Did In-house Digital Teams Kill the Freelance Stars?

Companies started to rely more on in-house web teams at the expenses of freelancers and agencies. Does this mean the end of the freelancer/agency model? I don’t think so.

Unless you’re living in the outer space, you may have noticed a change across the web industry: companies started managing digital projects using in-house teams, built with internal recruiting, instead of hiring agencies or freelancers. Moreover, recruiters started massive head-hunting campaigns targeting freelancers in the hope of bringing them “into the Matrix” of their clients’ internal web divisions.

I’ll talk about the questionable aspects of these recruitment practices on another article, maybe. The fact is freelancers and agencies are losing ground, Sarah Parmenter described what can be seen as the fade of freelance culture into in-house design. In the meantime, Jeffrey Zeldman suggested that companies need departments focused on the Web.

Is that good or bad for us? And what shall we do?

The only constant in this industry is change. And I must admit that I agree with Zeldman on internal web-focused departments. In my opinion, this can be a benefit for freelancers and agencies too, if we embrace the change.

The web is so important that companies cannot afford to outsource it fully anymore. A digital culture must start, grow and be nurtured inside the company. Also, the web division must be a real web division, made by people with the right skillset and with the contribution of the IT and marketing people. Paul Boag hits the point on this in his book Digital Adaptation, and Andy Budd suggests a series 7 of steps for companies who want to attract talents for their digital divisions.

Does that mean the end of web agencies and freelancers model? Absolutely not. It’s just that we need to change and adapt our offer. One of the benefits for us freelancers, for example, is being able to talk to web-savvy people on the client’s side, with no need to re-explain the basics every time. This leads to better collaboration. Another thing to consider is that an in-house web division must focus on the company’s business goals. Ok the growth culture, ok the innovation labs, and so on, but they can’t explore or master it all, and here is where freelancers and agencies can fill the gaps by working as “knowledge integrators”.

Use the Force

What’s our strength? Having worked in different projects and situations, we can offer a wide array of competences that in-house divisions do not always have. Internal web teams are often put together with people that do not come from the web at all, so what best occasion for an “in-house team startup training program”? Do a great work, and you will see benefits for both sides. You could end up being the go-to guy when “Hey, have you already played with [insert bleeding edge stuff here]? Do you think it can be useful for us? Do you have time for a little crash course/to develop this feature for us?”.

Here are some situations in which I’ve successfully worked with internal web/digital teams:

1. I worked for a company that had performance problems on the database side. The project used a custom library to access the database, and that library did not optimise queries. I introduced them to the fantastic world of ORMs and MVC programming. The project’s performance and quality had a huge boost, and they knew which skills to search for in the next recruitment tour.
2. Since I do both frontend and backend stuff, I worked for another company as a “liason” between the design/frontend team and the backend guys, introducing small but significant improvements in communication between those teams.
3. Another company I worked with had an internal team skilled in content planning and basic WordPress maintenance, but they did not have the skills to build a site from the ground up. So I helped them design and build the site. They can now deal with day-to-day maintenance, while I intervene on a spot basis for new feature development.

As you can see, this is not the end, but the beginning of a new phase, and we as freelancers should be excited to play with new shiny things, shouldn’t we?