How to Collaborate with Clients Remotely

Ah, remote working.

We get to skip the commute (unless it’s to a favourite coffee shop), we can wear what we want (did I hear anyone say bunny slippers?), and best of all we don’t have anybody peering over our shoulders to offer oh-so-helpful ’advice’ on our designs, code, or content.

I’m a big advocate of working away from an office environment. Whether you work from home or travel the world digital nomad style, it increases both productivity and quality of life. And after all, a happy freelancer is a good freelancer, right?

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However, working remotely does have its challenges. If it’s not done right we risk alienating our clients from the process and giving them a crappy experience.

So here are six things I’ve learned along the years that will help freelancers work remotely and keep their clients happy.

1. Get Your Timezones Straight

The absolute first thing you need to do when you get a new client is to memorise their timezone.

It sounds obvious but you’d be amazed how easy it is to forget when you’re juggling a few clients at once.

I recommend you use some form of visual display to keep track of this, whether it’s the standard clock widgets on your Mac or PC or a dedicated app.

Here are a couple of good ones for Mac:

World Clock

The Clock

And for PC:

Oh Clock

World Clock - Time Zones

Knowing the time in your client’s city is so important to giving them a good experience. Not only so you can set expectations as to when they are likely to hear from you, but so you can wish them a good morning or a nice evening at the appropriate times.

When I do this, clients love it — they always comment on how thoughtful it is, even though it takes minimal effort on my part.

2. Show Them Your Face

Another key to giving remote clients a good experience is to show them your face as early on as possible.

This is because one of the biggest issues of remote working is trust (or lack of). Something as simple as your client being able to see your face and your reactions goes a long way to making them feel like they’re working with a real person.

I’ve also found that my close rates on projects are much higher when we’ve had a face to face discussion, rather than just a phone conversation, before the proposal gets sent.

So get yourself on Skype as early and as often as possible and show clients that remote working doesn’t mean you have to lose out on a quality relationship.

3. Keep Everything Organized and Accessible

When working with clients remotely, it’s important that they can access files at any point in time.

Even if you’re not working across different timezones, it’s likely that sometimes the client may want to do something outside of your business hours. Maybe they have a full time job and this is a side project so they work evenings and weekends.

You don’t want to be getting emails asking for the logo (for the umpteenth time) when you’re trying to have dinner with your family.

So make use of cloud-based storage systems, whether that’s Dropbox, Google Drive, Droplr or whatever and add them to their own folder where they can find everything related to their project.

Now depending on the type of freelance work you do, this may look different for your projects but here is an example of my folder structure for most of my website design work.

Try to create these folders right at the start of a project to make sure everything stays organised throughout (it also has the benefit of helping you keep on track with your deliverables).

And don’t forget to include all the admin bits like the proposal, contract and any invoices.

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by Laura Elizabeth via SitePoint