Offshore Isn't a Dirty Word
I’ve built and managed teams across the United States, India, and the Philippines. At one point, I had team members in eight cities across three continents, all working together to deliver support and services to a global customer base. And every time I talk about this experience, I can feel the room divide. Half the audience assumes offshore means “cheap labor, lower quality.” The other half has done it well and knows how powerful it can be.
Both sides are right about some things and wrong about others. Offshore done badly is everything its critics say: a race to the bottom that degrades quality, frustrates customers, and burns through local talent. Offshore done well is one of the most effective scaling strategies available — not because it saves money (though it can), but because it extends your operational capability in ways that a single-geography team simply can’t match.
The difference between the two outcomes is leadership. Not the strategy. Not the vendor. Leadership.
The cost arbitrage trap
Let me start with where most organizations go wrong, because I’ve seen this play out more times than I can count.
The conversation usually starts in finance. Headcount is expensive. The fully loaded cost of an analyst in the U.S. is X. The fully loaded cost of an equivalent role in India or the Philippines is a fraction of X. The math is irresistible. The business case writes itself.
So the organization stands up an offshore team, usually through a BPO partner. The mandate is cost savings. The implicit message — sometimes explicit — is that this is about doing the same work for less money. Success is measured in cost-per-case or cost-per-resolution. The people doing the work are interchangeable resources in a financial model.
And here’s what happens: the offshore team is given the most transactional, lowest-complexity work. They’re trained on processes but not on context. They can follow a script but can’t exercise judgment because nobody’s invested in giving them the understanding required for judgment. Quality drops. Customers notice. Internal teams start treating the offshore group as second-class. Morale deteriorates. Turnover spikes. The cost savings erode because you’re constantly training replacements.
Two years in, someone runs the numbers and discovers that the actual savings are a fraction of the business case — and the quality impact is real. The program is labeled a failure, the offshore team is reduced or eliminated, and the organization concludes that offshore doesn’t work.
But offshore didn’t fail. The strategy failed. And the strategy failed because it was built on cost arbitrage instead of capability.
What capability building looks like
Every successful global team I’ve built started with a different premise: we’re not hiring cheaper people to do the same work. We’re building capability in a new geography that extends what we can do as an organization.
That distinction changes everything about how you set up, manage, and invest in the team.
When I stood up a team in India, I didn’t start with the most transactional work. I started with a capability assessment: what does this team need to be able to do in twelve months? Not “handle tier one tickets” — but genuinely operate as a high-functioning part of the organization that can own outcomes, not just execute tasks.
That meant investing in onboarding that went beyond process training. New team members learned the products at a deep level. They spent time with the U.S. team — virtually and sometimes in person — to absorb context, culture, and the unwritten knowledge that never makes it into documentation. They were given progressively more complex work as they demonstrated readiness, with the explicit expectation that they would eventually operate at the same level as their onshore counterparts.
It took longer to ramp. The first six months were more expensive than the cost-arbitrage model would have been. But by month twelve, I had a team that could handle complex cases, contribute to process improvement, mentor new hires, and operate with minimal oversight. The five-million-plus in efficiency gains we realized over time weren’t because we were paying less per person. They were because we’d built a genuinely more capable organization.
The cultural work nobody wants to do
Here’s the part that separates successful global teams from unsuccessful ones, and it has nothing to do with technology or process: you have to invest in cultural integration. Not surface-level cultural awareness training — real work to build trust, mutual respect, and genuine collaboration across geographies.
In most organizations with offshore teams, there’s an unspoken hierarchy. The onshore team is the “real” team. The offshore team is the auxiliary. Onshore makes decisions; offshore executes them. Onshore gets the interesting work; offshore gets the routine. Onshore is included in strategic conversations; offshore finds out what was decided afterward.
Every one of those dynamics undermines the offshore team’s potential. And every one of them is a leadership choice.
