I sat down with Brendon this week to ask him a question I've heard him answer a dozen times in passing, but never all the way through: what does “ethical offshoring” actually mean? 

I didn't give him questions in advance. I wanted his unrehearsed answer. If he'd told me the term was marketing nonsense, that would have made for an interesting article too. He didn't say that. But what he did say was more specific, and more useful, than I expected.

Quick answer: Ethical offshoring, according to Brendon Boyce, founder of Sharesource, means treating offshore employees at the same professional level as home-country staff, seems obvious but it’s not always the case. The same complexity of work, the same trust, and pay set against a living wage rather than the legal minimum. It rejects the older offshoring model of routing only low-level, repetitive tasks overseas regardless of a person's actual skill or qualifications.

The starting point: would you treat them the same?

Brendon's first answer wasn't really about pay, or contracts, or certifications. It was simpler than that.

“The first step in ethical offshoring is treating the people that are in the developing country at the same level as the people that work in your home country,” he said. “Obviously, because a human here is the same as a human there, why would you treat someone any differently because they are in a developing country?”

That sounds almost too obvious to say out loud. But he went further, and this is where it got interesting: he thinks the historical offshoring model fails this test by design.

“The types of jobs that were offshored historically were all low-level jobs,” he said, “and that as a fundamental rule makes them unethical because now you're saying that someone offshore aren’t up to the task of taking on high level jobs.”

Different culture doesn't mean different capability. Treating an entire country's workforce as only fit for basic, repetitive tasks isn't a neutral business decision. It's a judgment about who's capable of what, and it's usually wrong.

The maths graduate

Brendon didn't arrive at this philosophy in a boardroom. It came from one conversation, years ago, with a woman doing basic admin work for an offshoring operation he was running at the time.

He asked her what she'd studied. She was a maths graduate.

“That was like a turning point for me,” he said. “Hold on a minute, there's something funny about that. We're putting a super intelligent person into a very basic job, and she's doing that because of absolute necessity. That's a waste of talent. One, for us. But also are we being ethical by doing that? Imagine what it's like being a really smart person stuck in a very basic job. It's just not right.”

It's a small moment, but it's the moment the company's whole approach pivots on. Somewhere between “this is inefficient” and “this is wrong” is where Sharesource's philosophy was actually born: not in a strategy session, but in a single uncomfortable realisation.

Fairness without a business case

Here's the part I found most interesting. I asked Brendon whether being fair to people in developing countries eventually pays off for the business, the long-term, “it's good for the brand” argument that gets made about ethics all the time.

He didn't take the easy route.

“You have to let go of the outcome and just be fair, because that’s the right thing,” he said. “If you’re doing it because it benefits you in the long term, then that’s not really fair. That’s just a longer transaction.”

He'll admit there's an upside. Better client relationships. Lower turnover. A reputation that brings referrals instead of costing you them. But he was clear that's a consequence, not the reason. “You just do it because that's the right thing to do.”

What fairness actually costs

The abstract version of fairness is easy to agree with. The specific version is where most companies quietly give up, and it's the part Brendon was most willing to put a number on.

Sharesource's baseline roles in the Philippines currently sit around 45% above the legal minimum wage. Not the minimum. Forty-five per cent above it. Sharesource’s B Corp certification exists, in his words, to validate that this actually happens rather than just get claimed.

His test for whether a wage is fair isn't the legal minimum. It's whether someone can live on it.

“If you're paying somebody three US dollars, and that's what they'll take because they're desperate, should you be paying them three US dollars? What's the living wage?”

When Sharesource moves into a new country, the process is the same every time: find people on the ground who know what fair looks like there, rather than importing an assumption from somewhere else.

The number that's hard to argue with

Whatever you think about the philosophy, there's a number attached to it that's hard to dismiss: Sharesource's annual turnover sits at 16%, against an industry average of 30 to 40%.

Brendon doesn't credit this to pay alone.

“If you don’t get the money right, they’ll go. With good people, you have to pay the right money. But once money is off the table, what becomes important is the type of work and the culture of the environment.”

He's had clients tell him directly that culture, not cost, is why they stayed. It's not lost on him that it's good business too: every person who doesn't walk out the door is a replacement cost a client didn't have to absorb.

Most of Sharesource's new business, he pointed out, still comes from referrals. That's not a coincidence. It's what happens when the people actually doing the work are the ones recommending you.

Where this leaves the definition

By the end of the conversation, Brendon's definition of ethical offshoring had nothing to do with marketing language and everything to do with a handful of concrete choices: what kind of work you're willing to send offshore, what you're willing to pay for it, and whether you'd make the same decision if the person on the other end were sitting in the next room.

Frequently asked questions

What does ethical offshoring mean? Ethical offshoring means employing offshore staff at the same professional level as home-country employees, with work matched to their actual skill and pay set against a living wage rather than the legal minimum, rather than routing only low-level tasks overseas regardless of qualification.

How is ethical offshoring different from regular offshoring? Traditional offshoring often assigns offshore staff only basic, repetitive work regardless of their qualifications, and pays as close to the legal minimum as the market allows. Ethical offshoring matches work to actual skill level and pays a living wage, verified through mechanisms like B Corp certification.

Does Sharesource pay above minimum wage? Yes. Sharesource's baseline roles in the Philippines currently sit around 45% above the legal minimum wage, with pay benchmarked against a living wage standard rather than the statutory minimum in each country it operates in.

What is Sharesource's staff turnover rate? Sharesource's annual turnover rate is 16%, compared to an industry average of 30–40% for offshore staffing and BPO providers.

Does ethical offshoring cost more than standard offshoring? It can cost more per role, but Sharesource's founder argues the lower turnover it produces (16% versus an industry average of 30–40%) offsets much of that difference, since staff replacement itself carries a real cost to the client.

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