3 Ways to Successfully Balance Your Full-Time and Freelance Workers

In today’s work environment, building the best team with the capabilities to successfully deliver project-based work usually requires a combination of full-time and freelance workers. Capacity planning during the estimation phase of forecasting is always challenging, but you can set up your workforce for success by optimizing the differences between these two types of workers. Balancing your team allows you to stay profitable while also continually growing and taking on bigger projects.

1. Understand Strengths and Weaknesses

Creating the optimal balance in your team requires understanding the strengths found in full-time and freelance work that the other side is weaker in. Independent contractors often have the advantage in flexibility and expertise. While the virtual world provides a host of certification and online training programs, a freelancer can utilize specialized knowledge at the drop of a hat that could take a full-time employee weeks or months to learn. The availability of the remote workforce has created a worldwide reach when it comes to recruiting talent for independent contracting. In addition, their flexibility to jump on projects last minute should the need arise provides the whole team with an additional set of eyes and a new perspective on a project component.

Full-time workers have the advantage of past experience with the services you specifically provide. Essentially, they know the ins and outs of your organization. Full-time employees have also been known to have higher rates of productivity as well as consistency. Company loyalty and team cohesiveness can make projects move faster because of collaborative muscle memory.

2. Distinguish Peripheral vs. Core Skills

Fielding the right team requires having an in-depth understanding of team member skills, which are then divided between peripheral and core capabilities. Core skills are closely connected to the services and project components that employees provide the most often. These require the consistency of a full-time worker to serve clients well and manage both client expectations and relationships. Peripheral skills are only utilized for particular projects. But this doesn’t minimize their importance. Often, the people who provide these skills are highly specialized in areas like video editing, which can be crucial for some projects but aren’t necessarily widely applicable.

For resource managers, the key is to hire full-time workers with core competencies and freelance workers who can provide specialty skills when required for individual projects. This is how you prevent the high costs from employing under-utilized full-time workers and maximize the contributions of a consistently utilized network of freelance contractors, optimizing profitability. Skill matching is at the core of accurate and timely resource forecasting.

3. Support Unique Work Requirements

Successful, timely projects are only accomplished when both full-time and freelance workers are well supported. But the support for each is understandably different. Communication and collaboration are at the heart of every service organizations’ projects. Your people are your power, and their success is maximized when those around them are working at 100% capability. Independent contractors provide the best work when they are on boarded to the team and project in a way that builds rapport. Ideally, full-time workers are already communicating regularly in both casual and official settings, and it’s important that freelancers are included into the entire framework of project execution. Their work will align best with your business’s goals when the project has well-documented timelines, assigned resources, and especially deliverables. Your full-time workers are the most immediate representatives of company culture and standards, and their satisfaction and productivity will ultimately influence freelancers.

Matching the Right People to the Right Assignments

With Kantata, you can balance staffing requirements and skill expectations at scale. You’ll consistently deliver on client needs when your understanding of supply and demand is complete. Unparalleled demand forecasting ensures that the best people will be on your team and your clients’ projects, always.