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How Much Work Can You Off-Load?

Come 3 p.m. each day, workers staring at computer screens everywhere share the same dream: a magic button that says click here, and someone else will do this annoying project for you.

ps: by 9 a.m. tomorrow.

Starting this month, that button will become a reality for 10,000 Pfizer employees, though their button actually says oof, short for Office of the Future. "Our Harvard MBA staff was spending a lot of time doing 'support' work, not their actual jobs," says Jordan Cohen, senior director of organizational effectiveness. "These are people we hired to develop strategies and innovate. Instead, they were Googling and making PowerPoints."

Who is at the other end of that magic button? Two outsourcing companies in India. Their existence is an extension of the booming Indian outsourcing market, which already handles customer-service and computer programming for U.S. companies, as well as concierge services for executives too busy to answer email and arrange for dry-cleaning. But Pfizer's move is an acknowledgment that companies are wasting resources by saddling their most-prized workers with their own support work.

OOF was born of a financial crisis. In 2005, Pfizer announced a $4 billion annual budget cut to counterbalance the expiration of lucrative drug patents. The company later laid off 10% of its workforce. "It was going to be pretty traumatic," Cohen says. "Were we just going to tighten our belts, or work differently?"

At the time, Cohen was reading Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, which profiles India's virtual-assistant companies. After analyzing the activities of Pfizer employees, he learned that they spend 20% to 40% of their time on four activities: creating documents, manipulating and analyzing spreadsheets, scheduling meetings, and researching. So he called the companies in Friedman's book. Could they do this stuff? He found hundreds of operations, many with thousands of employees, specializing in so-called knowledge-process outsourcing--dealing with information and data. He rounded up 30 adventurous souls at Pfizer for a test-drive with four employees at OfficeTiger in Chennai.

The initial test run didn't work well. Assignments came back unusable, sometimes marred with typos, and with data incorrectly analyzed. Cohen realized that the problem stemmed from Pfizer employees not specifying what they ultimately needed, and the Indian companies struggling with multistep projects. He spent months breaking complex Pfizer projects into repeatable tasks and training both sides to handle them. On a trip to India, he learned that OfficeTiger was decentralized and fragmented--the graphics people on one floor and the research people on another. OfficeTiger proposed a team system, putting a dozen skilled workers in one room and passing the project around repeatedly. "I didn't think it would work," Cohen says. "There were too many handoffs."

But it did work, and the pilot took off. Word spread through Pfizer's towers, until the program included 200 employees. Meanwhile, Cohen worked to create a simple interface; now, when a Pfizer employee clicks the OOF button in Microsoft Outlook, a single triage worker in India receives the request and assigns it to a team, and the team leader calls the employee to clarify the larger purpose. The team leader then sends back an email specifying the cost. "At this point, the Pfizer employee can say yes or no," Cohen says. "That's the ultimate measure: Is this research project worth $750?" The verb "OOFable" entered the lexicon of Pfizer's pilot users.