Our advice: There are two very different answers depending on your company's situation. The big question is whether the offshore outsourcer is providing supplemental services alongside your technical staff, or whether it's in the process of replacing the IT staff.

In the first instance, the issues to be overcome involve fear of eventually being replaced, territorialism, change, and adjusting to working with a new culture. In the second situation, the issues are more fundamental--why should I help someone who is putting me out of a job?--and thus more difficult to solve.

Assisting Supplemental Services
The most important factor is putting your staff at ease in terms of their job security. If staff members feel that their assistance will eventually put them out of a job, at the very best you'll get malicious compliance with cooperation requests. Honesty and good communication are always the best policy, as they create trust and eliminate fears about your "real" motivations.

The second step is to create personal relationships between your staff members and their counterparts in the outsourcing organization. Cultural awareness training is very valuable for overcoming cultural "miscues," but nothing beats creating a team where members know each other as individuals for encouraging cooperation.

The final step is providing some financial or other type of benefit based on the success of the overall team, giving individuals added incentive to cooperate with their offshore counterparts.

Training Their Replacements
In this scenario, the level of cooperation is largely set by your and your company's behavior in reaching this point in the outsourcing arrangement. If your staff members feel they have been treated unfairly in the process, in terms of honesty, severance arrangements, and job-placement assistance, you're unlikely to get much cooperation regardless of incentives.

If employees feel they've been treated fairly, you have more latitude in providing motivators such as longer severance periods, completion bonuses, and additional training assistance to reward cooperation. Change is always painful and resisted, but if you help replaced employees regain security by moving to new and better positions outside the company, they're more likely to help the company make the transition successfully.

In today's still-tight economic climate, offshore outsourcing is a lightning rod for job-security fears. You can't blame technical staff members for being hesitant to assist those they fear are taking away their jobs. Reducing or eliminating these fears is your most important motivator for gaining cooperation.

-- Ian Hayes