—typing.
“My company has not sent jobs overseas, but our transcription service is having a lot of their dictations typed in Israel and India now,” says Suzanne Benderski CPS/CAP, operations manager for Tran-scion, a Syracuse, New York, startup that provides independent medical examinations review for disputed medical and liability insurance cases.
“Now that voice files and Word docs can be distributed through Web pages, it’s a much less expensive option for them from what I understand.”
Margaret Holt, president and CEO of New York-based Holt Learning, which provides employee training programs to companies across the globe, also says that the only firm that she has heard of that outsources administrative tasks overseas is one that moved its entire word-processing operations abroad.
“Time will tell if that was a positive move,” she adds.
Still, the fact that some word processing may be done overseas should not threaten the job of the admin who is increasingly performing tasks once consigned to managers, Holt says.
“Many of today’s administrative professionals do not perform repetitive tasks that are easily outsourced,” she adds. “They make decisions, take responsibilities, and run major projects.”
Another question might be whether admins are losing jobs because their bosses’ positions are being offshored, but those in the technical jobs mainly being outsourced today, such as software designers, coders, and quality-assurance technicians, rarely have admins supporting them, says Matthew Ripaldi. Ripaldi is branch manager for Adecco Technical for New York City, a division of Adecco Employment Services, a staffing company that placed 2.3 million people worldwide in 2003.
Some admins may lose their jobs due to a project manager or technical lead being eliminated as the team that worked under them is outsourced overseas, Ripaldi adds. However, money saved by moving routine jobs overseas also may mean more cash flow for research back home. These new projects may present new opportunities for administrative sup-port, both to coordinate tasks at home and overseas.
“We’re seeing a lot more communication globally now with projects being off-shore,” Ripaldi says. “Follow-up skills are crucial and the ability to communicate with all different types of people.”
Indeed, the tasks that admins perform are likely to evolve alongside the trend toward more virtual workspaces and globalization of workforces, Bivens says. But even though technology exists for almost every task to now be done remotely, the fact that even information technology (IT) companies have maintained physical spaces for employees portends well for the admin’s future.
“My guess is that there is always going to be some sort of need for people to gather at least in little clumps, and there is always going to be a need to have people coordinating them,” he adds. “As long as there are people going to the office for work, you’re going to need someone who has those really valuable organizational skills.”
The best way to ensure that your employer won’t offshore your job is to keep your skills at the highest level, especially IT skills, and read the business management books that your boss is reading, Herman says.
“Nobody is indispensable; no administrative professional should think of themselves as indispensable,” he adds. “The key is to make yourself valuable to the company you work for.”
Holt says her company’s most requested classroom and e-learning programs are those that assist employees of all levels and positions with “change.” But the biggest quality that will ensure your job is not out-sourced or offshored still remains your decision-making abilities rather than your computer skills, she adds.
“When I talk to clients, they say they don’t want robots, they want someone who can take the initiative and solve problems,” Holt says.
Embrace the Global Environment
Even if administrative jobs may be in less danger of being sent overseas, offshoring is already changing the environment of jobs here at home. If your company off-shores other job categories, you may need to interact via phone and e-mail with the individuals in those positions. You also will likely come in contact with offshored employees working for other countries when you call for tech support or customer service.
As executive assistant to the chief financial officer of multinational firm Xil-inx Inc., Gina Amstadter regularly inter-acts with personnel not just in her San Jose, California, office but in the company’s European headquarters in Dublin and Asian headquarters in Singapore. Call centers are based in all three locations in order to provide 24-7 customer service around the world. While the San Jose office covers a traditional eight-hour U.S. time shift, if she calls early in the morning, she may speak to someone in Ireland or, later at night, Singapore.
Amstadter’s advice to admins encountering foreign tech support is the same as calling offsite tech support in their own country. Because the biggest problem is that the person cannot see what you see on your computer screen, think about how to describe your problem precisely and clearly before you pick up the phone. Try not to use colloquial phrases that may confuse someone for whom English is not their first language. Then listen carefully to the response.
“I once asked ‘What’s the weather like in Ireland?’” Amstadter recalls. “He said it was ‘sunny,’ but I thought he said ‘funny.’ So I said, ‘Oh, is it raining?’ He said, ‘No, it’s sunny.’ I felt embarrassed. So I guess we need to learn how to listen, too.”
Amstadter also was asked to train her counterpart in Singapore, who came to San Jose for two weeks to study under her.
“We agreed that certain processes need to be customized to fit the way they do business in Ireland,” she adds. “We also discussed the possibility of a support system wherein I can cover for her when she’s out and vice-versa. If we are successful in doing this, we will introduce the concept to the rest of the company.”
To succeed in a global business environment, Amstadter recommends that administrative professionals develop sensitivity to cultural perspectives other than their own, including not just customs but also business practices, etiquette, and regulations. Other tips include maintaining awareness of time differences, networking with peers abroad to share best practices of both your countries, and benchmarking your skill sets against administrative professionals at multinational companies.
“Don’t leave everything to a just a phone call; put everything in writing once you’re off the line to make sure it was clearly understood,” suggests Victoria Mitchell, public relations director for Adecco.
On a recent project where Ripaldi collaborated with colleagues in Japan, all the communication was done via e-mail to assure no communication barriers and misunderstandings occurred via phone.
Admins even may wish to learn a second or third language to be more attractive to global employers, add both Mitchell and Ripaldi.
“Remember 20 years ago, they said with e-mail and voice mail, they won’t need secretaries,” Amstadter says. “It’s true, secretaries were phased out. We’re now administrative professionals. We’ve evolved and we raised the bar. When they laid off the middle managers, guess who took over?”
In her view, the move toward a more global economy just means that admins’ jobs will go through another evolution.
“It’s wonderful. It’s going to be a good thing,” she adds.
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