Flat management structures are all the rage, and with good reason: innovation is the lifeblood of a startup, and nothing kills innovation like micromanagement. But scaling a flat management structure is harder than it seems.
It’s widely repeated that “great people are 100x more productive than average people.” But while everybody says it, most companies just hire 100x more average people. At Expensify, we try very, very hard to hold the line and only hire people we think are truly great.
This means that despite ample resources and more than enough work to go around, we hire extremely slowly — and spend an enormous amount of energy doing it.
Ah, freelancers. As an account manager, they are either the light of your life, or the bane of your existence. Freelancers can save your ass when a project scales beyond your team’s capacity, or they can cost you dearly when they suddenly decide to go on holiday with your urgent work still sitting unfinished on their desk.
Ah, freelancers. As an account manager, they are either the light of your life, or the bane of your existence. Freelancers can save your ass when a project scales beyond your team’s capacity, or they can cost you dearly when they suddenly decide to go on holiday with your urgent work still sitting unfinished on their desk.
Before coming aboard with WorkflowMax to write awesome articles for all you lovely people, I spent a significant portion of my working life as a freelancer, working both directly with clients and as part of an agency team. So I know a thing or two about working with agency teams, and what makes a great – and a terrible – virtual team environment.
Here are our top tips for creating a successful virtual creative team at your agency:
Tip #1: Find the Right People
Sourcing freelancers can be tough – they are always hanging around when you don’t need them, and become mysteriously scarce when you are desperate.
My best jobs always came through referrals. Someone knew the agency was looking for a freelancer and thought I’d be a good fit. Because I’d been recommended, I was always keen to impress, and the agency always So that’s the thing I’d advise you to do. Ask your team, as well as family and friends, or other folks working in agencies if they can connect you with punctual, organised freelancers who produce quality creative work. This way, you don’t have to worry about putting up job adverts and trawling through submissions to find the right freelancer for the job.
Another aspect of finding the right freelance team is to assess your own needs – what parameters around the role are you comfortable with? Unfortunately, understanding this usually comes from trial and error (more error than trial).You only have to work with one freelancer with 20 other clients on her books to understand that you want a freelancer who will dedicate 100% of their time to your project. Check out more tips on our article: What Agencies Ought to Know about Working with Freelancers.
Tip #2: Confirm the Best Pricing Structure
Many agencies find it easier to pay freelancers based on an hourly rate. This means the freelancer can track time against a job in much the same way an employee can, and you’ll have an accurate picture of exactly how long each project takes.
However, the agency environment is fast-paced, and paying freelancers at an hourly rate doesn’t exactly encourage speed. For this reason, many agencies prefer to have freelancers quote a flat-fee for a job. This can help with job costing, as you know from the onset exactly what the freelance portion of a job will cost.
Most agency work I did had a fixed fee, which I worked out based on how long I thought a project would take. Most freelancers are flexible with pricing and able to work based on a fixed fee.
Tip #3: A Single Point-of-Contact
Of all the agency-side jobs I did, the ones that ran smoothest were those where a single member of the agency staff was responsible for managing my portion of the job. They might be an account manager, or simply someone from the creative team (usually a designer). All correspondence would go through them, and if I had a question, I knew exactly who I would call to get the answer.
The opposite situation has the freelancer calling the designer to talk about the assignment, emailing the account manager with questions about the brief, chasing up payments at accounts, and getting half of their emails and calls ignored or deleted or passed to the wrong person. The longer the chain of communication stretches, the longer the assignment will take to complete, and the more frustrating it will be for everyone involved.
Tip #4: Make Them Part of the Team
If you intend to employ freelancers regularly, then you should make a real effort to make them feel involved in the company. Many freelancers love the opportunity to come into the office for Friday-night drinks, skype in to brainstorming meetings, and receive news and updates about projects going on at the company. Involving them in the everyday life of the company helps give them ownership of , and basically ensures you’ll get a freelancer willing to go above and beyond for you and your company.
Tip #5: Focus on Building Long-Term Relationships
This is related to the point above. Even if your agency doesn’t regularly use freelancers, it pays to keep on good terms with the ones you do work with, especially if you know there are some big jobs coming up in the future. The agency world is really quite small, and a mistreated freelancer will likely be working for your competition in a matter of weeks – so think about that before you decide they are second-class citizens.
