Employee Augmentation – Marketing Outsourcing | Think (original) (raw)

Welcome to the first chapter in our five-part series ‘Outsourcing Models: The Five Options for Marketing Outsourcing’. In this chapter we look at our first option – Employee Augmentation.

Employee augmentation is an outsourcing method wherein a company hires the service provider to supply the necessary skills (like contract workers) and other resources needed to complete a project or specific objectives. Most importantly, the company assesses the skills, knowledge and experience of its existing employees to determine what it lacks to complete the necessary tasks. The outsource services provider will fill in the gap while the company still retains the greater control of the entire project or department.

These days, employee augmentation is often utilised by organisations who have identified a skillset shortfall in their marketing department or are looking to expand into new channels, and through employee augmentation are able to add immediate skillsets, whether it is a strategist, copywriter or social media marketer. If you are considering this outsourcing option, regardless of the industry you’re in, there are certain factors you should consider.

• Outsourced resources will be adversely affected if there are flaws in your internal system and procedures, in the same way that your existing employees are already affected.
• As mentioned, with employee augmentation you still retain control of the project, which means that you will also retain responsibility for the planning and managing of resources and assignments to ensure delivering results.
• As the need for employee augmentation grows, there will be an increased need to supervise an ever-growing team of both internal and outsourced staff.
• Training costs may still be incurred, especially for orientating contracted workers and outsourced staff, particularly regarding general knowledge about your company as well as any existing systems.

If you think the challenges above can all be overcome or at least mitigated for your company or a specific project, then you have the option to take advantage of many of the benefits that employee augmentation can provide, including:

• Onboarding of employee augmentation within your company’s existing procedures and systems are quicker than having to outsource an entire project team
• You can leverage existing company resources and enjoy the successes of combining the skills and capabilities of both outsourced staff and internal employee
• Reduced overhead and overall savings by not having to spend on internal training
• Dynamic staffing requirements – the flexibility to reduce or increase your workers as needed
• Bring an alternative perspective to problem solving

Stay tuned! Next week we will take a closer look at Project-based outsourcing. If you can’t wait till then, jump and ahead and download the whole five-part series in our special e-book edition – Outsourcing Models: The Five Options for Marketing Outsourcing’