I recently started to write about why freelancers are a vital part of companies to be successful and effective. Here are some insights on how it feels to be a freelancer in the web development industry.

Change, change, change = experience.

One of the most important factors to hire a freelancer as a company is to get experience from real world scenarios. As a freelancer changing my projects over time, I get a lot of insight into a huge variety of projects and teams. I get to know how companies work differently, how teams and its members perform, how projects fail or succeed and which technologies or workflows are used for which purpose. Such experience is invaluable when you start out, scale or need to build something you haven’t done before.

The downside for freelancers here? I need to constantly search for new customers, projects and do lots of networking to have a consistent income. Until this doesn’t work as expected.
On the upside it’s very interesting, challenging and rewarding to be part of different stacks, teams and success stories.

Onboarding, being a freelance team member, offboarding

A project usually starts by being onboarded. For me as a freelancer, I strive to start immediately with the codebase, documentation spaces and talking to other team members. A common challenge is the onboarding which requires accounts and access to be given to me. This often takes quite long in bigger orgs which may not be an issue to internals (but is still annoying), so I document this process, point out what should be improved and hand this over to my manager so they can improve the process. I’m hired on a daily rate and the longer I sit around waiting for access, we waste money and lose time to create great solutions. Therefore it’s important to me to give feedback from the beginning.

Once onboarded I want to get to know my colleagues. For some people it may be confusing but for me a vital part of successful partnership is to be part of the team, treated like the internals and being part of the company culture. This ensures I get the full picture and can adjust how I work and find out which solution or workflow may suit best for the team.

Of course there’ll be a difference between employees and freelancers but if you understand it, you can use this for the better. As freelancer, I also ask employees to give feedback or what they would improve if they could (acting as a person of trust in-between them and their managers) and then I can go to the managers and anonymously share feedback they otherwise would not get. In the past, this turned out to be a key benefit for both sides — happier engineers, happier managers. That said, you can’t expect that from any freelancer as this requires extensive knowledge in how to deal with people and feedback.

When I’m allowed to be part of a company’s strategy meetings or even off-sites, this always increased the effectiveness of my work. I could talk to directors, we could strengthen the team feeling, we had time to talk about life and work experiences or to share ideas for the company product vision.

When a project finishes it comes to off boarding. This is pretty straight forward but I ensure that I say goodbye to everyone, leave my contact details so people can always reach me afterwards in case they have questions. This is important to give people the safety of trust. While I’m certainly only a temporary person in the company, I’m there even if I’m not in the company anymore. I had it a couple of times in the past where people reached out later on and had a question on the codebase. It was not a big deal and I helped them out by simply answering that email. One of the last steps is to share my experience and feedback including suggestions for improvement but also praise of what works really well already to the relevant managers. Once that’s done, I’m offboarded.

It’s not a rare thing that the same company wants to have me back later for the same or a different project which makes this entire on/offboarding process a no brainer.

You’re hiring internally but it’s taking a while. Here I am to fill the gap.

A common scenario is that the company is actively hiring people for the role I fit in. However, we all know it can take a while to find the right person and a longer while until they start.

That’s where I as a freelancer come into play: I can often start right away and work on the tasks very quickly. Once the new employee starts, I can hand over and onboard them until they feel comfortable and knowledge has been transferred. Then we can check if there’s more for me to do, if working in parallel makes us faster or if we end the contract then.

The most effective thing to do as company is to fill hiring gaps with good and experienced freelancers. That way your time to market shrinks, the bug is being fixed faster, your revenue grows faster without the need to wait until you eventually find the right person to hire.

I’m here to challenge your and your team

With so much experience from other products and companies I am often challenging the people in the company. I quickly identify the workflow gaps, roadblocks or reason why people’s motivation is stuck. If I’m allowed — and of course I’m gentle and subtle in communication here — I will try to unblock people, improve processes and bring back happiness to people at work.

In the past, I’ve been often starting out with a development task but realise that some parts of the workflow need to be fixed. Therefore I created new guidelines using team workshops, coached people and fostered a culture of openness and trust so the team can improve themselves. The result? Happier, calmer people who understand the vision for the product and strive to build the best product they can imagine. Done that a couple of times already in big companies. The effect? The team shared this experience, it was copied and other teams joined this mission to build a great work environment and great products.

That’s my experience, how about yours?

I’m sure this is not the only view you can have on freelancers. I know there are different qualities of freelancers, same as in the hiring market. I’ve been sharing my experiences with highly skilled freelancers and my personal experience from working with dozens of companies like agencies, start-ups, NGOs or small and mid-sized companies. Let me know if you have a different story.

Liked what I wrote and think I can help your team out?

Send me an email with your case and let’s discuss how I may help you.