Art of Managing your Freelancers and Outsourced Teams Effortlessly Using Customised Management Tool

Outsourcing team is one of the effective ways to improve the efficiency, productivity, and performance of your business, but to manage your outsourced team, you need the support of customized management tools.

The business industry is going through a dramatic change these days. There are plenty of different factors such as tight competition, a storm of technology, changing needs of consumer and other under surface factors which are replacing the old norms of business management.

Today, every business wants to utilize the services of experts to nourish their organization. With the technology bomb, it has become possible for business organizations to gather globally scattered talent and use them to grow their business. The mega tech giants like Google, Yahoo, and Apple have already understood the shift in the environment and thus they have established their remote teams around the globe so that they can reap the benefits of the raw talent.

What is Outsourcing or Freelancing?

An outsourced team is a group of professionals from various time zones, diverse skills, and different cultures working together on a unified project. Each teammate working from a separate location, living in different cities, and working across time and space. Outsourcing can be done from a single professional or group of professionals both as per the convince of the business organization.

Outsourcing is turning out to be a great boon for business organizations as it has multiple benefits such as -

Helps in reducing business overhead cost.
Increase the productivity of a business organization.
Brings diversity and expertise to the operations.
Develops a globe organization and much more.

However, apart from offering multiple benefits, your outsourced team or a professional freelancer won't be able to deliver the desired expected results until they are managed properly. But, as your outsourced team members are scattered all around the globe and divided by different time zones, then managing them and synchronizing their work isn't less than a roller coaster ride.

How to Effectively Manage your Outsourced Team?

It is a big problem in front of companies who take the route of outsourcing to manage their remotely working different freelancers. But, the companies who can tame their outsourced teams have gained 33% more profits than others. However, a key point here is to manage them and because of the advanced technologies like TrackOlap - it has become possible for companies to manage their remotely located freelancers effectively.

1. Calculation of Working Hours

Some companies hire freelancers on an hourly basis like their in house staff. But, they can't record the attendance of their outsourced employees like their regular employees. They need a properly designed customized management tool to auto-capture the working hours of their freelancers.

If companies offer the digital portal to their freelancers, then they can punch in and out from anywhere and their geo-tagged attendance will be automatically submitted to their main office. This way companies can record the time spend by freelancers working them and auto report for the same will be generated which will help companies and freelancers in evaluating invoices at the end of a month. It becomes very simple to arrange your globally scattered workers and record their working hours automatically using the tools.

2. Make Freelancers Understand your Objectives

If you want your freelance team to work as per your business goals and objectives, then you need to make sure that they understand your business vision. To keep your freelancers in vision with your office staff, you need to establish a free flow communication among them. Clear and uninterrupted communication is the core system of an effective freelance team.

There are multiple different instant communication methods available in the market today, but they won't offer the level of secrecy and swiftness that a customized communication channel can offer. With the help of a dedicated communication channel, companies can broadcast messages to their all employees and can even send a personalized message to a particular freelance. This way all the confidential information of your business stays on your cloud server which ca'’t be stolen by anyone and you will be able to communicate with your freelance team anytime.

3. Quick Delegation of Work

It is a hassle for business managers to allot work to their different freelancers using emails or any other medium. Suppose if a company has hired professional content writer and PHP developer, then it will become very difficult to work for a company to allocate work separately to each worker and monitor their work.

However, the intelligent task management system offered by the customized solution can give the facility to quickly delegate work to freelancers using a single platform and send them task reminders. The platform even has an automatic schedule builder and agenda sheets which will be automatically updated once the freelancer updates the work progress report. Managers can even send priority tasks to freelancers along with multiple other features.

4. Systematic Reporting

Due to geographical diversity and vivid time difference, it becomes difficult for companies to generate systematic work reports of an outsourced team like when is someone on leave, how much a freelancer is due and much more. The misreporting sometimes leads to a dispute between companies and freelancers.

But, all this can be easily avoided with a systematic reporting system based on the automation tools. When data related to freelancers working hours, deadlines, work pending, etc., is uploaded on a single portal, then the tool will automatically generate various reports for managers which will help them in evaluating the performance of their freelancers and make sure that their payment is cleared on the due date.

5. Urgency can be Meet

There are few times when you need a job to complete on a priority basis, then in that scenario, the customized portal comes as your great savior. From the portal, you can easily check the availability status of your all employees and send a quick request to the freelancer. On the other end, the freelancer will receive the real-time alert and he can instantly check the project and accept or reject it instantly.

6. High-end Security Maintenance

When companies hire freelancers to perform a certain job for them, they need to share certain confidence documents or files with freelancers so that they can perform their work efficiently. But, if they don't use the high-end security tool to share information with their freelancers, then the information can easily get lost or fall in the wrong hands. Thus, it is very important for companies to share essential information with their outsourced team using encrypted security tools.

Here, with the help of a cloud-based technology platform, companies can upload documents, images or any other media on it. From there, freelancers can view them and work as per the instructions. The software is fully secured and protected with high tech security methods that no one can hack or steal from it. This will offer an incredible security system to both the companies and freelancers.

7. Helps in Building Trust

Trust is very essential to run a smooth workflow. In the outsourced method where employees and employers are both living on different horizons, then it gets very difficult to build a trust relationship. Companies here need an assurance that the work delegated to the freelancers will be finished on time with a high level of competency. And, freelancers need assurance on the subject that their revenue will be cleared by the company on time.

To establish a trust, it is essential for business organizations to constantly stay in touch with their freelancers and hear out their queries and overall create an environment where freelancers feel a part of the company. For this, companies can organize monthly or weekly meetings and for which they can send reminders to everyone using the platform so that in spite of the time difference every employee of the organization can be present in the meeting.

8. Easy Way to Set Responsibility

Most of the companies complaint that they are facing problems in setting the responsibility of their outsourced team towards the job allotted to them. They say that they need to face the problem of setting responsibility as sometimes their freelancers say that they haven't received the required information from the in house staff on time or vice versa.

So, it gets very complicated for managers to set the responsibility of in house and outsourced staff. However, when a single platform is used by all your staff members to interact with one another, then you can easily monitor the conversation and information shared among both employees. In the customized platform, you can store backup data for at least 90 days which will help you in setting the responsibility of a particular in the house or outsourced staff.

Parting Words

Outsourcing professional services have numerous benefits and have been proving out to be one of the preferred ways of employment these days. This method just needs different tools and technologies as compared to traditional employment methods. To properly, implement this method, companies need to get hold of the essential infrastructure that will help them in implementing this method. The customized management platform is highly essential to build your dream outsourced team and increase the productivity of your business.

To get the hold of the customized employee efficiency platform where you can manage your in house and outsourced staff efficiently, you need to contact the experts from TrackOlap. They will analyze your business structure and then they will create a custom platform suiting your business structure.