Will The WFH Trend Result In An Increase In Outsourcing?

Photo by Oleg Magni from Pexels

In general, I desperately try to see the good in things; every cloud has a silver lining style stuff. Typically, if you look hard enough you can find good in most things, but you tend to have to dedicate a real effort to find it.
This dumpster fire of a year has required a herculean effort from the world to find the good in a historically crappy year. Remember when 46 million acres of Australia burned to ash and we were all thinking that would be the disaster of the year? Devastating yes, but not nearly the 'disaster of the year nominee' we may have thought at the time. Fast forward to the world's pandemic, a worldwide unemployment rate of 8.3%, businesses encountering challenges of a lifetime, young and old affected and the mental health of the world just teetering on the razors edge between partial insanity and full-blown mental breakdown. Finding good, any modest level of good, is like an epic game of Where's Waldo.

In search of good some, I'd even argue many, have found a glimmer of a positive in the form of a world-wide 'working from home (WFH)' policy change. Personally, I have found solace in the fact that I enjoy the WFH environment much more than I had expected. I was always a 'go into the office guy', preferring the separation, and as a life-long participant in classical conditioning leaving home to go into the office was a means of removing distractions and turning on 'work mode'. Work would certainly follow me home, but the majority of work was conducted at the office. Enter economic and health survival mode; those that can perform work from home are encouraged to. A nation, a world, thrust a massive population into the WFH deep end, they with a doggy paddle, progressing to treading water and on our way to finding proficiency in the 'new norm'. Most of my colleagues and friends feel the WFH policy, full or part-time, is a big win for many and anticipating the policy to continue post-pandemic. Trading the frustration, cost and time wasted in traffic for added personal time can be a big win for the current and future's workforce. 

So, if you're like me, you set your eye on this glimmer of good on the horizon when you can anticipate the benefits of working from home when the world has reclaimed some form of normal. You look to a future to a better world where your commute remains 12 feet from your bed, society has returned to some form of normal and you continue to have the ability to use your lunch break to take your dog for a walk or have lunch with your spouse/partner.

Desperate to find the negative in this sliver of a perk, the dark shadows of my unconscious push a thought into my head; "if the workforce transitions to primarily remote, will outsourcing become the new norm?". A well-delivered shin-kick to my fragile emotional state delivered with precision and purpose, your future job security is now on the table....well done dark forces....well done.

Personally and professionally I have some very strong opinions on outsourcing and as a courtesy to any dedicated readers that have made it this far I'll refrain detailing my opinions but suggest that collaborating teams require timely communications with one another and conflicting timezones are the supervillain in such matters. Perhaps in time we will find a way to work effectively in highly remote settings, or corporate culture will change to accommodate. My current team has folks in Florida, the midwest, and California, a 3 hour difference at the extremes. If our culture continues to be flexible in remote worker hours of 9-5 (locally) that means folks lose 3 hours of shared communication time, or are forced to adjust. As a software engineer, it's not uncommon for managers to be even more accommodating, allowing team members to start later or earlier which can potentially compound the issue. 

Perhaps as a nationwide workforce we fail to work effectively and a WFH policy becomes a failed experiment only to return to localized teams in cube farms. Alternatively, maybe we evolve into a workforce and find ways to address such issues, timezones become irrelevant and our workforce comes from a worldwide pool of talent.

As an industry we should recognize the possibilities solving remote and WFH policies present and strive to become as effective (or more effective) than colocated teams. As a workforce we should recognize the complications we can add, the benefits it comes with and the risks to our profession that may be on our horizon. 

Only time will tell.