How to make friends freelance and full-time?
Prologue
Nowadays, in IT, there are two ways of relations between the company and employees. The first is hiring people for permanent employment, the second is the use of freelancers. Is it possible to combine the positive qualities of these so different approaches, while getting rid of the disadvantages?
I believe that is possible. And, moreover, some companies already have conditions for this. So, in order to determine what we want to save and what to get rid of, we will consider the pros and cons of each approach.
Freelance vs. permanent employment
The advantages of permanent employment:
- Guaranteed income (and other buns)
- A team of professionals is around, who has anyone to learn from
- Participation in large projects
Disadvantages of permanent employment:
- Lack of motivation
- Small interest in personal development of an individual employee
- Lower (comparative) labor efficiency
- The “I’m boss-you-fool” relationship model is of little use for the IT industry, where people are distinguished by intelligence by definition.
- Low employee loyalty
- Narrow specialization - code, code and code. Although many are not averse to express themselves otherwise.
- Fixed working day - although there are variations, anyway - after working 12 hours on one day, the next time you are welcome to the office
Freelance pros:
- Strong motivation for effective work (as you sink - you dig :)
- The ability to vary the ratio of "income-free time" at your discretion
- Responsibility
- Additional skills that appear due to the need to communicate with the customer
- When working with a freelancer, the company has the opportunity to transfer part of the risks to it.
- The need for a freelancer to constantly acquire new knowledge
Cons freelance:
- The risk of being left without orders for an indefinite period
- Unknown to potential customers
- Work on typical tasks in small projects
Peace, friendship, chewing gum
So how can you make friends full-time and freelance?
To do this, it is enough to introduce relations in the collective on the principle of a free market:
- At the beginning of the project, we recruit contractors - team members. The volume of work and remuneration are negotiated with each separately.
- We set a bonus for everyone for early completion (size is determined individually ), and for failure to meet deadlines - penalties (hello Motivation, thank God you have come! :)
- Well, we also determine the rate for work performed outside the agreed framework of the project.
What is the result?
A sense of responsibility and motivation is rising.
Risks for the project are shared and transferred to contractors.
Your boss is your customer. We teach team members to relate.
The employee himself will be able to vary his load-income.
A person begins to do something not out of fear of sticking in from the boss, but because he himself has agreed and now must answer for his obligations.
There is a normal business motivation - the desire to establish long-term relationships with the customer, so that orders will be transferred to you in the future (taken into projects).
I would like to improve the quality and efficiency of work in order to be able to raise my price in the future.
Limitations
Clearly, this will only work if the PM has the authority to manage the budget and determine the composition of the team.
In addition, in order to agree reasonably on the scope of work and remuneration, the ToR should be worked out in detail. Those. can be used in RUP. And in Agile (Scrum), at each iteration, agree again (by the way, if you set the length of the iteration per month, then you can simplify financial issues).
Requirements for skills for the next iteration can be published so that people can plan their employment for the next period. Well, here you can still think a lot of things ...
conclusions
What's in the net?
The minuses of freelance have been removed: you are known to customers within the company, and it depends on you whether they will take you to interesting projects; We work in large projects according to our level.
The minuses of permanent employment were removed: everyone became quasi-freelancers and received an upgrade of motivation and responsibility.
In general, everything looks very rosy: each employee is his own company. And the strength of the entire company lies in the unity of its strong employee companies.
Obviously, this approach will work best for companies with a design organization. Although it’s also suitable for operating activities - employees are able to perform the functions of service contractors, stipulating their activities and remuneration for a certain period.
That’s exactly what you can’t do without it - so that the upper ones want, and the lower classes can. In the sense that management must understand that it will be necessary to work in a new way. And they wanted it. You won’t be able to pull Vasya and say “do it”, and then an hour later “no, better do that.” And the lower classes - that is, employees, should be able to crawl out of a cozy swamp and try themselves in the real world (Morpheus, I’m blue, but bigger, bigger :) You
can start from part of the team - the crystallization center - to which the others are gradually connected.
Of course, there are questions. For example, what to do with bugs (the contractor gives a guarantee on his code)? Or how to keep people who have received a new degree of freedom from going into free swimming?
There are not a few of them, but I want to think over this approach, it seems to me very promising. And I want to analyze it from all sides. Therefore, a question for the habrasociety - what problems may arise? Or vice versa - unexpected advantages.
Maybe someone already uses / used a similar approach - what are the reviews?