Sounds crazy, right? Can you imagine your company providing a $10,000 budget for you to hire offshore workers to do parts of your job? Never! What about the confidentially and technical issues around accessing company servers, quality control, and general nervousness about job outsourcing? There are many challenges. But the mother of all trends – a vast oversupply of educated labour in coming years – will create immense opportunity. How companies access this lower-cost pool of increasingly skilled labour could make or break them in coming years. Consider the confluence of these trends: an expected sixfold increase in Asian middle-class consumers to 3.2 billion by 2030, four billion people still to use the internet, a rapid increase in internet speeds that facilitate remote work and sharply higher rates of university education in emerging countries. Oh, and software replacing more white-collar jobs in western countries. The result: tens of millions of people in emerging countries who are able to do knowledge-based service jobs for western companies at a faction of the price, work remotely, and earn a higher wage than they would from a local employer. And possibly do a better job given they have to perform to get their next project, and in some cases are better educated. This arbitrage between wages in developed and emerging companies is not new. Western companies have accessed low-cost labour in developing countries for years, first by outsourcing manufacturing, then basic service functions such as call centres and data processing.

Savvy entrepreneurs have seen the potential to build an online "entourage" of highly educated, low-cost workers using micro-job platforms, to help start-up ventures. But that's just scratching the surface. The influx of millions of educated, connected workers in emerging companies who are eager for project work from western companies will drive labour costs for knowledge-based service jobs lower in coming years. In turn, building online entourages of helpers will be the norm for a growing number of time-poor people in western countries. What if large companies capitalised on this trend and took global outsourcing to a new level? Rather than use offshore labour to replace higher-cost western workers in basic manufacturing or service jobs, they allowed their key people to build global project teams that could be turned on or off when needed, at low cost. Outsourcing would be done at an individual level, not only at functional levels, throughout the company. The trade-off: managers would need to demonstrate clear, measureable productivity gains from using offshore labour to support them, a magnified return on investment, and greater flexibility to capitalise on opportunities. Ultimately, costs would be cut, but the initial aim is making top managers 20 per cent to 30 per cent more productive by giving them resources to build global teams to use as needed for projects.

They still have to find and manage the teams, and are responsible for quality control and final output. There would be many challenges as managers trial offshore workers who tender for work, and readjust their work flows to manage people across different continents and varying work quality. But consider the potential long-term benefits. A manager who earns $300,000 is 30 per cent more productive after building a global entourage of five highly educated workers across five continents. The $90,000 productivity gain costs the company $10,000. Better still, the company does not have to employ as many full-time workers who are costly to hire and hard to fire. The best offshore workers can be sourced based on their online rankings through micro-job sites, and axed if their work is unreliable. Moreover, the company can ensure its top people focus on work that adds most value and outsource low-value tasks that are below their pay grade. Instead of delegating those tasks to costly underlings, such as graduates, PhD graduates in Asia are used for a fraction of the cost. In turn, the manager becomes the hub of a network of offshore helpers, co-ordinating resources and overseeing projects. As global labour is to amplify the manager's output, he or she might even have a better work/life balance.

When moving between jobs, managers take their global entourage with them, eventually paying them higher rates and bringing a strong network to their new employer. Yes, this idea would take companies with real foresight and strong reporting systems to fund their managers to build global, outsourced teams of project-based workers. Managers would need discretion to find the best people at the best price. But a massive pool of educated low-cost labour in emerging markets, the likes of which the world has never seen, will be too big an asset to ignore in the next 10 years. Harnessing it to build teams behind the best talent in companies, so they can do more, will be key.