Working with freelancers may seem challenging from time to time, as keeping them synced with your team isn’t always an easy thing to do. Since freelancers have a floating schedule, often work remotely and deal with separate tasks, rather than the whole project, they can easily fall out of the loop. However, one of our customers efficiently manages the work of 8 freelancers at the same time. Interested to know how? Take a sneak peek with us into their way of successfully organizing the team work.
FreestyleXtreme is a Bristol-based web shop that specializes in accessories, apparel and sports equipment for almost all forms of extreme sports. Recently, the team has been focused on getting into new territories and, therefore, had to work with a number of freelance translators to localize their website in different European languages.
Customer’s tip:
“Wages are the biggest expense in our company, so it’s critical for us to find the most optimal way to manage the team’s workload, especially when it comes to the part-time workers,” shares Ben Robert Richardson, the founder of FreestyleXtreme.
He understands that if there are too many tasks assigned to freelancers, they may run out of time and miss critical deadlines. At the same time, if freelancers don’t get enough of work, the company’s efficiency will suffer.
To take most of their time, FreestyleXtreme’s team has come up with several guidelines that make it easier to synchronize their workload. Here’s what helps them make freelancers the same part of the team as full-time workers.
Dedicate a fair amount of time to the onboarding process
According to FreestyleXtreme team, the best way to familiarize people with a new system is to let them take their time with it. On the first workday, the team lets the new person spend the time he or she needs to get familiar with the new tool. The team members explain the benefits of Wrike and the way it works. Then the newcomers usually get some time to figure out how the system works on their own.
Share your company’s vision with freelancers
Another important part of the onboarding process is to make part-time translators enthusiastic about what they do. Team members explain to the freelance translators that they are now the company’s voice in the new countries and that their work is valuable for the company. As a result, motivated workers take more responsibility for their assignments.
Let the freelancers know about your goals in advance
Scrum methodology helps a lot in planning for the FreestyleXtreme’s team. They run regular monthly meetings and set major deadlines several weeks in advance. This ensures that part-timers will have enough time to complete important tasks marked on their work schedule. Then each week, the head of each department checks up on the progress to make sure there are no stumbling blocks on the way.
Assign a team member to be a point of contact for your part-timers
There is one full-time member on FreestyleXtreme’s team who manages the workload of the freelance workers and acts as the central point of contact for the project updates. This helps to avoid conflicts and make sure important details don’t slip away.
Have regular progress check-ups
All freelancers in FreestyleXtreme have a five-minute morning meeting with the supervisor to go through their tasks for the day on Wrike. Manager looks through the project’s progress, clarifies the details, and adjusts Wrike schedules accordingly. Since freelancers normally work just 2 or 3 days per week, such approach makes sure everyone’s on the same page, even when part-time workers are out of the office.
Selective sharing helps vary the level of involvement
The easiest way to manage freelancers’ work is to put all tasks assigned to them in a separate folder in Wrike. With the selective sharing, you easily choose how much of the project data you want your freelancers to see. You can share only related tasks with each person, and at the same time, monitor the progress of all freelancers in the folder’s Activity Stream. If you feel like you want to involve part-time workers more in the project, you also can share other particular tasks or subfolders with any of them. For instance, you might share a subfolder with the project schedule.
Keep everything logged in
Last but not the least comes a simple rule of FreestyleXtreme’s team - no matter how small the task is, it should be always logged into Wrike project management tool! This way, nothing gets lost, even if it was backlogged months ago.
To learn more about FreestyleXtreme team’s workflow and managing the extreme sports equipment business, watch our podcast with Ben Robert Richardson!
Do you also apply any of these principles in your team’s work? Or do you organize your work with freelancers differently?
“Wrike has enabled us to effectively manage our team’s time and be more productive! All tasks are now transparent, so at any time I can see the progress along with any problems, and also learn how different members of our staff are handling their workload. We have now developed an ethos that, no matter how small a task is, it is put into Wrike, so nothing is overlooked or forgotten!”
Ben Robert Richardson, founder of FreestyleXtreme
Wrike Team
Occasionally we write blog posts where multiple people contribute. Since our idea of having a gladiator arena where contributors would fight to the death to win total authorship wasn’t approved by HR, this was the compromise.
First-hand Experience To Succeed with a Distributed Team
This is exactly the case of Avi Cohen, CEO of Pacific54, who successfully manages the five offices of his company, spread around Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and the U.S.
