When it comes to outsourcing, it seems the higher education sector needs an injection of private sector best practice.
Jane Willis, a professor of Human Geography at Queen Mary University London, appears to be under so many misapprehensions about outsourcing that I have to set the record straight.
To promote a keynote speech she’s making about the living wage, she’s decided to stomp the boot into private sector provision of services. On the Guardian website, she discusses Queen Mary’s decision to move domestic services back in house, all the way back in 2008. Now either she is acutely uninformed about how procuring services really works or Queen Mary’s University was a stupefyingly unintelligent consumer of outsourcing…or maybe they just didn’t care enough to do it right.
“There is a lot at stake in the way our cleaners, cooks and security workers feel and behave,” she says. Yes, we can all agree that. But her next comment: “those universities that have outsourced such workers have no influence over their training, development, working conditions and emotional attachment to the university's work,” is astonishingly wide of the mark.
Before we get started about motivating supplier resource, it’s worth mentioning that outsourcing domestic services, your kitchen staff for example, almost never involves throwing out the old staff and drafting in an all-new crack team. Chances are it’s mostly the same people, whose contracts are transferred to the incoming provider, under the Transfer of Undertaking and Protection of Employment(TUPE), a legal statute that requires that terms and conditions for staff remain the same, or at least as favourable to them.
So bearing in mind that it’s largely that same people doing largely the same job, the supplier is immediately under pressure to deliver higher quality service for a lower cost than the client could have done themselves. One of the intrinsic benefits of outsourcing is innovation in service delivery, and when an outsourcing company takes over they often find that the best ideas for improvement come from the staff. The newfound capacity to contest the way things are done can mean that the employees are listened to like never before, and that is a very motivating thing. Managers transferred from the public sector to the private usually find that they have more autonomy, yet increased accountability - two massive motivators.
A survey by Serco looked into autonomy: the poll of public-sector managers switched to the private sector by outsourcing revealed how 93% stated that “I have more autonomy than I had in the public sector” and 95 per cent said that “the transfer of the delivery of public services to the private sector resulted in improved (or significantly improved) service quality for the service users”).
Regarding greater accountability, DeAnne Julius, who led 2008’s Public Services Industry Review for the ministerial Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, as it was then known, wrote in the Financial Times: “The process of writing bid documents, clarifying the desired outcomes of the service, assigning clear accountabilities for risks and fixing a timetable for making decisions provides a focus and managerial clarity that is often lacking in public-sector operations.”
Focusing on outcomes is crucial to a successful contract. If you want staff morale to be high, and interaction with the students to be consistently convivial, insist upon that in the tender documentation from the get-go. Look into the supplier’s attitude to training and developing staff - chances are they invest more time and money in their people than a university could afford to, because these are big companies working in competitive markets and the quality of people is always a key differentiator. Equally, one of the biggest costs for a company is staff attrition - it’s actually cheaper to invest in existing people than recruit new staff and train them from scratch, so that’s what outsourcing companies do.
Anyone assuming that people are less motivated and involved simply because they work for an outsourcing provider would do well to remember that clients do get to design how outsourced staff appraisals work - and these usually are incorporated into the company’s remuneration as well as the staffs’.
To make outsourced staff feel a real part of things, they should have access to all the same benefits and incentives as the client-side staff and be treated with respect at all times. If retained university staff are treating outsourced staff as second class citizens, this is a counterproductive attitude that will be detrimental to performance, which no-one wants. Particularly the students. Or their parents, who oft pay astronomical fees for their children to be there and deserve maximum value for money as standard.
The outsourcing supplier will set about doing more for less by investing in technology and infrastructure, but managing people well, giving them a chance to shine and develop their skills is the heart of good outsourcing. It seems as though there could be an urgent need for up-skilling in university procurement teams. Real forward thinking private sector clients send their teams on skills programmes in outsourcing - this seems like something the university sector should consider.