Many companies use contractors frequently to support their business. These virtual or “temporary” employees serve significant roles that a company doesn’t have or doesn’t wish to retain on an ongoing, fully employed basis. They perform important tasks such as:
- Sales augmentation
- Marketing
- Public relations
- Web development
- Human resources
These are core skill sets for a company’s ongoing success. Ironically, these people are often poorly connected into their clients and rely on email to perform their work. They struggle to communicate and collaborate effectively with the company, whether it is in their best interest or not. When their contract ends, they walk away with the majority of the experience and learning they gained. This isn’t something they intend to do – it is simply the way it works in most situations.
There is a far better way to work with contractors to not only retain their valuable knowledge but also make them more effective while working for you. Using GroupSwim, you can make them a part of your company without the overhead or trouble:
- Collect documentation and processes to ramp new contractors up quickly
- Create groups for different firms or contractors and work with interactively
- Use web documents (wiki pages) to track versions and work collaboratively with them
- Discuss issues and questions using a private forum
- Document issues, track milestones, and measure results
- Amass emails from prior engagements and add new information as it is created
- Manage important files and documents to find them in the future
GroupSwim offers the features and flexibility to maximize your investment in contractors. Using email as most companies do is wasting money letting valuable information walk out the door.
Tags: collaboration, GroupSwim, Contractors
