All too often, companies hire outside consultants to suggest ways for the company to operate more efficiently. If companies were to spend more time listening to their own employees, such consultants would be unnecessary.Write a response in which you discu

In today's corporate society, the opinions of outside consultants on a company's efficiency are sought after more and more. Some argue that these outside consultants are superfluous and a waste of funds, where the company can get the same or better results by simply listening to its own employees. While I agree that companies should value and respond to the suggestions of their own employees, the contributions of outisde consultants cannot be disregarded due to the additional, trained expertise of consultants and their unbiased outsider view of the company's performance.

I concede that companies should spend more time listening to their own employees, as employees will have the most in-depth view of the inner workings of the company and hence can provide certain insights that others cannot. In virtually any scenario, the people most in tune with the company operations, and hence some of the best judges of efficiency, and the inidividual workers. As a simple example, consider an assembly line where workers play individual roles in adding components to a car as it is being built. Suppose that one worker along the line, who is responsible for adding wheels to the axels, knows that his or her job is a bottleneck along the line. This job may take much longer than the previous job of adding axels to the chassis, such that the wheel worker always faces a backup with what he or she does. In such a case, it makes sense for the company to listen to the wheel worker in his or her request for an assistant to help with the job and resolve the bottleneck. This bottleneck may not be as apparent to the managers who do not constantly supervise the entire process, but to the solitary wheel worker, it is a great concern. Hence, by listening to the employees in this situation or more complicated scenarios, the management can eliminate certain bottlenecks and improve company efficiency.

At the same time, outside consultants have much to offer a company beyond what employees can, including in-depth training into corporate efficiency processes. Many consultants get advanced degrees in economics, business practice, or other majors supporting the theories of corporate efficiency. As such, outside consultants will simply have more expertise than the employees in making important calls. Consider again the example of the assembly line, where a bottleneck occurs due to the task of adding wheels to the car. While an employee will be able to alert the management to the problem, an outside consultant has superior expertise that will inform the management of how exactly to address the problem. While the employee may request that an assistant be hired to make the job go faster, a more highly trained consultant can perceive higher-level issues pertaining to the problem: perhaps the hiring and pay for an additional assistant employee is not worth the slightly increased production of resolving the bottleneck. The outside consultant can rely on his or her special training into the issue to think of novel ideas that the management could not, such as redesigning the whole assembly line in a way that the management had not anticipated. Hence, by bearing a higher-level education, the outside consultant can think of and address issues that mere employees with their limited perspectives would be unable to see.

Furthermore, the opinion of an outside consultant has benefits that inside employees cannot give since outside employees are free of bias, thus providing a more objective view of the company's efficiency profile. If only the workers' voices are heard, the management will hear a very biased view of how the company is performing. For instance, workers are highly concerned with their own job security, and with performing tasks that are interesting to them. Even if a company's efficiency could be increased by a worker switching to a more unpleasant task, chances are that the worker may not bring that up to the management due to the disappointing ramifications to the worker. Or, consider again the example of the automotive assembly line. An outisde consultant could astutely observe that if the management invested in robots instead of people, the efficiency of production would be increased. The outside consultant can make this observation because he or she has no personal dependency on the operations of the company. An employee, however, is dependent on the company for a job, and so would be unlikely to bring this up to the management out of fear of losing his or her job to a robot. Thus if the company were only to listen to its employees, it may opt for a less efficient path that employees more people, even if it could have saved an abundance of money by switching to an automated, robot-based manufacturing plan. Hence, the outside perspective of a consultant is paramount due to the fact that consultants have no invested interests, and hence no bias in the company proceedings.

Altogether, while I agree that companies must listen to their own employees for certain matters of efficiency, the opinion of an outside consultant should not be discounted in situations that lend themselves to greater complexity, or in situations when the employees may have an interfering, invested interest. This is due to the additional training and unbiased opinions of the outside consultants, that set them apart as an important resource for developing coporate efficiency.