Businesses need staff. True?

Or could your business actually be losing money by hiring in-house staff to carry out certain tasks and projects rather than outsourcing them to third parties?

Here are some of the most common instances where businesses lose money on internal staff

Hiring generalists rather than specialists

If you have a number of projects to carry out across a series of similar areas, you might think to hire someone who has a general knowledge of those areas as they’ll be competent working on all of the projects compared to a specialist who would only be suited for one or two of them.

However, specialists are trained as such for a reason. Hiring a generalist will get you some results, however, you won’t be utilising the higher level of expertise and skills that a specialist can bring to the project. While you won’t necessarily lose money in this situation, you certainly won’t get the best value for money here.

Hiring specialists without enough work

So, if hiring generalists isn’t the solution, should you hire specialists instead? While hiring specialists will get you a higher quality result you have to remember the reason you considered a generalist in the first place: there isn’t enough work in a specific area for the specialist to do. So you essentially end up with a full-time employee who only has enough work to do part-time. Do you really want to pay their salary for that?

Employees waste time at work

The next step, if there isn’t enough work for a full-time employee, would surely be to look at part-time employees? Maybe not. A 2017 study found that UK employees tend to waste an average of 1.7 days at work through procrastination, socialising, and doing personal things. While it’s unrealistic to expect humans to be completely focused on their work 100% of the time, do you really want to be paying an employee’s salary (full or part-time) when they’re only working 73% of the time. To put that in monetary terms, the average UK employer would spend £8,100 on wasted time for a full-time employee every year.

Employee turnover costs more than you think

Another pressing issue with having employees rather than outsourcing tasks is that there is a huge cost when an employee leaves your business and needs replacing. It costs an average of 6-9 month’s salary to replace a member of staff on top of the new employee’s salary.

The solution: utilise external resources & outsource!

Ok, so we’ve established that you’ll probably be better off with someone who has specialist skills. But you don’t want to bring them on as a full-time employee because a) there won’t be enough work to keep them busy and b) employees waste time which essentially wastes a large chunk of their salary. Now what?

What if we told you that you could access a team of specialists and only pay for them as and when you need them to do work?

That’s basically what outsourcing is.

Find a reputable partner, like Digital Aptech, who can deliver the services your business needs when you need them rather than losing money by hiring an in-house member of staff.

Obviously, there are instances where hiring an employee is the best route however if there are projects you come across where you need extra hands, additional expertise or even a brand new skill set, consider whether outsourcing could save you money.

For more information about outsourcing your web development and project management, get in touch with us.