What started out as an exercise in reducing costs during economically unstable times has turned into an opportunity to strategically realign this organisation’s talent strategy. Its P&C Business Partner outlines the important evolution of this offshoring strategy.

In 2021, amid the uncertainty of the pandemic disruptions, talent shortages and rising operational costs, Morrows, a Melbourne-based advisory firm of around 100 team members, joined many other professional services firms in exploring talent offshoring to build resilience, increase operational efficiency and manage expenses.

What began as a practical response to short-term pressures has since evolved into a multi-year transformation marked by early wins, challenges and some significant lessons.

Today, around one in four Morrows team members are based offshore. These employees work across key functions, including financial planning, accounting, audit, superannuation and administration. These team members have become an essential and integrated part of our workforce.

As the People and Culture Business Partner at Morrows, I work closely with each business unit to align people initiatives with broader commercial goals. Our offshoring journey began in 2021 and I originally had minimal involvement. But as the program has grown, so has my involvement.

By early 2023, following a shift in responsibilities and team structure, I stepped into the lead People and Culture role. This transition significantly expanded my remit: I took over the day-to-day liaison with our offshore partners (BPOs) and initiated regular check-ins with People Managers.

As I moved into this role, I recognised the need to deepen my capability, and the AHRI Practising Certification Program was the ideal pathway to achieve this.

I chose Morrows’ offshoring strategy as my case study to achieve HR Certification because it had largely remained in a maintenance phase since its launch. It presented a meaningful opportunity to not only support the business more strategically, but to re-energise an important initiative with fresh insights, clearer measures and renewed intent.

From cost-cutting to capacity building

While cost savings were certainly a driver of our offshoring strategy, we also had broader ambitions. We saw this as an opportunity to address multiple business challenges at once.

For example, it would allow us to:

Free up local capacity by moving low-value, repetitive work offshore, so our local team members could focus on enhancing their growth, learning and client relationships.

Protect our people from burnout by redistributing workloads more sustainably. During the peak of the pandemic in 2021, like many professional services firms, we saw clear signs that burnout was a rising risk, particularly among our early-career professionals. In FY22, 40 per cent of our voluntary departures were aged between 25 and 35, and half of those cited moving to a competitor in a similar role. This signalled that we needed to do more to retain and support this group. Our offshoring strategy helped relieve pressure on stretched local teams by redistributing repetitive, process-heavy tasks, giving our Melbourne-based employees more space to focus on meaningful, engaging work and reducing the risk of burnout.

Accelerate development by giving our local team members more opportunities to engage with clients and focus on high-impact work.

Get ahead of the talent crunch, particularly in accounting and audit roles, where ongoing shortages persist. Enrolments in accounting degrees across Australia and New Zealand are declining, even as demand for qualified accountants continues to rise. In response, we’ve reshaped the early career experience at Morrows. For example, new graduates in their first 12 months are already gaining onsite client exposure, accelerating development and engagement. Industry-wide, the typical pathway from graduate to senior has also shortened significantly, anecdotally dropping from around seven years to just 3.5 years over the past five years. This wouldn’t have been achievable without our offshore talent.

Build a model that could grow with us, adapting as our needs, services and client demands evolve. In a profession where our value lies in expertise and strategic advice, not just compliance, we needed to free up our local teams to do more of the work that truly matters. While completing tax returns and financial statements remains foundational, our goal has always been to operate as trusted advisors.

To get there, we did the work to define what our ideal team structure looked like. This involved aligning roles and headcount to our target fee base, profit margins and service delivery goals, and then applying realistic benchmarks for individual performance. By combining this financial perspective with strategic workforce design, we’ve created a model incorporating offshoring that allows us to grow without overloading our people or compromising quality, allowing us to grow our fee base without proportionally increasing our overheads.

The benefits were clear. Our offshore team members quickly took ownership of transactional work, helping us maintain a lean and scalable structure.

Importantly, they also introduced new perspectives, skills and diversity of thought, enriching our workplace culture in unexpected ways. This didn’t happen by accident; we made a deliberate effort to embed them into the Morrows experience over recent years. 

“We’re seeing time to proficiency of new hires reduce from approximately four months, down to three months.” – Madeline Maurici CPHR

Every offshore team member is part of one of our divisional “animal” teams – they were involved in choosing mascots and team names when their teams were formed 18 months ago (the Tax-manian Devils remains a crowd favourite!). 

