27 Proven Ways To Align Freelancers With Your Agency’s Goals

Finding ways to align freelancers with the company’s goals is critical for its success.

As, due to the pandemic, more than half of organizations, or 53%, think that remote work has increased their willingness to hire freelancers.

Additionally, many individuals are planning to start their career as freelancers.

As a result, full-time employees are being displaced by freelancers in the gig economy. Thus, the organization must develop ways to align freelancers with the company’s objectives.

Moreover, employees are frequently given an orientation that explains the company’s goals, how they might contribute to achieving them, and why. 

Also, These newbies do not share the same perspective on the company as full-time employees. 

Thus, Companies must thus find a way on:

• How to align freelancers with their objectives to make sure that they understand the business 
• Why are they hired

So, that the company can ensure freelancers are aware of their agency’s objectives.

Here are some ideas on aligning freelancers with your company’s goals.

Check out how to evaluate a potential freelancer – a client’s perspective.

Ways On How To Align Freelancers With Company’s Goals

Make Your Core Values Known

Provide freelancers a paper that includes:

• A brief history of your company
• Explanation of your key principles :– what they are, what they mean to us and your clients
• How they influence the work performed.

It’s a fantastic method to give freelancers the context they need to understand their connection with the firm.

Any business or client should offer a brief to freelancers so that they are aware of their desires and needs; Because if they give a vague brief, the results will be not up to the mark.

This, will help them to align with the company from the very beginning.

Motivate Them To Support The Mission And Vision

Your agency’s mission and vision should unite freelancers, employees, and contractors.

Therefore, would help a company align freelancers, employers, and contractors together.

Moreover, even if it’s for a project, they’ll need onboarding, so consider creating an onboarding track for non-full-time staff. 

If everyone knows the company’s “why”, then the work will usually speak for itself, regardless of how long the talent stays.

Make Your Values A Part Of Your Vision

Working on projects with several members of your team is the most effective way to inform new partners about your agency’s direction.

It enables them to recognize the design aesthetic and creative criteria that characterize your work. 

Thus, the greatest way to align them with the aim.

Make A List Of Your Objectives

When you hire freelancers, you describe your objectives. 

Therefore, have a distinct project document that outlines the objectives of each project. 

So, that there are no misunderstandings and everything’s documented.

Define Goals, Policies, And Expectations

Set clear expectations, policies, and goals from the beginning. Your agency wants to work with freelancers, and you want to work with them.

Therefore, ensure that everyone understands the project’s components and the desired conclusion.

Moreover, when working on projects, keep notes and a record of communications that all parties can see. Reach out and touch base as required.

Set Expectations Clearly

When delegating work to third parties, clarity is essential.

As a result, all working partnerships with freelancers or contractors should begin with a set of expectations that are well established.

Before any work begins, make sure everyone is on the same page by explaining not only their role in the project but also why it matters and how it relates to the company’s overall goals.

Check out 7 client questions freelancers should ask before starting work.

Provide Them With Complete Transparency

Give them complete access to the company, just as you would an employee.

This includes allowing them to comprehend the larger scope of work.

Which includes the efforts that went into establishing the company, and the ins and outs, as well as the ups and downs, of dealing with clients or team members. 

As said, Knowledge is a powerful tool.

Hence, it’s important to be transparent with the freelancers.

Clarity Is Clarity While Finding Ways to Align Freelancer

Communication is critical. 

A freelancer simply cannot create to their full potential if the scope, timetable, and goal of a project are not clearly stated.

Making assumptions or being unclear can lead to frustration on both sides of the relationship. 

Furthermore, the lack of precise definitions on your end indicates that your project needs more clarification.

Discuss Goals In The Beginning

Freelancers are typically proud of their abilities, skills and believe that they know exactly what it takes to succeed at their jobs. 

A goal sheet could easily misinterpret as directions on how to do their duties, potentially resulting in ego clashes. 

Providing detailed instructions on each assignment, or even job stage if necessary, at times when the freelancer is open to guidance, could help break down barriers.

Also read: How to decide between hiring In-house vs freelancers or agency engagement>

A Company Should Hire Trainable Freelancers

It all begins with the hiring of trainable freelancers. 

Following that, it is the responsibility to clearly describe each project’s goal in great detail. 

With establishing expectations prior to the commencement of each project. 

Having detailed project task lists is a great way to align freelancers’ accountability while also providing leadership with trackable benchmarks to check performance.

Hire Them Because Of Their Approach

Don’t recruit freelancers only on the basis of their abilities.

Hire them because of their approach. Anyone can develop skills with training and knowledge,  but approaches can’t be taught.

There are many instances where freelancers learn on the job and produced outstanding results. 

Moreover, meeting company goals will not be an issue if they engage in working with you and are treating you as a member of the team.

Establish Standard Operating Procedures

If you don’t have the necessary systems in place, training new offshore team members and freelancers can be a difficult task.

When it comes to training new employees, standard operating procedures are extremely successful. 

They aid in the step-by-step breakdown of a procedure in a written text. 

To make your training and onboarding process go more smoothly, you may create video SOPs and host them on platforms like Trainual.

To Align Freelancer Company Should Treat Them As Team Member

Freelancers are an extension to your team, so onboard them the same way you would any other employee. 

By teaching them your culture and ensuring that their communication style is one that keeps the entire team engaged. 

Furthermore, goals are easy to quantify, but team emotions and bad communication are more difficult to recover from.

Provide Enough Work For Contractors

Provide enough work for contractors to want to join your firm and learn more about it. 

