Less employees equals less overhead. Less overhead means lower cost. Cost could be said to be "work" monetized. So less employees equals less work in the long run, shadow or not.
I used to work (circa 1989) at a pharmaceutical company that still had a typing pool. So if I needed to write up a technical document, I was expected to provide a handwritten manuscript to the pool, and then would receive back a draft typed copy, which I would annotate, rinse and repeat (with a combination of my terrible handwriting and technical vocabulary, this could be 3 or 4 repeats). This seemed totally ridiculous at the time - I had access to a terminal and would have spent less time typing it myself once than this process took.
At the same company, meetings typically had an official "minute taker" in attendance and a couple of days later our in-trays (physical) would contain beautifully typed and formatted minutes. I now work at a large bureaucratic software company, typically the person taking notes at a meeting: a) does a terrible job; b) earns upwards of $100K; c) contributes little meaningful to the meeting (a and c are sometimes inversely correlated). Having a pool of people who were good at taking notes and weren't attempting or pretending to participate at the same time might end up being more cost effective
It just hit me that the person doing the minutes could have been replaced with a dictaphone and you could have it typed in India at a few dollars and still have the beautiful minutes.
Yeah, maybe if it's a monologue, or at best maybe a dialogue. Ever tried to have a real multi-party meeting (let's say 5+ people) transcribed from a recording? It doesn't actually work, mostly due to poor echo cancellation, variations in volume, people interrupting each other, etc.
If you put that much more clearly (not recorded) into the ear of someone who is physically in the room and is somewhat accustomed to listening to the personalities involved, perhaps rudimentarily familiar with technical vocabulary, names of the participants, proper nouns in which the discussion commonly traffics, etc., it might stand a chance.
If you think sending a recording of a 12-person strategy session to an off-shore non-native English speaker would actually work, my guess is that you have not tried it. :-)
For sufficiently small values of "beautiful". Non-native speaker, muzzy recording, unfamiliar with your technical vocabulary and/or ongoing projects...
At the same company, meetings typically had an official "minute taker" in attendance and a couple of days later our in-trays (physical) would contain beautifully typed and formatted minutes. I now work at a large bureaucratic software company, typically the person taking notes at a meeting: a) does a terrible job; b) earns upwards of $100K; c) contributes little meaningful to the meeting (a and c are sometimes inversely correlated). Having a pool of people who were good at taking notes and weren't attempting or pretending to participate at the same time might end up being more cost effective