Please review my Issue Essay Task

The Issue Prompt:

"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 discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with these statements and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statements might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.


My response:

In order to suggest ways for the company to operate more efficiently, companies should refrain from hiring consultancies from outside, and, instead should focus on listening to their own employees. The above is the statement presented by the prompt, which, I strongly disagree with. There are three main reasons, due to which, companies should go for hiring outside consultancy agencies to suggest them ways to operate more efficiently. I'll list them down below.

The first and foremost reason is the inflow of new and fresh ideas. Many a times, the employees of the company, while thinking about the problem, are only able to think of, and around, the basic and temporary solutions discussed in the meetings and consider them as the gold standard. They are unable to think of the problem statement at a higher level and provide alternate solutions which might be much better than that temporary solutions. They might not be able to view the problem from a different perspective than their peers. In such a case, the outside consultancy might be able to provide alternate and better solutions by either looking at the problem from a different perspective, or thinking about the solution in a different direction. Therefore, the inflow of fresh and out of the box ideas is a very compelling reason to hire outside consultancies instead of just discussing with the employees.

After that, there might be a case where the company is a new venture/start-up, and/or the employees there are a bit inexperienced in dealing with the ways in how to operate more efficiently. In such cases, hiring external consultancy agencies becomes utmost priority. The solutions discussed and proposed by the current inexperienced employees might not be up to the mark and the external agency would definitely be experienced enough to provide the correct solutions. In this process, there is also a high chance that the employees take this also as a learning opportunity and learn a thing or two from the external consultants. This would definitely help the company in operating more efficiently at present and for the future as well.

Lastly, there is also the fact that external agencies provide an unbiased solution to the company, free from internal politics, purely in favor of the company. There is a high chance that there might be two or more very good ideas from inside the company, but, the decision that which idea to choose, can be a difficult one. In big organizations there is a lot of politics involved and given the human nature of taking sides with the one they most adore/idealise, the chances of the best idea being selected are lowered. In order to remove this bias, the introduction of external agency is very much necessary.

To conclude, I'd like to say that hiring outside consultancies in order to suggest ways for the companies to operate more efficiantly would never be unnecessary. Yes, discussion with employees should be done and more time should be spent in listening to them, still, hiring consultancies would be neccessary and an unavoidable task.