"We run multiple projects on online marketing strategies, and the main challenge for us was establishing a healthy workflow for all of them," Avi says. "As we managed to do it with the help of Wrike project management software, now we are able to reach markets of clients and employees that we never thought would be possible to maintain virtually!"
Avi has shared with us the rules that helped him efficiently manage his remote team in order to attract more customers. If you are ready to see your business grow, take a look at these great tips:
1. Make sure all team members keep up with the deadlines
Plans may change, and when the team is decentralized, it's tricky to ensure that everyone always stays up-to-date with the new schedule. Things have become much easier for us with the interactive Gantt chart that instantly provides all team members with a current project schedule wherever they are. When I create new tasks or reschedule existing ones, they always stay in the loop, receiving e-mail notifications about the changes. Also, on the online Gantt chart, I can instantly see who is responsible for which task and whether it will be completed on time.
2. Always stay on top of your team’s agenda
When you manage several projects split between a numbers of remote workers, you need to focus on the most important goals one step ahead. That’s why I customize the widgets on my dashboard to show tasks and projects I am currently interested in and eliminate the others. With custom settings, I always concentrate on the most important items of the work, be it overdue tasks, tasks to do this week or tasks assigned to a particular person in the company.
3. Create a collaborative online environment
Enthusiastic collaboration and idea exchanges are behind every successful project. When your team is separated geographically, you need to provide them with a convenient space for project-related discussions. For our team, that place is the Activity Stream. Here, we oversee all the recent updates and share our news, comments and files. And handy avatars make our communication more personal!
4. Dedicate enough time to each client
Good customer relationships are the key to your flawless reputation! As all Pacific54 team members keep their time logs in Wrike, at the end of the month I can easily create time reports to see how many hours were spent on each client. Analyzing this information helps us assure that all customers are satisfied.
5. Let your customers see the project progress themselves!
To make your relationships more productive, provide your customers with the full or read-only access to the project. This way, they will always have the most recent data available, while you will no longer spend a minute on keeping them up-to-date. A win-win situation! The viewer license feature alone saved me so many sleepless nights.
Nevertheless, your team members' personalities are also important for success, so simply maintaining an efficient online communication isn’t enough. What can be better than a phone call when you need to talk over an emotional issue? Why not try some virtual team building games activities? Or how about occasional face-to-face meetings with your colleagues that will definitely help you build strong team relationships? You will be surprised to see how even one such meeting improves your team’s virtual collaboration!
"Having tried many different project management tools, I was a bit skeptical about all of them. However, I was surprised by the ease of use and control over the projects Wrike immediately gave me. Now we leverage Wrike in our business in a way that saves us ton of time and money!”Avi Cohen, CEO at Pacific54
Pacific54 is a boutique online marketing agency that specializes in effective Search Engine Optimization, Social Marketing, Pay-Per-Click methods and much more.
Project Management
5 min read
Andatech’s Tips: How to Develop a Habit of Logging and Updating Tasks on Time
If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly!If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly!
Andatech is one of our customers, and it wholesales a vast variety of innovative electronic products for home in Australia. There are several teams within the company that are working on completely different projects, and the same employees take part in several projects at once. Prior to Wrike, the general manager spent several hours every week on collecting updates across different projects and putting them together into a general overview.
Now, every team member keeps their tasks up-to-date in the system, so it’s a matter of a click or two to see how things are going. This approach is beneficial for both managers and the team, as everyone is on the same page and is moving faster. We've asked Andatech's team to share how they managed to make logging tasks into Wrike a habit so quickly!
Leverage e-mail integration
Andatech managers wanted an easy way to track all work that has been done, especially by remote team members. So the first thing Andatech did was to create a simple rule: Any task that takes more than half an hour should be logged into Wrike.
Making this happen was easy. A lot of the team’s communication takes place via e-mail, so logging new tasks from e-mails into Wrike is literally a matter of a click, thanks to Wrike’s Gmail gadget.
“Most project management tools are hard to adopt right away because people think that it’s actually more work for them. But with Wrike, the biggest thing for our staff was understanding that it’s not just a separate platform. It naturally supplements other habitual tools, such as e-mail, easily converting e-mails into tasks,” says Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech.
If your team is used to communicating issues via e-mail, make sure everyone on your team knows the fastest way for them to turn e-mails into Wrike tasks. This means the add-ins for Outlook and Apple Mail users, the gadget for Gmail users and simply forwarding an e-mail to [email protected] for anyone else.
