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Integrating Your Virtual Freelance Staff with Your In-House Team

Written by: Daryl James

Article Overview: Most outsourcing assignments start small--you hire a freelance provider to complete a specific project. Then, when the provider proves they can be relied upon, you start giving them more hours and increasingly vital outsourcing tasks. Soon you may find your remote freelance provider fully integrated with your in-house staff, changing the relationship between outsourcing buyer and freelance provider. Here's what we've learned (on the job) when it comes to integrating outsourcing and in-house workteams.

Integrating Your Virtual Freelance Staff with Your In-House Team

Most outsourcing assignments start small--you hire a freelance provider to complete a specific project. Then, when the provider proves they can be relied upon, you start giving them more hours and increasingly vital outsourcing tasks. Soon you may find your remote freelance provider fully integrated with your in-house staff, changing the relationship between outsourcing buyer and freelance provider.

We hire freelance providers to work with our in-house staff, and, on some projects, one type of worker is virtually indistinguishable from the other. Add to the mix the workplace flexibility that allows traditional employees to telecommute rather than reporting to the office each day, and you've got a workteam requiring an entirely new set of management skills. Here's what we've learned (on the job) when it comes to integrating outsourcing and in-house workteams.

When you hire a freelance provider for a particular outsourcing project, you may not care when they do the work as long as the work diary and memos look good, and the product is delivered on time. However, as you need more real-time collaboration, you may have to reach an agreement whereby the freelance provider is available during some or all of your business hours.

When this happens, the outsourcing buyer must get answers to a few questions: How will the freelance team member be available? Is IM enough? Do they need to have a Skype account? A webcam? When they're "out-of-the-office", will they leave an away message telling you what time they'll be back to working on your outsourcing project? Will your in-house staffers do the same?

You trust your freelance provider to work around their daily life. Maybe they don't log on until after midnight, or frequently suspend sessions to handle family needs. However, once they've agreed to be available at set times, you have as much right to make sure they'll have a distraction-free outsourcing work environment as you do for the "in-house" telecommuter opting for a home office instead of a cubicle. Flexible freelance professionals are masters of clever workarounds, but as the workteam becomes more interdependent, everyone needs to understand that outsourcing expectations evolve.

Of course, you'll continue to manage your freelance provider using outsourcing tools (such as those found over at oDesk), but did you ever consider having your in-house staff logged into these tools as well? Getting all the staff for various projects onto one workteam management platform so that everyone can see who's available and when helps to consolidate and improve management functions.

Integrating your remote freelance providers into the company's daily outsourcing workflow can seem like a daunting task, but by thinking each challenge through, we've found that it's easier than you'd expect for remote outsourcing and in-house team members to become close colleagues.

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Article Tags: business hours, distraction, freelance team, house staff, management skills, memos, outsourcing project, outsourcing work, sessions, specific project, staffers, team member, telecommuter, time collaboration, webcam, work diary, work environment, workplace flexibility, workteam, workteams



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