For example: Giving a freelance writer 20 hours of work per week is preferable to spreading that work among four or five authors. 

Hence, if you don’t show actual dedication to freelancers, you’ll never get a true commitment from them.

Make Your Creative Process More Agile While Aligning Freelancers

Make use of Slack. Don’t rely on creative briefs that have not been updated in a long time. 

Spend the time to find and onboard the ideal freelancer. Besides, to team meetings, it should include one-on-one attention. 

Allow them to ask “dumb” questions in a relaxed environment. Create a procedure that allows you to easily share files and assets with the freelancer. 

Hence, making it easier for the company to align freelancers.

Allow Them To Attend Important Meetings

After you sign a non-disclosure agreement, give your contractors the opportunity to sit in on key meetings. 

Create a formal onboarding program as well as a Google Doc with resources for them to access. 

Above all, devote time to training. Even the most knowledgeable professional will experience a 30- to a 90-day learning curve.

Hiring seasoned contractors is a good idea. You may spend a little more upfront, but you will save time and money in the long term.

When Company Align Freelancers They Should Always Start With A Conversation First

Never send a brief to a freelancer without first speaking with them.

They need to go through the agency-client relationship’s history as well as the client’s marketing goals, and what’s at risk for the agency. 

Make it clear how important the task is so they are encouraged to give the same amount of blood, sweat, and tears that a full-time employee would.

Read more about how to select an ideal freelancer.

Count On Their Input And Creativity

Freelancers often have a lot of experience and can add a lot of value when their creativity and inputs are valued.

Frequently communicate the organization’s goals, then the project goals, and finally the guidelines that the freelancer is free to work within. 

When you value their opinions, you’ll find that your expectations exceed them!

Treat Them As If They Were Full-Time Employees

Include freelancers in employee onboarding sessions, and if they will be freelancing on a regular basis, fly them to your office.

Freelancers may not receive the same benefits, compensation, or perks as full-time employees. Hence, find methods to reward them and provide awards for employees to make them feel like a valued member of your team.

Tell Them Exactly What You Want

Frequently it’s heard that freelancers do poor work because they weren’t provided a well-written set of bullet points.

It’s impossible to go wrong if you declare, “This is exactly what we want from you, and what we’re doing in this specific project.”

Make A Calendar That Aligns Freelancers With The Company’s Goals

This will give freelancers a better idea of what’s coming up, and they will be able to ensure that it aligns with business objectives.`

Make Call-To-Actions

A content calendar can assist in the preparation and inclusion of Call-to-Actions.

The client can update them to ensure that the content has the appropriate CTA based on the goals. 

This is particularly beneficial for freelancers since they will be able to comprehend what the client expects from them more quickly.

Make A Strategy For Incorporating Them

Most agencies in the “gig” economy deal with a consistent group of independent contractors.

Here are five suggestions for how to align them: 

• Create a single point of contact for all your customers. 
• Prepare a brand brief for them.
• Your employee handbook should have a section for freelancers. 
• Intranet docs for freelancers are a good idea. 
• Employees should actively embrace freelancers as part of the company’s policy.

If There Are Any Upcoming Modifications To The Goals, Let Freelancer Know About It

Make sure you talk to the client on a frequent basis to see if the priorities have changed. 

In this manner, Freelancers will be able to cultivate a successful long-term relationship by creating more successful projects.

Collaboration and Information Sharing Is Very Critical While Aligning Freelancers To Company’s Objective

Although in-person cooperation is always preferable when working with remote freelancers. 

Yet, make an attempt to communicate all information to all team members.

For tracking, use a project management program, Google Drive for file storage, and daily Skype or screen sharing meetings for team updates. 

When you film client meetings for freelancers who couldn’t attend, the quality of the work improves as well.

Defining KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are a way of measuring a company’s performance.

Hiring a freelancer, a company should keep a note of the following things:

• How many clients are they addressing?
• What efforts are they actually making for the company’s success?
• Efficacy of their marketing campaigns

To truly measure achievement, a company needs to create smart indicators. 

The use of key performance indicators (KPIs) is a great approach to track a company’s progress as well as freelancers.

Defining KPIs will make it easier to manage and track freelancers and the company’s progress, and to determine which areas need improvement.

Also, trying out performance management tools will give pleasant outcomes.

Moreover, you will rapidly notice positive outcomes in terms of increasing your company’s success and ensuring that all of your workers including freelancers work to their full potential.

The Best Ways To Align Freelancers Is To Give Them Some Examples

The majority of freelancers are visual thinkers.

Hence, using words to describe a vision is not the most effective method of communication.

Therefore, show examples of the final product you expect to obtain, and be sure to explain the quality and rationale for your decision. 

This is ideal for graphic design, web design, user interface design, content formatting, tone, and video.

Conclusion 

These methods will help a company in managing freelancers in order to fulfill the organization’s goals. 

As a result, the job quality improves and a significant amount of time has been saved. The task of the company will be shared because of hiring freelancers. 

That is, Work efficiency improves. 

Moreover, both freelancers and full-time employees would benefit from these procedures because this would enable them to work together but individually. 

Also, Companies would benefit from a large pool of skills. Evaluate the most in-demand skills for 2022 and pick a career.

Thus, Applying these above ways will help a firm and freelancers to be on the same page.

Hence making sure that freelancers have a thorough understanding of the company’s ideals, which can result in exceptional outcomes.

Use Refrens Platform to hire different freelancers from IT to marketing to designing if you and your company are looking to employ a freelancer with a certain skill set!