Ways of Working: Working with others
In this second instalment of our 3-part series Ways of Working, Lily Green, No Bindings’ director, shares tips on how to manage working with others efficiently. These tips are ideal for those new to project management, freelancing or remote working.
Paper Trail - do you have a paper trail for your project and communications with others?
Written records are a great tool for when you need to reference past conversations and agreements to achieve clarity when working with others. These are some ways you can get into the habit of creating a paper trail.
Follow up any phone or in-person conversations with an email summarising what you spoke about.
Create a “live” document that you and your team can collectively edit. For example, if you have a weekly check-in with a client, you can take notes in this document and everyone can refer back to it and indicate when tasks have been followed through.
Keep a calendar or diary. whether that’s a physical organiser or iCal or similar, getting into the habit of logging meetings and events in your calendar is a great way to keep track of how many hours you’ve done working on a certain project.
Checking in - do you have a culture of regular check-ins?
Think about the ways you can set up a culture of regular check-ins to avoid only having meetings when things go wrong. Regular check-ins provide a neutral ground to raise issues but also celebrate achievements. As a freelancer, you may not be working in an office where you see your colleagues or collaborators everyday; as such it’s even more important to check in and see how everyone is doing to catch and resolve any issues before they become bigger and more difficult problems to solve.
Contracts - do you have a record of what you have agreed with a client?
“Contract” is a very official sounding word, but really it’s just a record of what you have agreed to do for a client and how much the client is going to pay you and when. Contracts can be verbally agreed, but it’s better if they are written down in case the people involved remember the agreement differently. Sometimes, you might feel pressured to start working on something before a contract is in place, but it’s always worth waiting to start work until you have either signed a contract, or at lest agreed via email what is going to happen. Later down the line, when you’re asked to do more work than was agreed, you have something to refer back to and can charge for the extra work.
In conclusion, when working with others, even if you’re collaborating with friends and family, it’s really important to have clear records of what everyone is expecting from each other, whether that’s time, money or deliverables. Regular, clear and documented communication will help you prevent problems and make it easier to solve problems when they occur.
Next week (and our final post in the series), we’ll be looking at how to Plan for Change.
Image credit: "Teamwork" by Skley is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0