Leveraging Sustainability in Relationships

As Chapter 4 showed, sustainability in outsourcing offers shared value to buyer, provider and good causes. These benefits can be strategic in the sense that competitive advantage may be derived for the buyer and provider. For example, by instilling sustainability practices throughout its operations and encouraging them at its clients, Steria gains value through reduced attrition in its workforce, thus lowering operating costs and building a trust relationship with clients that encourages further outsourcing contracts. Steria’s vice president for corporate responsibility commented that “this model is feasible for any client; it can be just computer support or can be the entire model, the full client partnership”. Accenture’s work in India, described in Chapter 3, demonstrates that other outsourcing providers understand the benefits of collaborative sustainability.