Outsourcing your technical, non-customer-facing projects to a specialist, external provider is an astute way to lower your overheads and maintain your profit margins in the current economic climate. But once you’ve established a relationship with an outsourcing provider, how can you extract maximum value from that partnership for your business?

One way to make the most of the partnership is to take advantage of the flexible employment benefits that outsourcing offers. Any time you need specialist help with a business-critical project, need a specific skill set for a project module or need to cover the absence of a key member of staff, you can draw from your supplier’s pool of highly-qualified, technically-skilled professionals.

Your outsourcing provider can also provide you with access to professionals who have specialist expertise in an extensive range of fields and disciplines. So why not use the talent that’s available to you to get specialist help to venture into new business areas or markets or to meet the challenges of new technologies?

For more on how you can benefit from outsourcing click here.

Handling requests for time off from employees can be tricky, especially during popular holiday periods when members of your team or department may already be away.

Grant the employee leave and you risk leaving your teams and business-critical functions under-staffed. But deny the employee time off and they may become disgruntled and either be demotivated on the days they’d wanted to take off or will simply call in sick anyway.

A possible solution is to implement a web-based leave management systems in your organisation, as they take the guesswork out of the process.

When an employee requests time off, rather than going on ‘gut feel” about whether the employee will be needed, you can use the leave management system to see at a glance who’ll be in and out of the office during the requested leave period and when key personnel will be absent.

You can then either confidently grant leave knowing that business-critical functions won’t be under-staffed. Or if resources are too stretched, you can demonstrate to the employee that you have a valid reason for turning the leave request down.

You can find out more about leave management systems here.

As reported in yesterday’s blog, UK companies are increasingly turning to outsourcing in order to cut costs in the current economic climate. But if you’re looking to lower your overheads by outsourcing your IT projects to an external provider, what should you look for in a potential supplier?

The security of your data will be paramount, so choose a company that is ISO 27001-certified, which is the highest international standard for evaluating a company's security procedures and is only awarded to organisations who can prove they have taken rigorous, preventative measures to protect customers’ personal information.

You also will need to ensure that your projects are outsourced to highly-skilled and qualified professionals, so only partner with a company that employs Microsoft-Certified professionals.

You don’t want language and communication to be an issue, so make sure the outsourcer has outstanding facilities and only employs fluent English-language speakers. And to ensure you don’t lose operational control of business-critical projects, only choose a provider whose specialists will work directly under your supervision and as part of your team.

For additional peace of mind, choose a UK-based company with an offshore centre, so you know your contracts will be subject to UK law.

UK businesses are increasing their use of IT outsourcing in order to bring down their operating costs during the economic downturn, a new report has shown.

According to a report by the National Outsourcing Association, UK businesses spent 12 per cent more on IT outsourcing and six per cent more on business process outsourcing in 2008 than they did in 2007.

Commenting on the report, the NOA chairman said: “Outsourcing has traditionally been seen as a cost saving mechanism for business, so in times of economic turbulence it is not surprising that the industry is continuing to grow."

You can find out more about the cost-saving benefits of outsourcinghere .

With absenteeism costing the UK economy £13.2 billion a year, (2008 CBI/AXA Absence Survey), it isn’t surprising that identifying and deterring staff who take too many ‘sickies’ is a priority for most organisations. But with so much attention placed on staff whose absences damage productivity and morale, is there a danger that employees with exemplary attendance records will go unnoticed or be unappreciated?

One of the great advantages of implementing an absence management system like LeaveMaster in your organisation is that it allows you to recognise and reward employees who never take ‘sickies’ and have faultless attendance records, as well as identify those who have been taking too many sick days.

You can find out more about LeaveMaster here.