Covid has caused a seismic shift in the way the workplace is perceived. Many companies have moved away from the traditional on site worker and towards a more flexible approach as to where workers need to be to do their job. The lessons learned from the pandemic was that knowledge workers could do their work remotely. According to Gartner ” prepandemic bias against remote workforce models now seem particularly unfounded given that employee performance has largely remained consistent or, in some cases, even improved throughout the pandemic”. The requirements to enable remote work; digitization, managng a dispersed workforce, and moving to the Cloud, have removed the barriers to offshoring. If a job can move to someones house, then it could just as easily be moved to another part of the world.
What is the potential impact that Offshoring have to Western economies? Jonathan Dingel from the Chicago Booth School of Business estimates that up to 4o% of work can be offshored from rich countries. The more developed the economy, the higher percentage of jobs that could be offshored. In addition, The report, “Anywhere Jobs: Reshaping the Geography of Work,” by the U.K.-based Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, analyzed the impact of Covid and remote work on jobs in the UK and concluded that both had “begun to loosen the binds that previously tied a job to a specific geography”. Peter Bendor-Samuel, founder and CEO of the Everest Group, an outsourcing research firm in Dallas has said that Remote work and the “talent shortage” in IT and engineering are “unleashing a new wave of offshoring,”