Update tasks in Wrike after everyday standup meetings
When tasks are logged into the system, at first people may still forget to update them. So Andatech managers decided to update tasks right after the everyday standup meetings.
They created a folder called “Morning standup,” where the project manager puts tasks that need to be done today and prioritizes them after each meeting.
After the meeting, team members also check that all updates they have reported during the meeting have been logged into the system. If they have previously forgotten to log something, it's high time to put it into Wrike, making sure the project picture is complete. This approach makes it easier to collaborate with remote team members, as the manager can quickly show them today’s agenda and the team’s priorities. The manager also sees the overall team’s progress in one place and can quickly measure the progress for any given period with the help of Wrike’s advanced filters.
Suggest that employees create personal folders for the most important tasks
Quick access to all current tasks is vital to set the priorities correctly and get things done in time. That's why every Andatech employee has a special widget on the Wrike dashboard with all tasks assigned to them (by default, you only have tasks assigned to you for this week). The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login.
If you want to create such a widget for yourself, all you need to do is go to “My folders,” click on the Descendants button, filter tasks assigned to you and click on the “Create a widget” button. This is a good exercise for all team members! :) The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login.
Sometimes there are too many tasks assigned to one person, so it's hard to quickly grasp the ones to focus on. Andatech's employees have come up with a solution! Some of them created the personal “Most important” folder (not shared with anyone else) and put the most important tasks from different projects there. This is easy to do, thanks to the ability to put one task in several folders in Wrike. Within personal folders, people can drag tasks up and down the list to prioritize, and then complete items on the priority list from top to bottom.
Following these three easy principles, Andatech’s team adopted Wrike quickly and smoothly! In turn, Wrike helped them greatly with tracking work progress, prioritizing things and figuring out what needs to be done and when.
Learn more about how the Andatech's team successfully uses Wrike for their workflow in our podcast with Sunil Joseph.
What are your team’s best practices in making task-tracking a habit? Do you have any particular rules in using Wrike and tracking the progress?
With Wrike, it gets easier to share and collaborate on any kind of data. We’re sure that the relevant people will see what needs to be seen, and things will get done in time.” — Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech.
News
3 min read
Need to Coordinate Multiple Teams? Wrike's Flexible Tagging Can Help!
When you prepare and execute the launch of a new product, service, or a website, there are so many things to take care of and details often fall through the cracks. The challenge is magnified when responsibility is shared between multiple teams and you need to coordinate them in the most succinct way. If a deadline is missed or a task is forgotten, your team can quickly disintegrate into a blame game, e.g. "I thought they were handling it!"
To avert such miscommunications and seamlessly track all of the small pieces for your launch, Wrike comes to the rescue. One of our customers recently shared the success story of his company, which relied on Wrike for launching their new site - read further and see if this situation is familiar to your team.
Sync the Efforts of Several Teams
Only-apartments is a Spain-based company providing global apartment rentals. Once they decided to relaunch their website, they had to coordinate the efforts between many different departments in order to deliver good results on time. Moreover, they had to adapt all of the marketing activities for eight individual marketing teams to reflect the new branding on the website. They tried Trello, Zoho, Asana, and other tools, but they felt more comfortable with Wrike since it facilitates both planning and collaboration.
One of the reasons Only-apartments chose Wrike (and it's actually one of the key features that helped them with the website launch) is the flexible folder system. "Project management over several marketing areas has never been so easy. Hands down, the most useful feature is the ability to access one task from multiple folders," says Ramon Glieneke, the Marketing Director at Only-apartments.
As an example of leveraging Wrike's flexibility for cross-functional teams, let's say you have one a task for your new website launch: "Write a new company description." In this case, your Content marketing team needs to write up the initial draft. Later, the Product and SEO marketing teams need to contribute to the messaging. You'll probably also need approval from Executives once the write-up is finished. One more step: send the task to Designers so they can create a cool image to fit your new description.
Tagging this one task to place it in 4 different folders - one for each team - helps each contributor track progress on shared work. The same exact task will be accessible from every folder it is included in. Content will start the task, Product and SEO will review when they see that Content has made headway, and Design will know to start once Executives have left their approval. Your project coordination becomes significantly easier.
To take flexible folders to the next level, you can also share a sub-folder within multiple larger folders. This gives you the ability to share an entire project - instead of just a single task - with multiple teams.
If you are worried about wasting time and losing track of important work before your next launch, use our folder system to track updates and progress.
What other challenges has Only-apartments solved using Wrike? How do they use Wrike to avoid meetings? Find out all the details in their case study we just published!
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