Council of Third Age: A careful outsourcing decision

"When we set up Council for Third Age (C3A) way back in May 2007, given the pioneering nature of our mission and tasks, and the competing need to get things moving very quickly, we were very clear from the onset that the organisation would have to start small and nimble. Our key focus then was to bring on board a core team of between 4 and 6 key people to staff the critical areas of work. The challenge was that there were more areas of work than what the 4 to 6 staff could handle.

We knew we need to “outsource” due to our “smallness” but the question was "which areas of work?"

When it came to human resources, our conventional mindset was to manage it ourselves. We all had the perception that HR involved “sensitive” staff information, especially on salary and payroll. How on earth could we outsource such sensitive nature of work to an “outsider” company? How do we control and manage such information? How do we ensure confidentiality and information security? Can we ever trust someone else to manage this for us? What happens if this company ceases its operations and worst, suddenly? What will happen to us? What will happen to our “sensitive” staff data and information?

It helped that it was with the referral and recommendations from our overseeing government ministry that we first met and discussed with Virtual HR the possibility of outsourcing our payroll and related HR services to them. It helped to somewhat pacify our primary concerns. But still, we needed to be convinced! Security, confidentiality and accuracy of salary and payroll were paramount in our concerns and requirements. We were looking for track records (third parties’ experiences and referrals, not Virtual HR’S sales pitch), tested and proven systems and processes and most important, long term maintenance and sustainability of the services to be provided by Virtual HR. We were focused on Virtual HR’s value propositions. We need to be convinced as to why we want to work with them, when there were many others offering similar, and promises of better services in the market. Payroll and our ability to pay our people accurately, timely and in full confidentiality were paramount and failure was not an option.

At the end of the day, it was their professional disposition, integrity and level of services (not from their sales presentation or promises, but through our discreet background checks) that helped us made the decision to work with Virtual HR. More than three years down the road, with a growing staff strength of 21, we are still getting consistent and often higher value propositions (enjoying services and service quality of what only bigger companies could afford to provide for their staff) from Virtual HR.