Make them a part of your team
Even if your employees’ work is meticulously planned and sufficiently analyzed, you still need to make them feel like a part of the team, if you want the project to go smoothly.
There are multiple ways to build a sense of camaraderie among your team members: from ice-breaking games to team retreats. You can’t forget, however, about including your part-time employees in the actual project lifecycle. They should be in the know about any updates and part of the decisions made by the team.
If there are project-wide meetings or workshops, make sure everyone is available to go. It often seems that freelancers’ and part-timers’ time is too precious to be spent on meetings: one can always brief them afterwards. If that’s the case, then perhaps that meeting is not needed in the first place and more people in the team are better off just receiving an update about it. Having people with varied availability on your team, may actually positively influence your team’s efficiency.
Speaking of efficiency, try to utilize tools that support asynchronous collaboration. When you hire freelance graphic designers or illustrators to produce visual assets for your brand, you usually want to review their work. Using software with online proofing features, such as ProofHub, you can easily point out any suggestions directly on the reviewed material. Freelancers you work with will be able to quickly understand your feedback, without having to go back and forth via email or phone. It’s also extremely useful for managing remote teams.
We’ve asked Vartika Kashyap, Proofhub’s CMO, about the importance of managing remote employees:
Without ProofHub, remote teams had their data scattered across multiple platforms — they used to manage due dates and to-dos through email, chat using a different platform, get updates on the phone, feedback on designs was confusing and used to get lost in long email threads, and there was no single place for work and performance overview. ProofHub puts every tool teams, managers and clients need under one roof. Alison Dalziel from Localise even described managing remote teams without ProofHub as, “Dogs and Cats.” “ProofHub has solved our problem of supporting projects remotely,” she added.
Are you ready to start managing part-time employees effectively?
At its core, managing part-time employees is not that different from leading a team of full-time workers, especially remote full-time workers. In both cases smooth communication, mutual understanding and a dose of empathy will go a long way.
When it comes to freelancers and part-timers, however, you need to be extra attentive, as many issues may go unnoticed. It’s easy to miss an overworked employee if they’re not working in the office and their hours are not tracked. Make sure you utilize different ways of increasing employee visibility, in order to always stay on top of their current situation.