When you outsource back-office work, the first number you compare is the monthly cost per person. It’s clear, it’s easy to defend, and it fits neatly in a spreadsheet.
What doesn’t fit in that spreadsheet is the time your own team spends working around a hire who speaks English but doesn’t yet work in it. That cost is real. It just lands on a different desk.
Even large companies have stopped judging outsourcing on price alone. In Deloitte’s 2024 Global Outsourcing Survey, 34% of executives named cost reduction as a primary reason to outsource, down from 70% in 2020, and improved access to talent now tops the list. Price per seat still matters. It just isn’t the whole bill.
Four costs that never make the spreadsheet
Rewritten emails
An update arrives that nobody can act on as written. Someone on your team cleans it up before it goes to a manager. A few minutes here, a few more there. Within weeks, rewriting has quietly become part of someone’s job.
The follow-up call
An update that can’t stand on its own turns into a call or a chat thread. Now two people spend time on something one person should have read in a minute. Across a week of open issues, those calls add up.
Literal process errors
A new SOP step has one ambiguous line. Someone who isn’t comfortable asking follows it to the letter, across every account. The next day goes to cleanup instead of work.
This one stays hidden for a reason. A Journal of Business Communication study of international business meetings found that people working in a second language sometimes stay quiet out of low confidence, or miss key details while trying to look like they understood. Nobody notices the gap until the work comes back wrong.
Handoffs that need decoding
End-of-day summaries, shift notes, status updates. When they’re hard to read, the next person starts the morning rebuilding yesterday instead of moving forward.
What the research says about lost time
Poor communication already costs more than most teams track. In a Harris Poll survey commissioned by Grammarly, U.S. business leaders estimated their teams lose 7.47 hours a week to poor communication, close to a full workday.
The top reasons listed in the same report match the costs above: clearing up confusion such as next steps (63%), fixing mistakes caused by miscommunication (59%), and following up with colleagues on deliverables (52%).
That survey looked at U.S. teams in general, not at second-language hires. When a hire speaks English but doesn’t yet work in it, each of those costs gets one more way in.
Who actually pays: your senior people
These costs rarely land on the person you hired. They land on your managers and your most experienced people, the ones who know the work well enough to fix it.
That’s the opposite of what outsourcing was supposed to do. You brought in help to take work off their plate. Instead, they’re supervising, rewriting and re-explaining.
And because the time is spread across dozens of small moments, it rarely gets reported. Your senior people simply absorb it.
How to measure it on your own team
You don’t need a consultant to put a number on this. Pick one week and keep a simple tally for any outsourced or remote seat:
- Updates or emails someone rewrote before they went further.
- Calls or messages that only existed to clarify something already sent.
- Tasks redone because an instruction was followed literally.
- Handoffs the next person had to reconstruct.
Next to each one, note who fixed it and roughly how long it took. Multiply those minutes by that person’s hourly cost. That’s the part of the seat’s price that never made the spreadsheet.
Then put it next to the per-seat savings you were weighing. If the tally is long, the cheaper seat may not be cheaper.
What to ask before you outsource back-office work
Before you sign with any staffing or outsourcing partner, ask these five questions:
- How do you check working English, not just test scores? Look for real work tasks: a written summary, a call scenario, the vocabulary of the role. Our guide on how to hire bilingual staff for working fluency covers what to look for.
- What happens before I see a profile? A good partner screens for skills and fit before your team spends time on interviews.
- How is the person trained on my processes? General training isn’t enough. Onboarding should be built around your tools and SOPs. Integration is a common weak spot: in the same Deloitte survey, 47% of executives named poor integration of vendor services with their operating model as an outsourcing challenge.
- Who checks in after the start date? Problems caught at 30 days are cheap to fix. Problems found at six months are not.
- Will they work while your team works? A question asked at 2 p.m. should get an answer the same afternoon. Our breakdown of the real cost of working across time zones shows the overlap math.
How TCA approaches it
TCA (The Colombian Advantage) connects U.S. and Canadian companies with highly educated, bilingual Colombian professionals for back-office and operations roles, including accounting, business operations and logistics and freight support. They work in your time zone, so questions get asked and answered the same day. If you’re still weighing locations, start with nearshore vs. offshore staffing.
- Every candidate completes a behavioral and cognitive assessment, with Predictive Index results, before you see a profile.
- We check English through the interview and a role-specific work test.
- You interview the selected candidates and decide who joins your team.
- Once they start, they go through TCA training plus a company-specific onboarding program built with you.
- We check in at 30, 60 and 90 days, then with quarterly reviews.
A U.S. firm in Los Angeles spent months trying to fill a gap in its pricing department with local hires before working with TCA. In Sophia Huluta’s words:
“Our new team members are highly productive and have acclimated to our organization’s culture with ease.”
Sophia Huluta, U.S. Firm, Los Angeles, CA
The goal is simple: a hire who takes work off your senior team’s plate, instead of adding to it.
Tell us about the role and the work it needs to cover. We’ll help you define it and find the right fit.