How to Efficiently Monitor Freelancers’ Work Remotely

2022-11-15

A digital marketing company from the USA often hires freelance designers and web developers for project work. Most freelancers get paid on an hourly basis. Unfortunately, company managers often face situations when freelancers try to cheat them by inflating the time they have spent on the project and, consequently, the price for their work. The company tried to implement simple time-tracking solutions, but they did not give the whole picture of the freelancer's activity during the worktime and were easy to cheat.

When the company received an important order from their longstanding customer to redesign their website, the managers began looking for a way to monitor freelancers closer. They needed a reliable tool to ensure that the freelancers were dedicated to working and did not try to add a few extra hours to the total time spent on the project.

The marketing company chose Spyrix Employee Monitoring as it had all the features for all-encompassing monitoring of the work activity and allowed the freelancers to control when they were monitored and when they were not. The latter was critical since the freelancer were using their personal computers, and the company did not want to infringe on their privacy.

Previously, the managers had to ask how many hours the freelancer spent working and manually put the data in an Excel sheet. With Spyrix, they received those reports to their online dashboard automatically. It saved them a lot of time and eliminated the possibility of cheating. At first, freelancers tried to fool the software. They left monitoring functioning for a couple of hours and went away thinking the program would count that time as work time. However, Spyrix had such cases covered: the program marked periods of no activity as idle ones, so the managers could exclude them from the payroll.

Activity reports provided additional insights into the freelancer's work. For example, the Spyrix social media monitoring logs stated that one of the freelancers spent approximately an hour a day browsing Twitter during his work on the project. When social media time was also excluded from his payroll, he and other freelancers started treating their work time more seriously. The manager could always ensure that the freelancer was indeed working by viewing their screen via the Live Viewing feature.

Using Spyrix Employee Monitoring allowed more accountability and encouraged more engagement with the freelancers. The project was completed a week earlier than expected. The company continued using Spyrix to monitor freelance workers in their future projects.