More and more, companies of all sizes are coming to rely on flancers as an essential part of their workforce. Having freelancers that you can rely on certainly offers a number of benefits such as the ability to hire someone for a one-time, specific project and the ability to leverage the experience of someone who has worked with dozens or hundreds of different clients. However, managing freelancers who work remotely can present some challenges. To make your work relationship with your freelancers more efficient and beneficial, here are a few tips on how to manage your freelance employees and keep track of their work.
Use a Project Management App
Project management apps are able to provide a great deal of structure to your interactions with your freelancers, enabling you to assign them tasks, track their progress, easily send and receive files, and more. There are several great project management apps that offer these benefits such as Asana, Trello, and Basecamp, and most of them are free at the introductory level.
Of course, if you hire your freelancers on a quality freelancing platform then the platform itself will have many of these features built into it as well. Either way, relying on online platforms and apps can make managing freelancers much simpler.
Communication is Key
Communication is key for any relationship between employees and employers. However, when you are employing freelancers who don’t check into the office like a standard employee, your communication with them may suffer.
Nevertheless, it’s important to make sure that you are clearly communicating expectations, ideas, feedback, and more to your freelancers, using whatever means of communication that you have available. A little extra time spent on a Skype conversation or spent crafting a detailed email can easily end up making for a much more successful project.
Create a Spreadsheet of the Freelancers You are Working With
When you are working with just one or two freelancers, keeping track of how much work you have assigned them, what their specific talents are, what they’ve turned in so far, and so on is relatively simple. As your company grows, though, and you begin working with numerous freelancers at the same time, these kinds of details can be hard to keep track of.
To make it easier, create a spreadsheet listing all of the freelancers you are working with and include pertinent information such as how much work a freelancer has outstanding, what they’ve turned in, what their areas of expertise are, and anything else that may be useful to know at a glance. Be sure to update this spreadsheet often so you don’t get behind and you’ll have a very valuable tool that will make it much easier to keep track of your freelancers.
Understand that Freelancers are Accustomed to Managing Themselves
If you work with freelancers for very long, you will likely discover that most of them require less hand-holding than a new employee. Experienced freelancers are used to keeping themselves on schedule without too much oversight from a boss. When you recognize this and trust your freelancers enough to manage themselves for the most part, you can save yourself a lot of time and hassle.
That’s not to say that communication with your freelancers is not important, especially when you are first starting out. Anytime you assign a freelancer a new project, you should certainly take the time to thoroughly communicate your expectations. However, once those expectations are made clear, your freelancer will probably be able to handle the rest all by themselves.
Carefully Craft Your Freelancing Team
Being able to pick and choose the freelancers that you work with offers a lot of benefits if you are able to take advantage of them. When choosing which freelancers you want to work with, it’s helpful to focus on how they will contribute to your freelancing team just as much as you focus on their individual talents.
For example, you may have a few freelancers who are available to quickly do last minute projects, a few A-list freelancers who can handle projects that require an extra degree of talent and effort, and a few B-list freelancers who are willing to do less demanding projects on a budget. Combined, these freelancers will form a very effective team that you can rely on for any project.
Of course, these three categories are not the only way to structure your freelancing team. You may have freelancers who are available on the weekends, freelancers who are experienced in a specific niche, or any other useful subset of your overall freelancing team. Dividing your freelancing team into subsets such as this, though, is a great way to not only get the most out of your freelancers but is also a great way to better manage and keep track of them.
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Guest Author Bio
John A.
John loves writing about all topics and enjoys doing research about new trends.
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