These days more and more businesses are opting for freelancers over a traditional staff labor force. Freelancers are more flexible and dynamic and provide you with many advantages when trying to compete in the global marketplace. Freelancers can provide your business with the boost it needs, but how can you be sure that you’re optimizing your use of a distributed team? The following tips will help you make sure you’re doing the freelance thing the right way.
1. Treat Freelancers As Their Own Business
Freelancers aren’t employees – it’s not up to your to train them or to be their boss. Freelancers are running a business, and you’re their clients. When you hire a freelancer, you give them a job and they get it done. A relationship with a freelancer isn’t an employee-boss relationship: It’s a relationship between two parties taking part in a business exchange. It’s important to get this point right because this kind of confusion can cause issues.
2. Make A Connection
Business deals benefit when they’re carried out with a personal touch. Try to meet your freelancer in person, or if that’s impossible, by video chat or over the phone. This will help your freelancer get a feel for your business’ culture and style, which could benefit the work. It’ll also help the transaction between you and the freelancer go smoothly – work relationships tend to go better when people feel that they “know” each other, even if they’ve only met once. This helps build trust. Studies have shown that trust can be a business’ most valuable commodity.
3. Make The Best Use Of Technology
With all the technological tools available today, managing a team of freelancers has never been easier. Programs like Google Drive and Dropbox make file sharing a snap. Others, like Skype, Google Hangouts, and Zoom, provide easy options for online video calls. You can even set up live chatrooms with your freelancers using tools like Slack. Using these tools will provide you with the tools you need to set up a well-designed and organized workflow. On that note…
4. Set Up An Efficient Delegation System
You don’t want to be reinventing the wheel every time you hire a new contractor. If you’re disorganized, hiring a contractor could feel like more work than it’s worth. Set up an organized system so that the process of hiring a freelancer is as fast as fluid as possible. Have a contact set up; keep a database of freelancers that did good work for you in the past; and finally, let us help you make the hiring process as smooth as possible. Contact us, and we’ll connect your business with the best CAD freelancers on the web so that you can make the most of your business’ time and resources.
5. Agree On The Terms Of The Contract Ahead Of Time
Conflicts between freelancers and businesses can sometimes develop because each side had a different idea about the nature of the contract. Make sure that issues like the amount of the commission, the scope and nature of the job, and the time deadlines are clearly set out ahead of time. Copyright and ownership of creative might also need to be established. It’s a good idea to set up some kind of legal contract, both for your protection, but also to make sure that communication is flowing smoothly among all parties involved.
6. Plan For Feedback Sessions
You can’t always expect that the first version of the work you receive will make the cut. For most freelance contracts, you’ll want to plan for at least two feedback or “jam” sessions before final approval. Plan these into your budget, schedule, and timeline.
7. Find The Right Person For The Job
You’re not going to want to hire just anyone. If you’re running a quality enterprise, you need quality work from your contractors. At Cad Crowd, we can help with that too. You tell us your project needs, and we go through our freelance database and connect you with the professional best suited to your needs. Not sure where to go from here? Contact us and we’ll help you get your team of freelancers up and running in no time!
8. Be Available To Communicate
A freelancer has a challenging job: with each contract, they’re working with a new team, in a new business environment, with different needs. A lot of questions might crop up in a situation like that, and you’ll both benefit by keeping lines of communication open. Long gaps between emails or unavailability of one of the parties can kill a project’s energy. It can also foster a culture of delays and slowdowns. Your business will do better if work gets done well, and gets prioritized. This has to begin on your end of the deal.
9. Be Realistic And Be Specific
A freelance contract isn’t an ongoing job – it’s a specific task you’re hiring someone to carry out. Set specific, short-term goals which are realistic in scope. “Fix our web presence problems” isn’t a good freelance project – it’s too nebulous and vague. “Design a website and set up Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages with the following content” is a lot better. Ideally, you want the task you’re setting up to be in one work domain, or at most, to straddle two, like technical skills and writing. The basic idea is that you want the freelancer to play a contained role in the company, not an open-ended one. Again, they are not an employee.
10. Be open to feedback
At the end of the contract, it’s a good idea to ask the freelance how they felt about it and whether they have any feedback for next time. If you improve your strategy a little bit each time you hire a freelancer, it could become an extremely rewarding and efficient part of your enterprise.
Like what you hear? Contact us for your free consultation and we’ll set you up with the best CAD freelancers on the web, tailored to your specific needs. We’ll get your freelance team up and running in no time!
