* Offshoring could mean extreme worker fatigue
In a May 9 Rocky Mountain News article headlined “Offshoring stretches workday” (link below) the author talks about what it is like to maintain offices in the U.S. and India. Exhausting. Stressful. No family life. Those were the things that came to mind when I read the piece.
The article talks about a small portable device chip manufacturer – PortalPlayer – in Santa Clara, with offices in California and Hyderabad, India. The primary issue is that the India location is, as the article phrases it, “12 1/2 time zones away.” This means that when American workers should be headed home, they have to stick around so they can jump on conference calls with those just coming on duty in Hyderabad, and vice-versa. Jeff Hawkey, vice-president in charge of hardware engineering says that many nights he runs home, tucks the kids in, then gets on a conference call.
Sounds like a good way to forget who you are married to.
In addition to the long work-hours, workers also complain about incessant calls, IM “pings” and pagers going off at all hours, not to mention that there is no such thing as a weekend off (because of the time differential – my Sunday is your Monday and so forth).
Peter Morici, an international business professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland is quoted in the article as saying: “You simply can’t keep working a full day, put the kids to bed, take a call from Malaysia, then go back fresh the next morning – it’s one thing to do it for a couple of weeks, but it’s another to put up with this pain in the neck permanently.” He fears that eventually folks involved with this kind of situation will be so sleep-deprived they will quit, forcing managers to re-evaluate the benefits of offshoring.
And that is the real problem with the situation – it is a permanent deal. When a company signs up for an offshoring effort, they do so for good, or until they dismantle it, one of the two. If you are involved with having to maintain relationships with folks on the other side, you are automatically set up for longer than “the average 50-hour week” – much longer. At some juncture you will either get sick of the pace and leave, or you will probably not recognize that blond-haired youngster up on the high-school graduation podium.
Some companies have gone so far as to treat the situation like on-call doctors would – this person takes the pager one week, the other takes it the next.
The article says that according to an April Deloitte Consulting study, 62% of senior executives interviewed at 25 large corporations said offshoring required more management effort than they had originally thought. More than half said they could not free up enough managers to supervise projects.
I guess it depends on the type of person you are. If you are “type A” and enjoy the constant buzz of the workplace, then this lifestyle might be for you. But you should consider entering into as a single person; or else you could end up one after an extended period of time in the “somebody’s always on the clock” routine.
I would like to hear your thoughts.