They attend team meetings, join virtual events and celebrate milestones with us, from birthday morning teas to end-of-financial-year parties.

We also make space to recognise cultural significance, like celebrating Philippines Independence Day. 

Importantly, offshore team members follow the same performance management and review cycles as their Melbourne-based colleagues. Whether it’s public holiday shoutouts, lunch catchups with meal vouchers, or recognition on our internal channels, we strive to treat everyone with consistency and inclusion – no matter what timezone they’re in.

What we’ve learned over this period

The journey hasn’t been without its bumps. In 2024, supported by the executive team, we paused to take a look at how well our offshoring model was working, beyond the cost savings, and where it was falling short.

Here’s what we discovered:

Communication gaps: The indirect communication style of the Philippines made it harder for some offshore team members to ask questions or query instructions. This sometimes led to misunderstandings, work being completed incorrectly and delays in workflows.

In some cases, review feedback didn’t land the first (or even second) time, requiring extra time and adjustments to get things right. We also realised that our Australian-designed engagement tools, like quarterly pulse surveys, didn’t translate effectively across cultures.

Longer time to proficiency: On average, it took offshore hires nearly twice as long as local team members to reach productivity benchmarks, placing additional strain on onboarding resources and complicating team capacity planning.

A simple yet effective way to address this was to ask managers to record those training sessions. Generally, the training was already occurring on MS Teams or Zoom, so it was one additional click to record that session, so team members had a recording to refer back to and the transcription to make any notes. We’ve trained our managers to be better coaches and paired new offshore team members with ‘Generation One’ buddies who’ve done the job before – people who can answer questions in real-time.

Unclear career pathways: Offshore team members expressed confusion around job titles, promotions and pay expectations. The default model of automatic tenure-based progression, which is common in many offshore firms, conflicted with Morrows’ merit-based system, leading to frustration and misalignment.

How we responded

Recognising these barriers, we moved beyond a ‘set-and-forget’ approach and introduced a series of deliberate, people-first interventions designed to strengthen and humanise our offshore model.

This included:

1. Embedding offshore teams into everyday operations

We stopped treating offshore team members as a separate function and fully integrated them into our divisional structures.

Onshore managers were given responsibility for coaching, oversight and workflow, developing new people leadership skills while building trust and alignment across locations.

This concentrated responsibility among a few key supervisors paid off. Communication scores lifted, expectations became clearer and engagement improved.

We’re still learning, but the shift toward a more connected, relationship-driven approach is clearly having an impact.

2. People management and cultural awareness training

To truly collaborate well, we needed to understand the context in which our offshore team members operate. As part of a broader educational initiative, Morrows Academy, our education arm, we launched a five-session workshop series.

One key session explored Filipino workplace values, communication norms and leading hybrid teams, helping managers build empathy and avoid common misunderstandings.

A lightbulb moment for many was learning that Filipino communication tends to be more indirect. For example, if you ask an Australian team member, “Do you have any questions?”, they’ll often use that as an invitation to engage further.

In contrast, Filipino team members may respond with “No” or “I understand,” even if they are unsure, a reflection of the cultural importance of avoiding shame or causing embarrassment (known as hiya). To address this, we encouraged people managers to reframe their language, asking, “Just so we’re on the same page, can you walk me through how you’d approach this?” or “Can you let me know your key take aways and next steps?”

Another cultural insight came from differing views on unplanned absences. In Australia, frequent unplanned leave is often seen as a red flag for disengagement or attrition. But in Filipino culture, priorities are often different.

We learned that many employees viewed family as their first priority, then community, then the individual. In one instance, nearly our entire team took the day off to attend the funeral of a colleague’s parent, which was a powerful reflection of their community-first values. 

This contrasts with the more individual-first mindset often seen in Western workplaces, where the default is to put yourself first. Recognising these differences has helped us shift our assumptions and lead with greater cultural sensitivity.

We also adapted our recruitment approach, updating interview formats to better identify candidates with strong communication instincts and collaborative mindsets.

This human-centred lens is helping us build the right team culture from the outset. Next, we’ll roll out feedback training for intermediate and senior team members to ensure that everyone, regardless of location, feels confident giving and receiving feedback constructively.

