Outsourcing. The sheer mention of it can divide a room into multiple camps, each passionate about their own point of view. It’s good for companies, it’s bad for companies. It hurts the economy, it helps the economy. For every positive viewpoint somebody always seems to have a negative one. The question is: Who’s right? With so much information attached to this topic, it can be hard to come up with a consolidated opinion. Because of this, I’ve decided it deserves three articles: One listing three reasons why I don’t like it, one in which I list three reasons I do like it, and then an overall conclusion.

This is the first of these articles: Three reasons I don’t like it.

1.) It takes away jobs - Simply put, if you place jobs in one place, you take them away from another. For example, if you are going to have one customer service center and you outsource it to India, then the jobs that could have been created in your home location won’t be. I’m a big supporter of keeping jobs “in house” if possible, as it helps your economy in a number of ways (the unemployment rate being the most obvious one) and that you are giving back to the people that support you.

2.) Lower quality - While this isn’t universal, from my experience certain areas of industry can really suffer in terms of quality from outsourcing. A big example of this is customer service. If your customer base is mainly English speaking, then you should have customer service personal whose first language is English, or who are fluent in English. This goes for any language. If you have a Greek customer base, then your customer service people should be fluent in Greek. It seems like common sense to me, but unfortunately many companies today don’t share this philosophy.

3.) Communication issues - This covers a broad range of areas in addition to any possible language barriers. For example, having half of your team work in a drastically different time zone can be a huge hindrance to your project. Who wants to hold a meeting at 8:00 PM just so everybody who needs to attend is awake? Also, different cultures have different norms for their work environment. Maybe they usually work six hours a day and you work eight. How do you resolve this? There are usually enough problems that crop up during a project without signing on extra ones right off the bat.

It seems like there are some major downsides to outsourcings, stay tuned for the next article in this series for a look at some of the positives: 3 Reasons Why I Like Outsourcing