When I set up my global leadership cadence, the offshore leaders were full participants — not observers, not update-givers, participants. They had the same decision-making authority as their onshore counterparts. Their teams were recognized in the same all-hands meetings. Their feedback was solicited and acted on with the same weight. When promotion opportunities arose, offshore candidates were evaluated on the same criteria.
This isn’t charity. It’s operational necessity. If your offshore team feels like a second-class operation, they’ll perform like one. If they feel like a valued part of the organization with real agency and real stakes, they’ll perform accordingly. I’ve seen the same individuals go from disengaged to exceptional based solely on how they were positioned and treated within the organization.
The time zone advantage
One of the least appreciated benefits of a global team is time zone coverage, and most organizations waste it. They set up offshore teams and then try to force them into the onshore team’s schedule — holding meetings at inconvenient hours, requiring overlap during the U.S. business day, and treating the time difference as a problem to be managed rather than an asset to be leveraged.
My approach was the opposite. We designed our operations to take advantage of the time zone spread. When the U.S. team went home, the India team was coming online. Cases that came in after hours didn’t sit until the next morning — they were actively worked. Complex issues that required research could be progressed overnight and waiting for the U.S. team with a solution draft when they arrived. Customer-facing coverage extended without anyone working nights.
This “follow the sun” model isn’t new, but most organizations implement it poorly because they don’t invest in the handoff. If your offshore team doesn’t have the context and authority to pick up where the onshore team left off, the time zone advantage evaporates. You just end up with two teams working in parallel who have to re-sync every morning, which often takes more time than it saves.
Getting the handoff right requires shared tools, shared documentation, clear case ownership, and — critically — trust. The onshore team has to trust that the offshore team will handle their cases competently. The offshore team has to trust that the onshore team will respect the work they’ve done overnight. That trust is built through the cultural work I described above. You can’t engineer it with process alone.
The talent market reality
There’s a pragmatic argument for global workforce strategy that goes beyond cost or capability: the talent simply isn’t always available in a single geography. I’ve run hiring processes in U.S. markets where qualified candidates were scarce, expensive, or both. Meanwhile, there are highly educated, technically skilled professionals in India and the Philippines who are excellent at this work and eager for the opportunity.
The idea that the best talent is concentrated in one country is parochial, and it’s getting more outdated every year. Some of the best analysts, engineers, and leaders I’ve worked with were in Hyderabad and Manila. Not “good for offshore” — genuinely excellent by any standard. The organizations that recognize this and build global teams accordingly have a structural advantage over those that limit themselves to a single talent pool.
But — and this is important — this only works if you’re genuinely investing in those people. Offering a job at a fraction of the U.S. salary isn’t a talent strategy. Offering a career path, leadership opportunities, meaningful work, and a genuine seat at the table — in a market where many employers offer none of those things — that’s how you attract and retain the best global talent.
What I tell leaders considering offshore
If you’re thinking about building an offshore team, ask yourself one question before anything else: are you building this for cost savings or for capability? If the answer is cost savings, you’ll get what you pay for — literally. If the answer is capability, you have a chance to build something genuinely powerful.
Then accept that it requires real investment. Not just financial — though that matters — but leadership investment. You’ll need to spend time with the team, not just manage them through dashboards. You’ll need to challenge the onshore team’s biases about offshore quality. You’ll need to create career paths that cross geographies. You’ll need to be present — virtually if not physically — in a way that demonstrates the offshore team is a priority, not an afterthought.
And you’ll need patience. A well-built global team takes twelve to eighteen months to hit its stride. If you’re expecting the business case to be proven in the first quarter, you’re going to make short-sighted decisions that undermine the long-term potential. The organizations that succeed at global workforce strategy are the ones that commit to it as a strategic capability, not a tactical cost play.
Offshore isn’t a dirty word. But it does require leadership — real leadership, not just a budget line and a vendor contract. The organizations that figure this out have a competitive advantage that’s difficult to replicate. The ones that don’t will keep cycling through the same failed experiments and concluding that the model doesn’t work.
It works. It just requires more of the leader than most are prepared to give.
— Bruno