3. Direct relationships over intermediaries

While our BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) providers remain essential operational partners, we made the conscious decision to reduce reliance on them for people management.

We reclaimed control of onboarding, training and performance oversight. As a result, managers saw an immediate improvement in accountability, engagement and communication. 

Managers now build personal relationships with offshore team members; this shift has created stronger psychological safety, clearer expectations, and faster responses to underperformance.

It also reinforced values such as curiosity, accountability and continuous learning being the foundations of our desired team culture.

4. Data-driven workforce strategy

One of the most powerful lessons I took away from completing the AHRI Practising Certification Program was the importance of speaking the language of the business and taking a data-driven approach. That insight fundamentally reshaped our offshoring strategy.

We introduced an annual balanced scorecard to track key success indicators, encompassing not only financial outcomes but also communication effectiveness, knowledge sharing, team perceptions and time to proficiency.

These metrics gave us a 360° view of what was happening on the ground and removed the guesswork.

This data-driven approach became a foundation for our broader strategic workforce planning. By aligning workforce decisions with chargeable hours, fee bases and profit margin targets, we created a scalable model that supports both our people and the firm’s commercial goals.

Importantly, this clarity secured executive buy-in and demonstrated the value HR brings to firm-wide performance and sustainability. 

5. Role clarity and honest conversations

As our offshore workforce matured, we saw the need to redefine job titles, pay structures      and career paths. We launched a full review of offshore roles to ensure alignment between responsibilities, expectations and remuneration.

We also took a more transparent approach. For roles with limited progression potential, we’ve been upfront about those constraints, even if that means some attrition among long-tenured team members. 

At the same time, we’re proactively hiring and developing the next generation of talent, and we plan for a level of excess capacity to ensure continuity and capability.

Being upfront helps manage expectations and ensures everyone, locally and offshore, understands the value and boundaries of these roles.

“By aligning workforce decisions with chargeable hours, fee bases and profit margin targets, we created a scalable model that supports both our people and the firm’s commercial goals.” – Madeline Maurici CPHR

Results so far

We’ve set the framework, equipped our managers with the tools and have shown commitment to the journey. The results are now speaking for themselves:

• Offshore productivity has improved and is now aligned with onshore team members. We’re seeing time to proficiency of new hires reduce from approximately four months, down to three months. Managers report increased confidence and stronger communication from newer offshore hires.
• Local team members have more time to focus on strategic, client-facing work.
• Cost savings remain substantial, supporting reinvestment in people and growth.
• While offshore turnover is still higher than onshore, we now anticipate and manage it more effectively.
• Most importantly, our teams increasingly view offshore colleagues as Morrows team members.

We didn’t get it all right. We underestimated the time it would take to build capability, overlooked some early cultural mismatches, and were slow to address concerns about career progression. 

Also, there’s more to do. Designing a robust visitation program is next on our agenda. Over four years into our offshoring journey, we’ve yet to connect with our offshore team members in person. We want these visits to be more than just symbolic. They will be a vital opportunity to build trust, strengthen team dynamics and prepare our teams for the future. 

We’ll use these visits as an opportunity to invest in training offshore team members to step into buddy, coach and mentor roles – growing capability from within. To support this, we’re developing a structured visitation plan with clear objectives and success measures to secure C-suite buy-in and ensure a strong return on investment.

As automation continues to reshape the accounting industry, we’ll need to continually evolve our offshore approach. As AI technology continues to enhance efficiency and take on more of the repetitive, low-value tasks traditionally completed offshore, we’re actively considering how to evolve the roles of our Filipino team members. 

We’ve already begun exploring ideas to assess how AI will reshape our task allocation and capacity models. For example, while AI may eventually prefill tax returns, we’ll still need skilled team members to validate, interpret and apply professional judgment, these are areas where our offshore staff could continue to add value. 

We’re also exploring whether AI can help us identify team members with the right capacity and skills for different types of work, further optimising our talent deployment. While AI wasn’t a key factor in the original offshoring decision, it’s now a crucial consideration in how we future-proof and grow the capability of our offshore workforce.

Offshoring at Morrows is no longer just a cost-saving exercise; it’s a strategic capability platform. It supports better client service, enables local development and strengthens our long-term workforce model.

It’s still a work in progress, but it’s progress we genuinely believe in.

Madeline Maurici CPHR is the People and Business Partner at Morrows.

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