How to manage remote workers

Published on July 28, 2010 How to manage remote workers

If you are running an online website, you may wish to hire remote workers to help work on your website – loading products for example. How should you best manage these workers?

In our opinion, if you are using remote workers from other countries, we would strongly recommend against giving them admin access to load your products.  Just like you wouldn’t give a contractor you hadn’t met the keys to your office to go and do some work in the weekend. While most honest hard working contractors can be trusted, it’s not good security practice to go giving out admin passwords and if your shopping cart uses a spreadsheet-based data importer, then you don’t need to anyway.

Instead, if your shopping cart uses a system like Ozcart does (with a spreadsheet based loading system), get them to input your products into the spreadsheet – which you can then import into your site. Get them to do some sample records first and try importing them into your site to make sure they work before you get them to do the bulk of it so that you can work with your shopping cart provider’s support team if there are any changes to the way the data needs to be input or saved before importing.

Some other tips to make sure that you get what you want, build the relationship you want and don’t get ripped off include the following:

• Be very clear about what you are getting before you start. Even if you’ve posted the job on a freelancer website and chosen a winning bidder, reconfirm the job before any work starts.  How many products will they be loading? Will they be loading the attributes (colour, size, etc.) or just the product name and descriptions? What format will they deliver in? How often will they provide something to you? Who will fix mistakes? When is the job considered done?
• Communicate throughout the job. If you have a messenger service on your computer use that to talk to the worker – or send regular emails and expect regular emails from them. There’s nothing worse than waiting and worrying that the job might not even be getting done. Set regular times to communicate so things become predictable. A predictable job is not a boring one, it’s often a job well done.
• For bigger jobs, break it down into smaller parts. Make sure there are clear deliverables that can be measured at each step of the way.
• Encourage the worker to ask questions.  Raise any problems you have as soon as you are aware of them, and ask them to do the same.

Good communication forges a lasting relationship and a small product loading job could lead into a bigger job. For jobs like search engine optimisation, things are even harder for remote workers so an even greater amount of structure and milestones are required.