Now You See It and Now You Don’t: Consequences of Veiling Relational Work

INTRODUCTION

Outsourcing service providers must deliver apparently seamless service to their clients while they concurrently navigate the complex conditions of their own organizations. As with a play-within-a-play, this work goes on primarily behind the scenes. The individuals and groups charged with shaping and delivering outsourcing services are thrust into work situations that bridge hierarchical boundaries, are geographically distributed, and pose high professional and monetary risks. Schedules are fully booked with face-to-face meetings, electronic correspondence, and telephone conference calls typically extending well beyond a traditional work day as people work together across multiple time zones. The standard routines of the business (eg: project management protocols, schedules, formalized meeting agendas, sales pipeline reviews, managing sales support software) contribute to a structure that gives shape to the turbulence of daily demands. These formalized work processes, protocols, and business controls are clearly visible in the rhythm of daily work. However it is the intangible work of business relationships that is the glue holding the seams of seamless service together.

This paper offers findings from a study of Information Technology (I.T.) outsourcing services and explores the conditions in which relational practices are veiled by the work designs, tools, business lingo, and even media representations of Information Technology outsourcing services. Veiling describes the way the language and focus of these elements have taken over and permeated organizations to levels where the business benefits of relational work are obscured. Specifically, this paper describes the intended and unintended consequences, on individuals and organizations, of relational veiling that emerges in response to the situational dynamics of the I.T. outsourcing services workplace. The term ‘veiling’ was assigned by our research team as an etic code to describe the situation where people “don’t say”. Instead they avoid conflict without resolving it, fail to clarify assumptions, vent issues and feelings in back channels to avoid difficult conversations, choose to interact indirectly via electronic media to avoid direct and potentially difficult contact, and persist in the use of technology tools that do not help accomplish work. We contend that the language of spread sheets and project management are privileged over relational work. As a result, the everyday realities of person-to-person and person-to-technology relations are obscured. The critical work of relationship is veiled by this dominant perspective and mirrored by a silence in the empirical literature.

BACKGROUND AND APPROACH

The idea for this study initially grew out of varied consulting engagements with technology outsourcing service providers from 2001 through 2005. Executives would often say, “I don’t have to talk about this relationship stuff. I’m great at getting along with people.” Their focus was on managing the relationship rather than understanding the work that was required to create and nurture the relationship. Relationship work lands in the realm of “soft skills” and therefore did not seem worthy of the attention of “real” business; the intangibility seemed to make the topic uncomfortable. This was reminiscent of the disappearing of relational skills described by Fletcher (1999) in her study of female engineers: “The discourse suggests that there is a dynamic process involved in which relationship practice “gets disappeared” as work and gets constructed as something other than work” (Fletcher, 1999, p. 103). However, our observation is that relational work was not invisible in Outsourcing Services. Instead it appeared to shift in and out of preeminence depending on the proximity to contact with the external Client. The work of relationships was stressed and highlighted, greatly visible, when it came to the relationship with the external client. For example, significant annual corporate investments of both time and money were focused on managing the business relationships between the customer and the service provider and the business value of relationship was frequently spoken of in conversation as central to revenue growth and client satisfaction. In contrast, the ‘in house’ or intra-organizational relationships did not receive the same degree of attention despite broad recognition that internal breakdowns, quite distal from the Client interface, were visible and damaging to the overall Client relationship. We were intrigued by this contrast in attention to relationship and drawn to research it in more depth.

The findings described in this paper are drawn from a grounded theory study of outsourcing relationship formation (Kreeger, 2007). During 2006-2007 we completed 25 in-depth, unstructured interviews with technology outsourcing services professionals from a Fortune 50 global technology organization. All of the participants were actively involved in newly signed outsourcing agreements that represented three different service sectors: industrial, manufacturing, and travel. There was extensive field work as our research team had open access to face-to-face meetings, telephone calls, team rooms, and documents (e.g., job descriptions, process documents, metrics, and measurement policies) related to the work of outsourcing service delivery.

We applied the analytic processes and tools of dimensional analysis (Bowers, 1988; Kools (1996), Schatzman, 1991; Schatzman & Strauss, 1973) and situational analysis (Clarke, 2005). Star (1991)describes this approach to constructivist grounded theory as an approach to study predominantly invisible social arenas. Veiling emerged as a significant dimension of the overall dimensional analysis.

ICONIC IMAGES

The iconic image of the technology outsourcer is not about relational work. The media commercials of three major outsourcers, Accenture, EDS, and IBM, depict an interesting picture and support this claim.

EDS is a large outsourcing provider. In an EDS commercial called Manhattan (metroid48), a group of people are recruited off the street with the promise of $100.00 for 15 minutes of work. These people are the outsourcing team. One of them is in a chicken suit. The implication is that the work of outsourcing is being accomplished by a group of unskilled strangers. Perhaps EDS intends this as an observation about their competitors.

