I have been working with an outsourced team for many years now and have found over the last 18 months that the most effective way to hire team members is full time. I have used contractors,  paid people casually, part time – all the different types that I talked about in my eBook – ‘Outsource Made Simple’. By far the most effective, and the most beneficial for me is to hire team members in a full time capacity.

I like the commitment. Having team members that are 100% focused on my business and their job, makes managing them and my projects really easy. Knowing that I can call upon them anytime, and for those 40 hours per week, I control what they do with their time.

Over the past couple of years I have experimented with using freelancers in a contract type setup. It works well for my business type where I can contract one part of the process or one project in its entirety, and have someone else complete it for me without the commitment of full time.

Out of all the projects I do, these end up being the ones that cause me the most hassle. The reason is because this person does not have a commitment to my business, nor to my project. They have a 100% commitment to their own business and projects. It means meeting my deadline is not the most important factor for them. It also means that once they have been paid for their contribution, if I need them to rework or amend something that was not done correctly, I find the priority for them to complete this is very, very low. I can understand why.

When I was operating as a freelancer just like this, the most important thing for me was getting enough paid work completed that week to produce my income. If I was continually working on past projects and helping clients out, then I was not getting income that week because I’d already been paid for it.

That is why in my current setup, apart from the odd occasion, I employ all my team members in a full time capacity, even though their job description was not a full time workload.

One team member worked for me a matter of hours a day and yet was paid full time. What I paid her for was her availability. I wanted her particular skill set to be available to me at short notice whenever I needed it. This setup worked very well for my business and really increased my productivity. Although her daily work schedule by default was only around 2 hours, it meant that I had 6 hours during her day at my disposal that I could assign work to her and have it done instantly if it was urgent.

For me that was the difference between having an on-demand worker as opposed to having to get in line and be done at the next available date by a contractor.

One of the key behaviors I look for in team members, and the culture that we build around our team is ownership.  This is primarily the reason why I prefer full time workers over freelancers. I want my team to have a sense of ownership over the business and therefore over the individual tasks of the projects they work on. I actually find it really exciting when my team work on a project and use their initiative and do things above and beyond what I’ve ask them to do because it demonstrates ownership. I find this to be a very rare trait in freelancers.

That is why my recommendation, and my personal preference is always going to be employing team members full time. Even if I don’t have a job description that warrants a full time team member, it still works out better for me to have that person available whenever I need them. It doesn’t take me long to find enough tasks and things that I can take from my day to include as part of their job description to fill out those 40 hours per week.