My goal of writing on Steemit is to lay out all the lessons and tips I've picked up over the past three years running a remote team. This is the first installation focusing on communication. Over the next few months I will cover an extensive range of topics from starting a company; picking the right tools and resources, and overcoming the common challenges of working remotely.
On your way to starting a remote business with contractors from all around the world? Or maybe you're a skilled resource working from home. The prospect of working from home and having the flexibility to do the things you want while making money is hugely attractive. However, one of the biggest challenges facing this vision is communication effectively with your employees or employer.
Upwork is an amazing resource that captures the heart and soul of globalisation. For anyone unfamiliar, Upwork.com is the world's largest pool of online contractors. As an employer you can write a job proposal and have ten applications in less than an hour. As an employee, you can work from home and make great money on a schedule you define. The big issue is that it's often hard to pass information between employer and employee. Without face to face contact like in an office, passing on a simple message can feel like an uphill battle.
Managing contractors or talking to an employer on the other side of the world is a new problem. This is far from the norm of regular work and it's fair to say best practices are still being established. Broken communication leads to missed deadlines, requirements not being met and a general uncertainty about what the other party is doing or wants to achieve.
After wresting with these issues for the past three years, I've got a lot of suggestions that will help even the trickiest of communication flow smoothly. This article will just touch on some of the really high level approaches and tools!
The first thing to remember is that as an employer or employee, the reason you're working together is to achieve a goal. That goal MUST be recorded somewhere clearly so both parties can see it. The best tool for this is something like Asana, Trello or Teamwork PM. These project management tools act as shared task lists. With a few tweaks, you can configure these applications to the progress of tasks to be visible (I'll write another post about this later).
Once the goal has been broken down into different tasks, the next tool to use is Slack. While Upwork has its own chat tool, Slack is the industry standard for communication. As an employer there is no reason you shouldn't have Slack. It's free, it's versatile and does an amazing job of enabling communication. To best utilize Slack, it helps to set up particular channels that relate to goals, or projects.
As an employee, sometimes you don't have the power to get an employer to adopt Slack, but you can at least suggest they check it out!
The final step in communication is to talk all the time. Like anything else, good communication requires practice. It may seem redundant to talk to a contractor who isn't coming on full time about things outside of work, but that's actually the best way to build a relationship. This should be the first goal - once you have a relationship you can identify the other person's style of communication and adjust your approach to achieve maximum clarity.
At the end of the day, the biggest risk to communication is hiring the wrong person. This alone can make or break your experience with Upwork.
It's always recommended to also use Upwork's messaging system to keep track of the progress as proofs for both employer and freelancer. It's inevitable to have disputes in the middle of the project and the messaging system will help leverage it when Upwork's team investigate the issue.
(As far as my experience, when you are dealing outside their platform, they will not be able to add those as evidence when they investigate a dispute so that would be a bummer for the employer or freelancer about it)
That's a fair point. In my experience, it's difficult to keep on top of communication with multiple Upwork resources through their native chat system, especially if you're working with an existing team that needs to talk to the contractor. As long as they record their time using the Upwork application, there is a fair bit of evidence to support these kinds of cases.