We been listening to a few commentators recently (especially the great Scott Galloway from University Stern School of Business at NYU) who are hypothesising that Covid 19 has accelerated a number of key areas of the business landscape – online retailing is the most obvious one.
One less obvious area is off-shoring or outsourcing of the human resource. The way the hypothesis plays out is that, once you accept WFH is the new normal then businesses will say hang on, why are we paying employee X to work at home being paid a “UK salary” when we can off-shore to employee Y to work at a much lower “outsourced salary” doing the same job with the same skill set – sort of makes sense eh?
Well at Breathe we think that hypothesis is too simplistic and what will emerge is a hybrid model as follows. Businesses in Marketing/Media will more than likely change from a traditional fixed office format to a collaborative work space set up where the senior management and project teams can come together. Day to day, those key people will WFH collaborating on Teams/Zoom etc.. Outside that, a more flexible and scalable near shore freelance/collaborative workforce (just like Breathe Out!) will be used to support the key operators develop ideas and plan strategy. The final cog in this machine is cost effective offshore delivery and activation of campaign plans through all communication channels by outsourcing specialists.
Breathe have been talking about the near-shore/off-shore model for a while now and we are seeing a rapid acceleration towards this way of working. The bottom line is (like it or not), in the future working en masse 8 hours every day in one space is not going to be the norm in the marketing services sector.
