Professional service firms routinely outsource their office cleaning and some of their HR services. Many law firms use established providers like Cash Room and Document Direct for other services.
Why?
This article sets out three reasons why outsourcing might be worth considering. We see three competing imperatives that firms face:
1. The imperative for Resource Optimisation
Your firm is the sum of its people. Their ability to maximise focus on client delivery is a critical success factor.
Your people are highly trained in their discipline. Elevating their profiles, removing distractions and increasing their engagement are important in improving their performance.
Their improvement will not be improved by spending time on:
- Avoidable administrative tasks
- Non core work
2. The Imperative Of Focus
The Eisenhower Matrix (link to why outsource) is a well established way to consider, segment and prioritise work tasks. It applies particularly well to professional services where fee earners need to balance important tasks.
Eisenhower advocates considering important tasks as Urgent or Not Urgent
Client service and fee earning is obviously both important and urgent. No doubt ensuring these tasks are completed is in the clients and the firm’s best interest.
Small and medium sized firms do not have the available and suitably skilled people to pick up the tasks that are Not Urgent for fee earners. They are often held in a ‘too difficult, some day’ category .
3. The imperative for Service Innovation
This resource challenge inevitably impacts these firm’s ability to innovate their services. There can be little doubt that increasing client expectations, the skills crunch and rapidly evolving technology options are placing increasing pressure on firms to innovate to ensure their futures.
These pressures will not go away and firms need to embrace the challenge. This requires finding new ways to think about and act on those ‘too difficult, some day’ challenges.
Three Suggestions To Consider
Consider these points as useful starting suggestions to inform your perspective.
1. Client First
There is unprecedented change underway and it is, in our opinion, very likely that firms who understand and meet their target clients’ needs the best will thrive. These needs are changing and are rarely to do with the technical qualifications of the fee earner or the plush offices they sit in.
Defining which clients are ideal, understanding what those clients value and figuring out how to deliver that effectively and profitably is essential. When was the last time you or your firms did this?
2. Top down Bottom up
The decision making processes that a firm adopts is hugely consequential. Subjective opinion sharing amongst peers is not likely to produce good outcomes over the long term.
A firm’s leadership needs to be actively involved both in each of the pressures a firm is facing (perhaps most obviously gaining an understanding of the threats and opportunities that technology and process automation present). They need to provide informed, objective guidance from the top.
Inevitably there is growing fear amongst the wider team about the impacts of these change pressures. They will all have formed an opinion about how they will affect them (typically that their job is under threat). At the same time they are the experts in how the firm actually works (the details of the current processes), information which is essential if optimal responses to these pressures are to emerge.
Open, honest and objective communications between the firm’s leadership and the wider team are urgently required to ensure good outcomes for all.
3. Collaborate to Accelerate
As a provider of specialist outsource services you might expect us to say this but it doesn’t make it less true. Building long term, mutually beneficial relationships with specialists who can augment your team to take the important, not urgent tasks out of the ‘too difficult’ category is a logical response.
PSOut can show that its services are immediately value adding, enabling service innovation to benefit our client and their clients. Relieve the pressing imperatives and generate value for all parties. What is not to like?
