Full-Time Freelancing

Not long ago, I was talking to a friend about keeping people motivated at work. You may have read one of my previous posts referencing Dan Pink, his ideas about the ineffectiveness of incentives and the alterative of offering employees autonomy and purpose. My friend said something that stuck in my head; he suggested that, in the end, the only way he could be happy and have autonomy and purpose in his working life was to simply run his own company. Well that sounds lovely, but I think I have a better solution; it might just take some work to implement though.

The fact is that having everyone running their own company would be impossible if only for the fact that one person doesn’t constitute a company and, if everyone had their own company, there would be no employees. For the sake of discussion, let’s forget the company thing and discuss the idea of everyone simply working freelance. This is one way of doing business that can potentially work and can be seen operating with success in the film industry. The people working on any given film are generally working on freelance contracts and are hired on a film by film basis. This forces everyone to be at the top of their game because if they aren’t at the top of their game, they don’t get the next job. That can be a very highly motivating thought, if slightly stressful.

Another plus to working freelance is that as your reputation grows, so can your fees. A skilled and experienced freelancer can command huge fees because if people want the best, they have to pay for it. The film industry, again, is great example of this where the biggest names can pick their own fee and, with a bit of marketing and hype, even the less talented people can still command a high fee (see Keira Knightley).

There are plenty of problems with the idea of running your own business though, the biggest one for me being that you have to run your own business. I’ve been working freelance for the past two years or so now and one thing I can tell you is that I hate my job. Don’t get me wrong, I love providing the services that I offer. I love making videos, drawing, writing, animating, designing, and even doing voice-overs; but this makes up only part of what I do. A huge amount of my time is spent doing administrative work or research which pays absolutely nothing. I can spend all day at my desk answering emails, writing estimates, emailing and calling regular/potential clients, researching ways of improving my business, looking at the competition, and a million other things. During the quiet months I can spend dozens and dozens of hours doing this without seeing a penny of income. Obviously I do get something out of this and it pays off down the road, but when I think of the job I love, I don’t think of staring at budgeting spreadsheets or filling out my tax return.

The fact is that working for your self can be very stressful and uncertain. So if the only way to get great work out of people is for them to become self employed, but being self employed is a massive pain in the arse, what’s the answer? How about employers treating employees more like freelancers, whilst still paying them a salary?

I know that the client vendor relationship can vary greatly from job to job, but what I’m talking about here is the idea of recognising a person’s skills and experience, and simply letting them get on with their job. In a freelancing situation, a client will ideally trust in that contractor’s abilities, and simply allow them to get on with things. The client will give the freelancer a brief and a deadline. The freelancer then goes away and returns with the solution. Obviously the client gets final say in how the whole thing turns out, and is allowed to tweak the idea how they see fit, but ultimately the designer should be allowed to tackle the brief in whatever way meets the requirements and deadline. This doesn’t generally happen in companies.

What happens all too often, in a company, is that people are told what to do and how to do it. What tends to happen is that one person excels at their job (perhaps by showing initiative at the right time and impressing the right person) and that person is promoted to a middle management or supervisor role. It then becomes this person’s job to tell all the employees in their department how to work efficiently (or rather, how to work like them). There are two problems with this; first, the way in which one person operates is not necessarily the best way for another person to operate; and secondly, since this person no longer does the job their employees are doing, they don’t have the first-hand experience that helped them excel in the first place.

Imagine a person doing brilliant woodwork with a mallet and chisel. This person becomes so skilled and experienced that they are promoted to manage their department where they direct everyone how to do the job as well as them. To begin with, you may have some people who find it easier and more effective to carve the wood than chisel it, but because the new manager has forced them to use a mallet and chisel in an attempt to standardise the production process, these people can’t excel. They are forced to follow instructions to the letter because they lack the ability to improvise with these tools that are poorly suited to their way of working.

Now imagine that, in the above scenario, a new technology is invented, such as a router, which will allow the whole team to work much more effectively. This presents a manager with a problem. He isn’t an expert with the router. If the manager implements the new tool, it might increase productivity but it would make his knowledge and experience redundant. He wouldn’t be able to answer all the problems that might arise from using this particular tool. If the manager chooses not to implement the router, the company falls behind other companies that have implemented this newer more effective way of working.

The other problem with many middle management jobs is that once you’ve laid out the standard processes, you’re expected to have all the answers, and that just isn’t possible. Even the most experienced worker won’t have a solution to every problem, but if a manager turns to their employees and asks for ideas, the general response is “You’re the manager. You figure it out!” This kind of mentality tends to be brought about by the fact that a manager is paid more than the people ‘under’ them. Employees are reluctant to give good ideas to their managers for fear that the manager will present that idea as their own and get paid even more for someone else’s hard work. Many managers won’t pass on good ideas they receive because presenting someone else’s good idea to their bosses might raise questions about why they’re the manager and not the other person; or they may just erroneously consider the idea to not hold any merit.

So, by treating everyone as freelancers, they’re all acting as their own manager with the ability to develop their own most effective working process. Employees are given briefs and deadlines, but allowed to meet them however they like. The benefit of this for the employee is that there’s all the freedom of working for yourself, but none of the stress of running a business. The other benefit of this is abolition of the manager/employee relationship, and development of a peer group, creating an environment much more conducive to cooperation. If a person has a problem, they can work with their colleagues to find a solution.

This is just a kernel of an idea, and all sounds very good in writing, but I can’t claim to have successfully implemented this in business. One company that can make that claim would be Valve Software who, through what they refer to as a ‘cabal process’, have proven over time that there is no need for a lead designer or manager; and that working in teams of 10-15 people, with the aim of tackling briefs and solving problems together, is far more effective.

This feels like a very long rambling post and I know I haven’t gone particularly deep into the solution, but if you have found anything interesting (or irritating) and you’d like me to elaborate further, please feel free to email me. Perhaps I’ll be able to flesh this idea out in a future post.

If you’re interested in seeing how Valve’s cabal process works, you might want to check out this article on Gamasutra.