6 Ways to Streamline Working with Contract Employees

Businesses of all shapes and sizes work with contract employees for a wide range of different reasons. As an HR professional, this hiring approach is likely something that you will encounter at some point in your career, especially as we have seen a shift towards more and more people working as contractors in the last few years.

Maintaining a successful relationship with your contract employees is an important way to ensure that you retain talented workers and create a positive reputation which means it’ll be easy to find and work with more contractors in the future. In this article, we share six key pieces of advice to help streamline your approach to working with contract employees.

Stay ahead of the industry with exclusive feature stories on the top companies, expert insights and the latest news delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe today.

1. Ensure They’re Fulfilling a Genuine Need

First of all, make sure that the decision to hire a contractor is definitely the right one. Something that can sour a relationship pretty quickly is establishing a contract and then not actually needing the work or input that you promised, or even requiring something different from your original brief.

Before making the decision to hire a contract employee, evaluate your current team and decide whether a contract hire is the right fit for your situation. Suppose you just need to increase your capacity for a short-term period. In that case, you need more flexibility in your hiring approach, or you’re looking for specific and expert insight for a single project, a contractor is the right choice. But if you’re simply looking for more employees to be part of your team in the long term, a contractor probably isn’t the right choice.

2. Choose an Experienced Contractor

Our second piece of advice to streamline your contractor experience is to choose someone experienced to work with. This can make everything about the working relationship more straightforward because you’re hiring someone who will be confident with their role and the process of working on a contract basis.

Choosing an experienced and established contractor also means that you’ll hire someone with experience fitting into a new team, which is likely to lead to more efficient onboarding. You can also verify your choice by asking them for references or feedback from previous employers, allowing you to get a full and unbiased opinion of their skills and avoid hiring someone who won’t actually be able to deliver what you need. 

3. Establish Clear Expectations

One of the best ways to make sure that you have an easy ride with hiring a contractor is to establish clear expectations from the start. This can be done through the contract you agree on but also by delivering a comprehensive role description and onboarding plan.

Something that can really disrupt working with a contract employee is unaligned expectations when it comes to things like core hours, communication platforms and deadlines. By making your expectations and non-negotiable working conditions clear from the start, you and the other employees involved will have a much more streamlined experience.

4. Keep Communication Clear

In line with that last point, clear communication is another thing that is essential to a streamline contractor working relationship. From the moment you reach out to a contractor to offer a position, you should maintain prompt and clear communication with an expectation to receive the same back.

Communication is integral to a successful contractor relationship, and this is especially important if you’re hiring someone who is going to be working remotely. You should make your expectations for communication clear from the beginning for the contractor, but also establish how you’re going to communicate with them and then follow through on these promises to set a positive precedent.

5. Integrate Contractors in the Team

One of the best ways to keep your contract employees happy and working efficiently is to do what you can to integrate them into the team. Having an ‘us and them’ culture between permanent and contracted workers isn’t going to be good for team morale, and may also mean that your contractors share negative reviews of working with your company and won’t want to come back to work for you in the future.

If your contractor is working remotely then this team integration can be more difficult, but there should still be an effort to invite them to team calls, involve them in social activities and onboard them in the same way you would an employee. Make sure that contract workers know the role that they play in your company and the value they provide, and ensure they’re given the same appropriate opportunity to join other team activities.

6. Manage Payment Efficiently

Our final piece of advice for ensuring that your contractor relationships are stress-free and streamlined is to ensure that payments are managed effectively. There’s nothing like a delayed paycheck to quickly turn a relationship sour and leave you with a lot of work to try and rectify the situation, which is definitely best avoided.

You should also make sure to complete the relevant checks using a contractor hourly margin calculator to ensure that you understand where your contractor falls in regard to this legislation and who needs to pay the appropriate tax. The last thing you want is to deal with the fallout of incorrectly classifying whether your contractor is taxed like a permanent employee, so make sure that this is ironed out at the start of their contract and doesn’t affect the payment process. 

Summary

As a HR professional, contract employees can bring your employer plenty of business benefits, but also potentially some logistical challenges. By following the advice that we’ve shared in this article, your experience of hiring and working with contractors should be as smooth and painless as possible.