“Outsourcing and Talent Management – Making a Difference”

ST Electronics (e-Services)’s Sharing on 2nd Charity Council Networking Seminar

As part of iServe’s continuing efforts to educate and share with the charities on shared services, Ms Karen Tan, Deputy General Manager, ST Electronics (e-Services) shared her views on how outsourcing can make a difference in talent management for the Charities during the recent 2nd Charity Council Networking Seminar on the 11th March 2010.  

Ms Karen Tan highlighted the fact that there are limited HR resources available to most charities. Hence, outsourcing of administrative services is a possible avenue for charities to focus their energy in managing and developing a smaller pool of staff who are top talents.  This will allow the charities to concentrate on developing key competencies in their talent pool to achieve their organisational missions.  

Ms Karen Tan pointed out that talented people who are brought in as executive leadership are meant to lead and steer the charity towards fulfilment of the organisation’s mission.  The executive leadership’s key concerns and deliverables should be in the areas of vision, mission, strategies and governance. It would be a waste if in reality, their focus and attention are being derailed to handling administrative processes more than the strategic areas.  With this in mind, the charities can consider off loading some of the administrative processes by outsourcing them to quality service provider.

Charities are encouraged to view outsourcing as a golden opportunity to re-design the jobs for their staff with potential and bring them up the value chain. These staff can be re-trained and professionalised where they could be more directly involved in the charities’ services and activities, for example, serving their beneficiaries, planning fund raising, developing volunteers etc.  These will increase the meaningfulness of their work, and give the staff a sense of pride in their achievement and contribution to the charities.

With this, Mrs Karen Tan concluded that working in partnership with quality outsourcing provider is a strategy which the charities can deploy as part of their plan in talent management and transformation to be high performance organisations.

Well governed and high performance charities are by nature, great attraction to talented people, volunteers and donors.