When a Contractor's Fit Changes: Seeking a Better Role, Building a Stronger Team
Experienced Contractors Carry Every Project
Independent contractors are the driving force of Dudley Land Company. They're the most important resource we have, and we can't serve a single client without them.
That's especially true of our most experienced contractors, who are also among the hardest people to replace. Strong abstracters are particularly difficult to find right now, and when an experienced professional leaves the industry, years of knowledge leave with them. For us, developing and re-placing the people already on our teams matters just as much as recruiting new ones.
Over a long career, though, the role that suits a contractor best can change, often for reasons that have nothing to do with their skill:
- A change at home, like a new baby or an aging parent, can call for a new balance.
- A new project can bring a new team and a role that draws on different strengths.
- The work itself can shift, the way it did when courthouse records moved online.
When that happens, we start by looking for a role that better fits the contractor's life and strengths. If we can find one, we hold on to an experienced professional, and our clients end up with a stronger team.
Noticing When a Fit Changes
When a contractor's fit changes, we usually see it in two places: in their work product and in the feedback we hear from their managers.
Often, it shows up in the handoff between projects. A contractor who did excellent work on the last project joins a new team and starts to struggle, and when we dig into what changed, we usually find that their previous role suited their skills better than the new one.
Our leadership in the field is often the first to notice.
Crew chiefs on our larger projects work with contractors every day, so they tend to see the patterns sooner and let us know when something seems off. That early word matters, since independent contractors are used to powering through a problem on their own. When we hear that something has changed, we pick up the phone.
Twice a year, we also step back and evaluate every contractor. The evaluations help us see who's progressing, who wants to move up, who could step into leadership, and how each project team is doing as a whole.
A Review Role for a New Parent
Here's how that approach played out for one of our strongest abstracters. After they had a baby, balancing title work with a newborn became difficult, and they were someone we didn't want to lose, whether to another firm or to the industry altogether.
We moved them into a review role on a leasing project, where many requests only need to be turned around by the next day. They generate new documents, solve problems for lease buyers, and handle administrative work, and they can do it when it fits their new schedule.
The move gave them the flexibility they needed, and it gave us flexibility too.
We kept a strong abstracter we didn't want to lose.
The leasing team gained an administrator with real depth in title.
The Detail That Made a Top Reviewer
Another contractor was running title in a very difficult county in West Virginia. The work they turned in was good, but it took longer than the team needed.
When we looked closer, we realized it was their attention to detail that was slowing them down. They were digging deeper into the title than the role called for, chasing down every question on their own.
That same depth turned out to be exactly what review work needs. Once we moved them into review, their field experience helped them understand the work and catch details many other people would miss. They grew into the top reviewer on their team and became just what their crew chief needed.
A More Productive, Stable Team
For our clients, putting contractors in the right roles adds up to a better team overall. When we move someone into a role that fits, we see their productivity go up, and they tend to stay on the project longer.
Independent contractors are free to move on whenever a role stops working for them. We could lose someone who's been great for us when a little effort would have shown they'd do better in a different role.
Turnover carries a cost. Every new person brought onto a project adds to it, while the longer a team works together, the easier the work gets, because everyone knows how everyone else works.
The longer a contractor works with us, the more productive we are for our clients.
Looking for Another Role Before Letting Go
When a contractor's role doesn't work out on one project, we step back and reevaluate. The answer might be on another manager's project, and finding it takes a conversation, sometimes several. What we're looking for is a role that helps everyone: the contractor, our client, and Dudley. Sometimes that's a role that works for now while we keep looking for the right one.
Projects move fast, and under that pressure it's easy to focus only on what's right in front of us. That's why we keep coming back to one question:
Where can we put this person so that it benefits all of us?
Contractors who see us working to make it fit are more likely to stay, and that's our core value of people at work: we treat others as we expect to be treated.
When an experienced contractor's fit changes, we work to find them a role that suits them better. When the move works, the contractor stays, their work gets stronger, and our clients end up with a more productive, more stable team.
If you're looking for a land partner who works to keep experienced people in the roles where they do their best work, let's talk.
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