Overcome Economic Slowdowns and Labour Shortages With NATIONS

There are two significant factors on every executive’s and board member’s minds these days - a forthcoming economic slowdown and the current labour shortage. While it seems like an economic slowdown would cure a labour shortage, it is simply not the case as the shortage is being caused by a mass exodus of older workers into retirement with not enough younger workers to replace them. 

Outsourcing has been a buzzword in the C-suite for the past few months as a result, and language service providers like NATIONS are here to fill that gap. 

Economic slowdown: what it means for your business 

The Bank of Canada is now predicting a mild recession for the second and third quarters of 2023, with growth expected to rise again at the end of the year. This is a much rosier outlook than it had in Q4 of 2022, but responsible corporate governance would dictate still treating a recession as a recession and not just a mild dip. 

For most corporate leaders, this means a freeze on hiring with the exception of must-have roles and a general contraction in department budgets across the organization. Some more highly affected sectors, such as tech and e-commerce, have already begun to practice mass layoffs, but these workers will generally migrate easily to other sectors where they are needed. 

This necessitates a tricky balancing act for managers and executives. With growth and therefore demand being expected to rise in Q4 of 2023, a hiring freeze is a short-term solution that may lead to a long-term problem, especially faced with a labour shortage.

Labour shortage: outsourcing is the solution 

The reduction of Canada’s labour force is overwhelmingly due to retiring workers, according to Statistics Canada. A recent report by Toronto-Dominion Bank revealed that due to inflation, some of them are postponing retirement by a few years, but that only buys so much time. It only reflects the intention of some of these older workers, and TD estimates that within three years a massive 900,000 workers will have exited the labour market entirely. 

Outsourcing is both the short-term solution for the expected economic contractions in 2023 and the long-term solution when the gray wave of retirees crashes on corporate human resources in three years. Clearly, outsourcing is much less expensive than hiring an employee, and having a reliable partner in place for your language services and translation requirements can alleviate much of the strain on many departments, from legal to communications. It must be done selectively though — outsourcing is not the same as offshoring. 

You want to look for a company based in Canada and, as with everything else in your business, you want quality over a low price. Fully automated translating and other language services without a human touch are a recipe for disaster for your brand reputation, and it is what you’re getting when you look for the lowest bidder. 

The economic slowdown is an excellent time to shop around for the right partner for the long-term. You can see how quickly they handle requests, the quality of the work, and use them to put a multilingual content and localization strategy in place for your organization. 

Why NATIONS is your language services provider of choice 

Once you start shopping around for a language service provider, you’ll notice very quickly that they generally fall into two categories; mom and pop shops and vast global organizations. NATIONS is a happy medium between those two extremes, with the added benefit of being an ideal Environment, Social, & Governance (ESG) partner due to our 100% Indigenous ownership. We are a trusted language service provider for government at all levels, some of Canada’s largest corporations, and many other smaller businesses and nonprofits.