At the heart of it, creating a positive relationship with your freelancers comes down to basic human decency – treat them with kindness and respect, and they’ll do the same. Don’t think of a freelancer as someone who’s in the office one week, and then you’ll never see them again. You can work with them multiple times, and they may follow your as you move companies, or come in handy when you need some work done for your own personal projects :).
Tip #6: Use the Right Tools
To do their job properly, a freelancer needs the right tools. Usually, your contractor will have a pretty sweet set-up in their home: the right software for the job, plus some basic collaboration tools such as skype or Yammer. This might be all you require to feel confident that they’ve got everything they need to do the job, or you might need to get them set up on some of your agency’s own tools and systems.
For each job, think about what you need each person to do in order to keep the job running smoothly. Will your freelancers need access of WorkflowMax? How will you communicate with them? How will you share documents, track changes and make edits? How will othe members of the team collaborate with them? If you’re paying hourly, how will you get an accurate picture of time spent on the project?
Just like a builder checking his toolbox before he leaves the house in the morning, before you start a job, decide with your entire team – freelancers and in-house staff – what tools you need, and make sure everyone knows what they’ll be expected to do.
A team of competent, enthusiastic freelancers can be a real asset to an agency; they will save your ass when the workload is getting away from you, or provided specialist skills of knowledge where your staff fall short.
More efficiency
Of course skilled workers are always more efficient, and efficiency has a direct impact on your company’s performance. There is a clear correlation between providing your employees with the training they need to become more productive and an increase in the company’s overall profitability.
With continuous and up to date training, employees are able to complete their tasks in the most safe and efficient manner possible while providing consistency and quality. So, by providing training, you can expect to see improvements in business performance, enhanced operational efficiency and employee productivity, all of which contribute to better bottom line performance.
Higher retention
At the same time, making training available to your employees provides them with the tools to increase their skills and makes them feel more valued by the organisation which helps to increase staff morale and improve levels of retention. As your employees acquire new skills and gain higher level qualifications, they increase their contribution to the business, and achieve greater productivity in the workplace. Training allows them to move to other positions within your organisation which provides better prospects or better remuneration. Upskilling staff to do new and different tasks keeps them motivated and challenged, which helps to minimise employee churn.
With a training culture, you can safeguard your business from key staff turnover by ensuring you have capable people at every level of the organisation, with someone always ready to step in and lead a team should a replacement be necessary. In addition, when adding or replacing managers, you don’t have to go outside the company to look for candidates. With the right training, you’ll have a pool of qualified successors.
Last, but by no means least, by offering continuous training in your business, you can be assured of being able to attract the best and brightest talent.
Of course in many industries you may be legally obliged to provide staff with specific training, yet all businesses need to ensure that employees are trained to do their jobs safely.
Future needs
To implement the right training for your business, you need to target the skills training to meet the needs of your operation now and in the future. Success comes from knowing how to use your people and resources to your best advantage.
As a priority you need to consider your business plan and assess your business goals and the skills you need to meet them. It’s critical that you can list the qualifications that your employees require and compare them to the qualifications they currently have so that you can plan training and development programs to fill those gaps.
It’s also important to know which qualifications or accreditations are due to expire so that training and development or renewals can be scheduled for them in order to manage the risks associated with non-compliance.
As part of the continuous training culture, as new employees are hired, it’s important to record their current qualifications, skills and training and identify their ongoing training and development needs.
New training and qualifications management module
To help you better manage the training needs of your employees, enableHR has launched a new training and qualifications management module. This module appears as a new tab for all person-type records and contains a table of qualifications, grouped by role, with buttons for managing them.
With the new module, you are able to:
· track the qualifications, training and skills of candidates, employees, contractors and volunteers, and analyse current workforce skills and qualifications. · record and report on all qualifications held by employees along with their associated expiry date. · identify when an employee has gained or completed a qualification or accreditation. · update an expired qualification with a renewal without losing the history tracked for that initial qualification.
The new module also features an alert tool to schedule training requirement reminders and facilitate additional training prior to any qualifications expiry dates.
Reporting on Training
Reporting from the new module is comprehensive and allows managers to list employees with specific qualifications, and compare roles to identify qualifications needed, gained or required, as well as list roles with qualification details and which roles share specific qualifications to help streamline training needs.
With enableHR’s new training and qualifications management module, businesses can better manage their employees training requirements and improve HR compliance and HR risk management.
