The importance of adapting your performance management processes when building an offshore team.

Have you ever found yourself complaining that offshore staff aren’t as good as onshore staff? (I did that for a while, back in the early 2010s).

And yet many companies would say that their offshore team is as good than their onshore team, and offshoring is reliable and effective foundational pillar for the business.

What’s most likely happening is that nobody has helped you understand what management techniques you need to adjust in order to excel with the offshore culture. (In our case, the Philippines).

It turns out that to build a world-class offshore team you can’t use ALL the same management practices as onshore. It’s not realistic to expect people to behave identically and give you the same outcomes in a different culture.

Let’s look at a couple of performance management tools as an example.

1. Staff and managers in “Western” cultured countries usually thrive on informal feedback and coaching. Onshore staff don’t need or want formal performance evaluations, they are happy with some bullet points and a chat.
   
2. Written warnings are also rarely treated as an interactive performance management technique onshore. They are often treated as a pre-termination formality, not as a constructive improvement process so they are rarely used onshore and companies don’t expect good outcomes when they are used.

And this works OK onshore because both of those are an accepted and SHARED part of your culture. But neither is the same as the Philippines.

When managing Filipinos, if you only do informal HR practices, and don’t have any clear structure to performance review and improvement, your team will absolutely NOT reach its potential.

So concluding that offshore staff are generally inferior in abilities, while providing a performance management system that feels alien or incomplete, is like trying to hammer in a nail using a chainsaw, then complaining that the nail is poor quality.

All your Filipino staff have gone through their careers by relying on formal HR processes and a uniform (culturally shared) approach to performance management. By not giving them guidance in the way they expect, you create confusion or actually make them believe they are unimportant to your company; not worthy of “proper” feedback from the boss.

That’s not your intention of course, but the road to HR hell is paved with good intentions.

In the Philippines, of course nobody WANTS to get a written warning – like onshore.
But a formal HR action like a written warning is actually received CONSTRUCTIVELY by Filipino staff.

Too many onshore managers are afraid to do formal HR actions because they assume staff will react negatively to it. They assume offshore staff will react the same as onshore staff. Not true.
Your Filipino staff genuinely want to be clear on exactly what the boss needs from them so they can protect their job and grow their career. Formal HR actions like Performance Evaluations, PIPs and even written warnings are seen as a normal and helpful part of protecting their job and growing their career.

This is one of many reasons why simply hiring staff in another country will NOT deliver you great outcomes or the 70% cost savings that most outsourcing brochures blather on about.
Why would the best staff in any country want to stay with your firm if the management approach feels alien, unsupportive and uncaring?

Put yourself in their shoes for a minute and consider this: why would the best staff in any country want to stay with your firm, if (from their point of view) you can’t even deliver such “basic HR requirements” as formal performance evaluations and “proper” written guidance?

If YOU grew up through the first 10 years of your career expecting those things are part of any well-run company, and then you join a firm who has little in the way of structured performance management processes, you may well assume that company is unprofessional or disorganized.

Nobody wants their staff to be in the position of feeling like they have to tolerate ineffective management in order to do their job properly. But that’s what often happens. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad manager, it means nobody told you how to tweak your management to fit the market.

This is why we help clients at all stages of staff performance management.

Even though you manage your staff directly under our staffing model, we already know what challenges you’re going to have as a manager in a different culture – even before you know.

• We help you ensure employee performance objectives are clear, understood, and described in their contract.
• We remind you when performance evaluations are due and help merge your existing process into one that will be effective in the Philippines.
• We chase you up if you don’t complete the Evaluation, because we know you’re busy.
• We build the evaluation document for you, to make it look the way it needs to look in order to be the most effective.
• We work with you to decide what employee mistakes should be formally documented for best outcomes.
• We coach you on what an NTE is for and how we comply with the HR laws of the Philippines.
• We push for a written warning or a PIP when we know that this is needed in order to affect the change you’re looking for, and the best action to help that person succeed in their role.
• We chat with you every month about your team morale outcomes.
• And once per quarter we get together with you and zoom out. We look at the bigger picture, using our Best Practice Advisory Report. Based on what we are seeing in your team, how well is your firm delivering the 25 elements of multi-shoring Best Practice? These are the factors which dictate whether you can build and sustain a world-class multi-shored business. Which parts are critical limiting factors for your firm? What SYMPTOMS that are bugging you today are actually CAUSED by management techniques that don’t match this culture?

Our Advisory clearly shows you the next steps to keep gradually improving your offshoring outcomes.

This is all the hard stuff that other offshore providers don’t help you with, because they don’t have the capabilities to do much more than recruit some staff, do your payroll, and give you an office. Technology Elite began life as an advisory firm: we thrive on doing the hard stuff.

You can of course learn everything the hard way like my Australian business had to back between 2010-2013 before we started Technology ELite. I don’t recommend the chainsaw-and-nail approach to learning that I had to go through. It’s frustrating. It’s expensive. Many companies give up before they see the benefits.

OR rather than being alone in the journey, you can partner with a staffing and advisory firm who knows in advance what your NEXT problem is going to be, and already has the granular solution ready for you

Request your free Offshoring Opportunity Assessment here.