Globalization does my work for me!

What if I could click a button and have someone else write this post for me? Believe it or not, some people are now given this luxury in the workplace. “OOF,” which stands for Office of the Future, is the result of years of flattening and globalization and companies like Pfizer and other major corporations are taking advantage of it. many other people are focusing on globalization and their wheels are turning too.

As the result of a major financial crisis in 2005, Pfizer had to create ways to work more effectively while also reducing costs. Senior director of Organizational Effectiveness Jordan Cohen, who at the time was reading Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat,” decided to take advantage of globalization and convergence. After some research he found that employees were spending 20% to 40% of their time on tasks that could be done by someone else. Who did he call? The companies Friedman mentions in Chapter two of his book (The World is Flat, 2005)!

This scenario is as real as it gets when we’re talking about outsourcing and globalization. What’s more fascinating are the initial results and the struggles that occurred. At first things went poorly. Assignments were often flawed with typos or incorrectly analyzed data. The problem stemmed from both sides of the world. Pfizer employees were communicating ineffectively and Indian firms found it difficult to tackle the multi-step projects and were unorganized. As a result the process had to be reorganized and tweaked to work effectively. Office Tiger, the Indian firm working with Pfizer, decided it would create teams that would tackle certain assignments, and the work would be passed around. Speculation by Cohen and others circled management meetings as people discussed the high number of “handoffs” for outsourced projects.

Fortunately after minor adjustments the pilot took off and the program grew to two-hundred Pfizer employees. The benefits for Pfizer are huge. The amount of time to complete projects is cut close to half, while savings are huge. “Pfizer pays $15 to $35 per worker hour, far less than they would pay the McKinseys of the world, whose rates typically start at $215 per hour.”

Globalization is an unbelievably significant opportunity for businesses. This article is significant in showing how globalization can be helpful to your operations and employee effectiveness. But information outsourcing isn’t without its own flaws. The convergence of technology and collaboration has been available for years, but even in 2008 it can still be a struggle to effectively integrate these tools and processes into your business. This was clearly seen as Pfizer struggled to identify an effective process for outsourcing menial tasks. However Cohen notes that after the kinks had been worked out things we’re significantly more efficient. “It’s kind of amazing,” he said. “I wonder what [our employees] used to do.”

Source from Fast Company February 2008 Issue.

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