6 Tips for Managing a Remote Freelance Writing Team

Freelance writers are a godsend for many businesses looking to ramp up their content marketing efforts. But managing a team of writers remotely is no easy feat. You need to make sure your writers live up to their obligations and deliver work that lives up to your vision, while also avoiding scammers and time wasters. Unsurprisingly, these challenges only get bigger as your writing team grows.

Fortunately, my time as an executive to more than 350 freelancers at WordAgents has taught me a thing or two about effectively managing a remote team of writers. Here are the main lessons I learned:

1. Take advantage of technology

Using remote work tools and online platforms is a no-brainer when it comes to coordinating a geographically dispersed team of writers. Of course, given the plethora of options available, it can be challenging to put together an easy-to-use tech stack that maximizes productivity.

In my experience, the following tools work well for efficiently managing our writing team’s workflow and maintaining consistent, high-quality output:

• MarketMuse for content briefing

• Proofreading Grammar

• Copyscape for eradicating plagiarism

• ClickUp for project management

• Google Workspace for Document Organization

• Slack for direct or asynchronous communication

• Zoom for live meetings

• Loom for video messages and presentations

• Payment Management Trolley

• BambooHR for managing team data

Related: 5 tips for managing a virtual team

2. Install standard operating procedures

A common hurdle to hiring freelance writers is to educate them about how your business works and make it clear what you expect from them. The best way to quickly acclimate new writers to your business is to develop a well-defined onboarding program that displays your standard procedures in simple black and white.

To accomplish this, I recommend that you create a “writer operations playbook” to hand out to all new freelancers. This starter pack should contain everything your writers need to know about working with your team, including the standards you expect from their work, your billing/payment process, and instructions on how to access tools or training that can help you write.

It’s also worth setting up an online hub where writers can easily access information such as their performance stats, customer feedback (if any), and payment history.

3. Refine your hiring funnel

Creating an optimized recruitment funnel is essential to reduce the risk of hiring unsuitable candidates. The sooner you can filter out poor quality writers, the fewer headaches you’ll have along the way.

The trick is to discourage bad candidates from ever applying. To reduce our pool of applicants at WordAgents, we ask all candidates to write a short test paper, complete a short online course and attend a video call before deciding whether to hire them. (I should note that within our team we only share test assignments completed by our candidates. We never deliver candidate work to clients.)

If an applicant is successful, we place them on a short trial period during which we will verify that they can deliver the work we have done for them. Sometimes new writers will overestimate how much work they can take on and forget that “writer fatigue” exists. That’s why we try to limit the workload of new writers to a maximum of 2500 words per week.

Related: How to hire top-notch freelance writers for your content business

4. Insist on responsibility

When you remotely manage a writing team on a large scale, sliding standards can cause major problems as you spend more and more time tracking down writers who deviate from the rules. So it is imperative to reinforce your standards clearly and often. After all, the less time you spend handling “special cases” and the fewer revision requests you receive, the better your ROI will be.

Be sure to establish a standardized feedback process where writers are regularly and fairly assessed on the quality and quantity of their work. You can also encourage writers to adhere to the standards by establishing an ongoing training program. Your best and worst performers should regularly participate in these coaching sessions to foster a culture of collaboration and mutual support within your team.

5. Focus on results versus activity

Micromanagement is an ineffective and impractical strategy when dealing with a large team of writers. Therefore, you should place much more emphasis on the quantity and quality of your writers’ outputs rather than the minute details of their day-to-day activities.

This means setting clear goals for your writers, but also trusting that their talent and education will lead them to deliver quality and punctual work.

Whether it’s writing SEO copy, an ebook or a landing page, different writers approach different assignments with their own unique plan. By letting them do the project in the way that suits them best, they gain a greater sense of ownership in their work.
Related: Micromanagement is murder: so stop killing your employees

6. Put a collective emphasis on over-communicating

My philosophy is that there is no such thing as over-communication when working in a remote work environment.

I have already mentioned the importance of regularly raising standards and communicating your standard operating procedures to your writing team. The same applies to informing your team about new developments within your company or organization.

You need to develop a communication strategy for your team to ensure that the right messages reach the right people at the right time without creating an overload of information† For example, your communication strategy should capture the frequency of team meetings and include standardized meeting templates to ensure they remain productive.

Related:

Today’s digital economy makes it easier than ever for organizations to meet their marketing KPIs through the help of freelance writers. But the benefits of outsourcing work to freelancers also introduce a new set of challenges for marketing managers.

I hope this post has reassured you that these challenges are perfectly surmountable. The key to managing a team of remote freelance writers at scale is developing well-communicated and repeatable systems that are easy to follow.