Why HR Outsourcing Can Make a Difference for Your Businesses in Lean Times

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Since the start of 2022, more than 91,000 workers in the technology sector have been laid off in the United States alone, according to a recent Crunchbase report. While organisations reel from the impact, Human Resources teams are left struggling to implement redundancies while withstanding their own department’s headcount loss. The balancing act is unsustainable and leads to poorer work quality, lower productivity and difficulty retaining top HR performers. 

“When HR is in survival mode during extended periods of organisational change, everyone loses,” said Accela Asia’s Client Director & Head of Talent, Vanessa Mittman. “To minimise the negative impact and maximise the benefits of transformation, HR must be engaged and equipped to deliver an exceptional employee experience amidst the changes.”

More organisations are strategically outsourcing parts or all of their HR functions to balance the internal load. There are four core benefits that any organisation can expect as a result of outsourcing HR. 

1. Enhanced Focus on Strategic Initiatives

HR Outsourcing enables organisations to focus on what they do best - those core business activities that must be managed internally - while a reliable and knowledgeable partner supports and advises their internal teams. 

A globally recognised independent spirits distribution company based in Singapore approached Accela in 2018 with an HR dilemma. They were growing quickly and, after doing without dedicated HR during their start-up years, they required HR support. The internal demands didn’t warrant a full-time HR Business Partner (HRBP) hire, but they needed an experienced HR management professional with localised expertise across APAC, Australia and New Zealand. So they enlisted Accela Talent as their outsourced HRBP responsible for managing the entire employee lifecycle, including recruitment, employment contracts, onboarding and offboarding, administration of payroll, benefits and insurance, salary survey participation, grievance management and performance management.

The shift ultimately freed up the management team’s time to focus more intensely on scaling operations. 

2. Sustain or Gain a Competitive Advantage  

When you work with the right HR Outsourcing partner, you’re purchasing process expertise and eliminating the learning curve that typically comes with international growth. Rather than spending 3-6 months building an employer brand locally, hiring experienced local HR talent and integrating them into the company’s operations, you gain immediate access to seasoned HR experts who have run the same processes and programmes repeatedly for businesses of varying sizes and models across a breadth of industries. You gain decades’ worth of HR expertise in a matter of weeks, which can make all the difference in emerging markets like Singapore, where socio-cultural understanding is instrumental to success. 

3. Accelerated Time-to-Market

Further to point 2, another obvious but essential benefit that companies with limited HR resources gain when outsourcing is the time saved by purchasing process and market expertise. 

When an APAC-based financial software unicorn experienced explosive regional growth, its leaders knew that scaling up HR on their own could be risky. Not only would it be expensive, but it would mean additional pressure on an already lean department. So the company commissioned Accela Asia as their outsourced partner in Singapore to lead a focused set of administrative HR activities to save their teams time and money. Accela Asia took ownership of the organisation’s work pass processing and applied immigration expertise for relocated employee cases.

4. Financial Control and Cost Savings

Without re-stating the obvious, when you work with experts, there’s a high degree of planning accuracy and, in turn, a much lower likelihood of cost overrun, resulting in better financial controls. Cost savings may even be possible when the need for an in-market HR presence is strategically high, but the cost to place or hire and train an in-house team is also high, resulting in a low or negative ROI. 

How do You Know when the Time is Right to Outsource HR?

While there are many benefits, it’s essential to understand that HR outsourcing is not a magic fix to navigating people-centred transformation during lean times. To outsource HR effectively, there should be a widespread internal understanding of your company’s value chain to avoid outsourcing the activities that differentiate you as an industry leader.  Organisational performance goals should also be clear, as they will shape the HR Outsourcing objectives you define and track alongside your outsourcing partner.

For specialized HR Outsourcing business partner solutions, get in touch with Accela Talent.