A recent television spot for IBM, another larger outsourcing service provider, opens with the view of a large factory. As the camera closes in on the factory, we see IBM-blue flowers streaming from the smokestack. “I’m Not Like Everybody Else,” by the Kinks plays in the background. The flowers blow into an office building where people are working in cubicles. The people in the cubicles are lip-synching to the lyrics from the Kinks. Finally, against a long shot of Manhattan and the Empire State Building, we see the IBM logo (IBM, 2007). The blue flowers all look alike and the people are in cubicles lip-synching. What about them was not like everybody else? In an IBM television commercial, a group of people are standing together in a semi-circle. It appears that they might be in an airport. Their mobile devices all ring. They talk and text into their mobile devices. They exchange cryptic monosyllables. We think about face-to-face meetings where people mostly interacted with their machines.

Another large outsourcing provider, Accenture, has Tiger Woods as their brand endorser. Most of the commercials show him making impossible shots using skills that are compared to skills that Accenture can help companies build through outsourcing: “We know what it takes to be a Tiger” (David, 2006). Tiger Woods is presented as an icon of high performance. Tiger Woods is just one person and golf is a solo sport. Where is the relational work in this image? Absent. We learn from this Accenture message that great outsourcing providers are solo artists.

It is difficult to miss these iconic messages once you begin listening for them. They depict people acting alone or interacting with machines instead of each other. This area of media discourse and its relation to the way that relationship is veiled within organizations is, in and of itself, a fascinating topic for research. It became a part of this study as we discovered that the language and work of relationship was veiled in acronyms and project management processes. It was constituted by the stories people chose to share and the work we observed. These branding forces are a part of what keeps relational discourse silenced.

VEILING CONDITIONS AND STRATEGIES

Veiling is a strategy that individuals and groups take as a result of particular aspects, or conditions, of the total work context. In this section of the paper we briefly describe three conditions that consistently linked to veiling as a strategy. These conditions include (1) Work designs (2) Business Metrics and Quotas, and (3) Technology Tools Understanding these conditions, and the organizational change levers that they represent, is an important part of the contextual story of relational work.

The participants in this study had a lot to say to our research team about relationships in outsourcing services. They had strong opinions about relationship value (positive), what worked and didn’t work in their work with people and technologies, what they’d change and how they’d improve it. In contrast, when the participants were together, on the phone or in person, they didn’t talk about these same observations and concerns. Instead, they discussed the problems with technical work and reviewed project management status. They seldom discussed successful or “on-target” work. The only time the word “relationship” was used was in context with the word client (e.g., “I am focused on the client relationship”)

Implications

The unintended consequences of relational veiling can have negative impact on service delivery. When veiling is opaque, individuals and groups may appear to take actions counter to effective business practices and natural courtesy. The unintended consequences of these actions are service breakdowns, losses in productivity, and visible ‘seams’ in the service performance that erode client confidence and satisfaction. In other instances, when veiling is more diaphanous, there is a mis-match between what people say about relationship value and how they do their work. Service professionals describe that “relationship is everything,” while the everyday realities of person-to-person and person-to-technology relations are concealed by a focus on project management language and technology.

One executive told us: “My job is to make it smooth”. Work appears smoother behind the veils of various thicknesses that work their way into the toolkit of service delivery. In that sense, veiling is an adaptive response to the work context that leads to an intended result. Veiling strategies are taken for self preservation and for protection of individual and group.

So where should we go from here? What advice can we give Outsourcing Services professionals? Unfortunately and not very pragmatically, the answers that we propose are likely to require both time and financial investment.

First, we recommend that organizations take a close look at the work design and process burdens that they are placing on their people. The conditions of the work place form barriers both to people’s efforts to work with other people as well with people’s efforts to work with technology. Second, we recommend an increased intentionality to new technology roll-out. Innovation and transformation is a major element in technology services. However, incautious implementation ultimately damages the overall service experience. Lastly, we recommend consistent financial investment in some face-to-face interaction for outsourcing service groups. We calculated that the cost of an initial face-to-face meeting was seldom more than 1% of the project budget.

There is certainly a rich opportunity for more research for those of us in business ethnography. This study only begins to scratch the surface of a major gap in the empirical literature (Kreeger, 2007). We are uniquely positioned to watch for the work that relationships do and to recommend changes in practice and technology that have the potential to both add to our scientific understanding of a predominately invisible phenomenon as well as to make recommendations with business impact.

Conclusion

Given the challenging conditions described in this paper, and the overall turbulence of the I.T. services environment, it is no wonder that individuals consciously or unconsciously take on veiling strategies. We stress the critical point that relational work is not veiled simply because people lack some form of interpersonal skills or desire to get along with others. Instead, relational work is veiled within the dominating conditions of the workplace. It is also not our intention to vilify the importance of enabling technology and business controls. Instead, we are suggesting that these have been over executed at the loss of other important dimensions of work.

Lisa Kreegeris a member of the Service Practices group of IBM’s Almaden Services Research. Lisa’s research focuses on interorganizational relationships and relational work in complex service systems. Since joining IBM Research she has led or participated in projects focused on relationship formation among IT service providers, and collaboration practices among globally distributed teams. She holds a PhD from Antioch University and an MBA from Seattle University.

Elizabeth Holloway teaches at Antioch University in the graduate Leadership and Change Program. Her current writing is in the areas of mentoring and coaching as relevant to creating communities of practice in corporate environments. In addition, she is investigating the systemic effects of “toxic” behaviors within organizational cultures and the role of coaching in these situations.

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2008, pp. 31–39. © American Anthropological Association, some rights reserved.