5 Post COVID-19 Trends For Outsourcing And Nearshore Development Companies
The pandemic affected us all — from individuals to governments and enterprises. Covid-19, with all its uncertainty and unprecedentedness, has dramatically reshaped our everyday lives as well as corporate practices all over the world. Unfortunately, businesses in several industries suffered to that extent that now they are to either significantly adjust to the current situation or simply stop their operation.
As for IT outsourcing companies, there sure have been a few significant challenges on the way but the overall outlook is rather positive. We’ve recently made some predictions on IT outsourcing in Ukraine for 2021, but today, let’s cover 5 major post-corona trends in outsourcing and nearshore development companies.
1. Remote work
With the arrival of Covid-19, people all over the world suddenly understood how dangerous personal interaction can be when the disease is highly contagious. Thus, in 2020, many businesses around the planet had to close their doors and switch to working from home.
Remote vs in-office work has been a long-debated issue even before 2020, but restrictions and lockdowns significantly spurred its relevance. While remote work provides employees with more personal time and space as well as cuts their living costs, there are a few challenges that arise, especially for the management.
Outsourcing and nearshore development companies are no exception — those who switched to working remotely had to face the fact that controlling and supervising employees is much more complicated when there is no in-person interaction. Thus, managers of such IT outsourcing companies have to constantly improve internal communications as well as a motivational system in order to reduce the negative effects of remote work while minimizing the spread of the disease by staying home.
2. Communication with clients
For customer-oriented companies, especially large ones, personal communication with clients is not only useful but also sometimes vital. If an outsourcing or nearshore development company aims to provide the best result possible, it’s necessary to clearly understand the client’s ask. To do this, the team usually needs to understand the personality behind the client as well as his needs and preferences. On the other hand, if the project is large and important for the client, he often prefers to meet with the team before signing the contract — talking to the team’s core members helps to evaluate the contractor’s skills and abilities. When both domestic and international travel is restrained, it’s not that simple to meet and get down to the discussion in person. Thus, COVID-19 has been hampering the working process and has made it somewhat more impersonal.
3. More control over working hours
This trend derives from the first one — remote work. Since most employees of outsourcing or nearshore development companies don’t go to the office, their working schedules may vary significantly. Some managers allow for more freedom — like starting your working day whenever you can as soon as you get the job done — while others strive for more discipline. Whatever the approach, the post-COVID-19 era demands more control over working hours than it was before the pandemic. Today, managers and project leads have to pay special attention to the working schedule of the employees and ensure that the overall productivity will not suffer from the discrepancies.
4. Increased demands for the internal structure
While differences in working hours may demand special consideration from the management, they are not the only issue. Another important change that COVID-19 has brought about is the fact that employees cannot communicate as efficiently as they could in early 2020. While some workers may have returned to offices, others may prefer to continue working remotely. Thus, to ensure a smooth and productive working process, managers have to enhance the internal structure of outsourcing or nearshore development companies so that remote workers still feel like a part of the team.
5. Challenges with ongoing projects
There’s no wonder that outsourcing or nearshore development companies get little to no projects from the sectors that were most hit by the pandemic. Indeed, why create something irrelevant? But there’s a catch — what about those projects that are already in development? When the pandemic hit, many software development companies faced the fact that what they have been creating may not be of use at all since the situation changed dramatically. Since many of those clients didn’t want to completely halt the development of their products, they asked their outsource or nearshore companies to help them — to alter the product so that it regained or at least improved its relevance. How a particular software development company tackled challenges with ongoing projects was a great marker of its agility. It seems that those alterations of principles of work or product features have become an indispensable part of a qualitative development process, and result-oriented outsourcing or nearshore development companies have to conform to the new rules to keep afloat.
Summary
To wrap it up, COVID-19 has dramatically reshaped how businesses all over the world function internally as well as communicate with their clients. Software development companies are no exception — they have to deal with the ramifications of remote work and ensure a productive environment within the team as well as smooth communication with customers.
As an outsourcing development company, Idealogic faced the same issues in 2020. It’s too early to tell if we coped with the challenges successfully, but we are proud to see satisfied clients and motivated employees. In general, we always try to be flexible with our clients and meet their demands — whatever the situation.
