In today’s global village your co-workers are as likely to be sitting thousands of miles away as at the next desk. Technology has broken down physical barriers and with an increasing variety of consultancy services going offshore, a new way of working is developing. Welcome to the virtual team.
“We are starting to see more intelligent globalisation going on,” says Fiona Czerniawska of the Management Consultancies Association. “The consulting process is being broken up: putting in a new IT system, for example, might mean talking to the client onshore, designing and building the system offshore, testing it both on and offshore, and moving onshore for training. That creates a lot of issues."
Paul Morrison, managing consultant at Alsbridge, says: “Many consultancies have been local businesses, perhaps with a global presence but not well integrated. Now, the business itself is offshoring functions such as IT, finance or human resources.”
“Our data predicts further growth in the value of work being moved offshore,” says Duncan Aitchison, partner at TPI, a sourcing advisory firm. “The approach of many companies to outsourcing has matured to the extent that it is now no longer a question of whether to offshore, but rather which elements and to what degree.”
Offshoring is driven partly by cost; salaries are cheaper in eastern Europe, albeit a price differential that may be eroded in time. But it also reflects the need for 24/7 working, allowing a firm to complete a project more quickly.
Different countries are also developing different skills, says Czerniawska. “We could end up with clusters of specialist consultants in different countries,” she adds.
“It is the modern equivalent of the division of labour.”
That process can already be seen in operation. India (which won 5.2% of offshore contracts compared with 3% in 2005, according to TPI) developed an expertise in IT that encouraged the development of education and training, which in turn attracted more people to work in IT — a virtuous circle that results in India becoming the dominant player in IT or business process outsourcing.
That may lead to a reverse offshoring, in which Indian consultants are brought to the UK to provide expertise or training — a mix-and-match solution that increasingly blurs the line between on-, off- and near-shoring. “People are now much more sophisticated about dividing up their work,” says Czerniawska.
The trend towards different countries providing different skill sets could pose a problem for the management consultancy industry, warns Morrison.
Traditionally, management consultants in the UK cut their teeth on analytical, number-crunching work before moving on to strategic consultancy. Now, much of the analytical work is being offshored to other parts of the world, providing cost and efficiency benefits for UK consultancies but potentially changing the career path of their employees.
“It is a question for the whole industry,” he says. “If more and more analytical resources are going offshore, what does that mean for the traditional model?”
Working across continents involves a shift in thinking. “People may need to dump some of their preconceptions — believing that China only produces low-level work is not a productive way of creating a team,” according to Czerniawska.
Being part of a virtual team demands clear communication — not easy when working across languages and cultures. It also requires clear work demarcations, says Morrison.
“You need to be very clear about governance — who has what roles and responsibilities. It is also crucial to manage the hand-offs; when the technical team completes a piece of work, how does that get handed back to the sales team so that ideas aren’t lost in translation?”
Working with colleagues and clients in a variety of countries means developing a deep level of cultural sensitivity. “Understanding that not everybody is familiar with the nuances of the English language is core,” says Andrew Crowley, vice-president and CEO for CSC Deutschland Solutions. Sometimes you may have to say something in several different ways. Having language skills is key for senior leaders at CSC. We are seeing more employees with an international education and they are likely to work in cross-cultural teams.”
Planning the team’s functions well is crucial. “The basics of how you are organised need to be 150% greater for a virtual team than if you can call everybody together in front of a whiteboard,” says Crowley. “Anything is possible; you can build a house in four hours, but you need six months of planning to do so. Planning is key.
“You need to invest time to bring the team together and you need to do that at the beginning of a project.”
Technology has made virtual teamwork possible, but is only as good as the people behind it. Applications such as WebEx, which allows several people in different locations to read and edit a document at the same time have proved invaluable; 3G working and BlackBerrys are standard issue.
“Technology is part of the story of the formation of our team,” says Barbara Harvey, a senior executive at Accenture and head of its virtual team. “It allowed us to make it happen. Laptops mean everything is accessible from wherever we are — e-mails go to everybody automatically. The most important bit for us is bandwidth: there’s no question of not being able to connect, and that has transformed working practices. That, and working from home, which allows us to take calls at strange times of the day. That gives us the flexibility we need to work across different time zones.”
However, there is still room for improvement in the technology; connections still drop unexpectedly, conference calls can be marred by telephony time delays and e-mails do not always reach their destination. “Nothing beats working alongside a consultant in the same room,” says Morrison.
Hello, Hong Kong
THE VIRTUAL research team at Accenture, the global management consultancy, draws together 130 people in 14 countries and 27 cities.
Barbara Harvey, its head, says: “Our clients are not in any particular geographic location. We need to be able to respond on a global basis and wanted to create a single research entity with the capability to handle any question 24 hours a day.”
Accenture has developed protocols for activities such as conference calls: participants are required to ignore all e-mails, turn their head away from the window and focus on the call rather than trying to multi-task.
Creating a sense of shared culture among such a disparate group requires hard work. Harvey finds it important to allow time for casual conversation: “Sometimes the most important bit of a conference call is the beginning when people are chatting. These things sound trivial, but if somebody can share a couple of photos of their recent holiday, it helps bring the group together.”
The team supports Room to Read, a global education charity, and recently held an online quiz to raise money and help provide a sense of collective fun.
