Managing Free Agents

Even if you do not invest a lot of time and effort in leading your free agents, you still have to manage them. In fact, the more you back away from leadership, the more time you will probably have to spend on management. If nothing else, you need to find them, then hire or contract with them, then keep track — somewhat — of what they are doing.

Finding free agents is easy. Finding good free agents can be a little trickier. If you are hiring them for the first time you will not know much about the quality of their work. Hopefully they will have some kind of portfolio or can provide qualified references you can check out. Finding free agents through a freelancer website or through their own individual website allows you to see how they have done before, whether through employer feedback or links to portfolios.

When it comes to actually hiring free agents, get some legal advice early on. If you are going to be doing this regularly you should have a standardized contract where you fill in the blanks depending on the project. Of course, by working with a free agent you have got less paperwork to worry about. There’s no health insurance to worry about, no retirement; usually, just tax paperwork.

How you pay your free agent is up to you. You can pay by the hour or pay by the project. If you do the former, you are really paying for the process, and you might be paying them for time they are not actually working if they finish in less time than they quoted you. If you choose to simply pay by the project, what you are paying for is the product rather than the process…you need to figure out which method best addresses what is most important to you.

If you do decide to pay by the hour you will need to find some way to track their work. That can be tough. A lot of free agents will be working off-site. Now, with your regular employees, working off-site is not necessarily a problem because, ideally, you have a relationship with them that creates trust, and you do not need to see what they’re up to. But with free agents, especially when you have not worked with them before, you do not really know that when they bill you for 30 hours they really worked 30 hours. So, either find a way to keep an eye on their billable hours, or agree on a price for the project and just go with that.

In the knowledge economy, free agents have become an important element. To stay fresh, you sometimes need to be willing to reach out beyond your internal pool of talent and bring in something new. But that is easy to say, tougher to do. Leading employees who work for you regularly can be challenging, but making the best use of the talents of those occasional workers requires some extra management skills on your part. So, before you jump into that, make sure to think about what is required.