Many of us procrastinate, but how many of us are chronic procrastinators? Negatively affecting not only our own performance but the people we work with.
If you guessed 1 in 5, you’d be right, and it appears that procrastination is even taking a heavy toll on company profits.
Dr. Joseph Ferrari, an expert in the field, stated in an interview with the American Psychological Association (APA) that chronic procrastination affects 1/5 U.S. adults. To put that into perspective, it is more prevalent than all anxiety disorders combined, including depression, generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), PTSD, and all other phobias.
And procrastination consumes over 25% of an employee’s average workday, costing employers nearly $10,000 per employee every year, according to a study published in 2013.
Chronic procrastination is not just poor time management.
Putting off tasks does not indicate that an individual is necessarily a “procrastinator.” According to Dr. Ferrari, chronic procrastinators have made it a part of their lives, delaying at home, work, relationships, even filing their income taxes.
Understanding key differences between chronic procrastination and an isolated event of bad time management is a critical first step in diagnosing and subsequently finding a solution.
Types of procrastination.
There are many different opinions, definitions, and studies on the so-called types of procrastination. But my favorite comes from Paul Graham, it’s short, concise, and to-the-point.
“There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I’d argue, is good procrastination”
Simple enough, right? Clearly “nothing” is the worst form, with “something less important” probably being the majority of procrastination.
As they say, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. If you have recognized yourself committing (a) or (b) on a frequent or even daily basis, the experts just might call you a chronic procrastinator.
You’re a chronic procrastinator, now what?
Well, just wait a minute and it might pass.
Kidding, of course!
Follow a few simple steps to get yourself back on the right path.
It’s important to remember that you didn’t come out of the womb as a procrastinator. It’s habitual and increases (or decreases) overtime according to your own actions, environment, and interruptions.
Control your own actions.
Social scientist, David Niven (from our own University of Cincinnati), suggests taking on the easiest slice of the most difficult task. This is viewed as a good way to create positive momentum and get satisfaction from completing work or tasks.
Procrastinators tend to focus on the cost of action rather than the benefit of completion, perpetuating the avoidance. So small wins of completion are imperative to enforcing the idea that the feeling of completion can rival the anxiety of trying in the first place.
Put yourself in the right environment.
You’ve heard the saying that you’re the average of the 5 people you spend most of your time around. It’s funny how cliches are often true.
This is especially true for procrastinators. The environment you’ve put yourself in has a direct impact on your actions. Not only should you put yourself around other action-oriented people to create good habits, but you should limit interruptions as often as possible.
Limit the opportunity for interruptions.
As we’ve talked about before, a big key to increasing productivity is limiting multitasking and interruptions. Utilize the “do not disturb” function on your phone, or our favorite, Rescue Time, to alert you when you’ve been on your favorite gossip site for too long.
I’m a chronic procrastinator myself, and have learned that when anxiety starts to set in and I want to waste time – I take a 5 minute walk to re-focus myself.
I know what you’re thinking, you just wasted 5 minutes, what did you achieve? But compared to the 10, 15 and 20 minute increments I used to waste, I’m saving loads of time.
On that 5 minute walk I relax and remind myself of exactly what I need to get done, how important it is to me and my team, and how happy I’ll be once it’s completed. That gets me in the mood to take action every time!
At the risk of sounding like a broken record…Bad rostering will hurt your business. A lot.
Rostering when executed incorrectly can be an utter time waster for you as a manager and for the overall smooth running of your business. The concept of no-shows is something that everyone in a managerial role has been faced with at some point in their career. So why is it that people sometimes don’t turn up to work? Or they turn up to the wrong shift, at the wrong time?
Too often we see businesses with employees who are constantly changing their minds, swapping shifts with their friends, complaining that they don’t have a social life, or simply that they’re missing out on the fun shifts.
Cloud based rostering is by far the best solution for you as a business. If you can place some of the onus back on the employee, you’re helping to eliminate any potential for error. The meticulous, precise nature of cloud based rostering helps to ensure that you’re making the best decisions for your business whilst enabling you to accurately forecast in both real-time and in the future.
In any management role it’s important that your time is spent carefully. Fine tune those certain tasks where time spent can be reduced. Rostering should be completed efficiently, effectively and when done correctly should help you gain a lot more control over your wage costs. Don’t partake in bad rostering.
Make smart choices. If you want any advice on how to gain more control over your costs with better rostering, get in touch with us now or give our free trial a go here.
