Companies hire outside consultants to suggest ways for the company to operate more efficiently. If companies were to listen to their own employesss, such consultants would be unnecessary.

Companies hire outside consultants to suggest ways for the company to operate more efficiently. The prompt says that If companies were to listen to their own employesss, such consultants would be unnecessary. I do not completely agree with this claim. Companies often go to outside consultants to increase their operating efficiency for two main reasons. Either they are in very good position and want to spend their money efficiently and invest in consulting agents to increase their operating efficiency as well as to compete with their counterparties. Or the companies are in a egregious situation and they want to increase their operating efficiency to get out of that situation. There are many consulting firms and they have a good record as well serving the companies which hire them. Listening to their own employees is important but one cannot make a reliable decision by only listening to them. So consultant services are important.

For instance, consider the current oil price drop that occured recently. This affected many upstream and downstream companies abruptly. Their profit and revenue declined at an incredible rate. All big oil firms like ENI, BG, RWE, EON decided to cut their cost. In order to cut their cost, these companies had to get rid of unwanted operational costs. so they needed experts who can help them in such situation. Of course as the claim says the company can rely on their own employess decision and try out the new idea suggested by the employee. But how reliable is that idea? Companies cannot invest on ideas which are unreliable without any substantial evidence. So they hire consultants because they are reliable and they have proven records to have succeeded in supporting clients at emergency situation. Moreover at adverse circumstances like this companies cannot spend time analysing and working on a new idea without knowing the potential success of implementing such idea. On the other hand if they hire a consultant and hand over the issue to the client, the consultant analyses the situation deeply and provide multifaceted solutions from which the company can choose their option. This mainly helps the company to relax a bit and gives them a relief and appeases their pressure.

However, in certain cases, there may be good ideas that may come from their own employees. Conmpanies must heed to their employees which may be fruitful but this is always not the case. Companies have a predilection for consultants since they offer multiple solutions for the same issue. Hence, considering the limitations like time & number of solutions provided, reliability, companies prefer consultants over their own employees. Most of the companies go to consultants only after many rounds of internal discussion so I doubt the claim that companies do not spend time listening to their own employees.

Hence, it is futile to spend more time listening to their own employees, and company needs to hire consultants in order to increase their operating efficiency.