Five Ways to Make Sure You Get the Best Out of the Human Cloud

The cloud is a virtually infinite pool of excellent resources – but you need to know how to use it well. (If you don’t, it could be a minefield.) Here are five tips for you to get the best out of the human cloud.

1. Set a contract. While there are many differences in working with people in an office and working with them through the cloud, one thing that should always be present in either situation is a contract that both parties have agreed to. The contract should, at its simplest, specify the service provider’s specific tasks, deadline, and the compensation amount for the project. Not having a definite contract will put both of you in a guessing game of time and numbers.
      
2. Give detailed instructions. A finished project will not be of any use to you if it isn’t done the way you need it to be done. Do not assume that your service provider thinks the same way as you and has the same image of the final product as you have in your head. Give as many details as you can regarding the project so that you will get exactly what you need.
      
3. Answer e-mails promptly. Both you and your service provider will always have time constraints. To make sure that the project gets done properly and on time, always check your e-mail for questions or clarifications that your service provider might have. It is common e-mail etiquette to answer all emails within 24 hours.
      
4. Don’t send too many e-mails. It is perfectly fine that you check on your contracted work’s progress every once in a while. However, you don’t have to do so every day. To get assurance that the work is progressing as it should, it is better to ask your service provider to e-mail you updates daily or every other day. But it’s another thing if the e-mails come from you. Even in the human cloud, there is such a thing as micromanaging, and very few people work well with somebody hovering over their shoulders while they work, even if that somebody is half a world away.
      
5. Always leave feedback. After every project, don’t forget to leave feedback on your service provider, whether the feedback be positive or negative. Positive feedback helps a good service provider get more work – a fitting reward for doing a good job for you. On the other hand, negative feedback helps your fellow outsourcers avoid unprofessional and incompetent workers.

Why You Should Consider Hiring from the Human Cloud Rather than Putting People into Your Office

The traditional office consists of rooms, cubicles, and a certain number of people. While this is how office set-ups have been for decades, now is a good time to take a serious look at its alternative – hiring from the human cloud.

The human cloud is a major component most virtual offices. While many would rightly argue that nothing can be as good as face-to-face communication, the advantages of working with people in the cloud may still offset the relative difficulty of having to communicate online. Here are several advantages that you can get when you hire from the human cloud:

1. No need for physical space. Renting out an office space is an overhead cost that will surely eat into your monthly income as a company. But as your company grows, you will quite likely need more employees. Hiring from the human cloud eliminates the need for you to rent a bigger office and purchase new cubicles (and supply more free coffee). Your overhead costs remain practically the same, whether you have one or a hundred employees.

2. Results-based pay. Most employers who hire from the human cloud pay their employees according to the results that their employees put in. Unless you choose to pay employees by the hour, they only get paid once their task is finished and approved by you. This eliminates salary costs for employees that do little more than time in and time out and spend four hours of their office time on Facebook. And even if you do choose to pay employees by the hour, there are several tools that you can use to make sure that your employee is really working during the hours that they are paid for.

3. Time flexibility. You can have people working 24/7, in shifts, and none of them will have to take the graveyard shift! All you need to do is hire somebody from a different time zone. If you’ve got errands during the day, you can monitor your employees via email on your Blackberry or iPhone. You can delegate tasks before you go to sleep and find them done and ready for approval when you wake up in the morning!

Hiring from the human cloud gives you all these advantages and more: You don’t have to deal with noise from nearby cubicles, missing supplies, or even unpleasant odors, etc. All you need is your computer and you’re good to go.

The Human Cloud: An Increasingly Prominent Trend

(Originally posted on my Tech Wisdom blog last year)

The Human Cloud. The phrase conjures up many images—skydivers interlocking hands to form a net as they free fall, a cluster of women in an overly crowded bathroom coating the air with a fine film of hairspray, or the technological wonder of Cloud City as it drifts above a gassy planet in The Empire Strikes Back. While all of those things could pass as a human cloud in some way, the true definition tends to be a little more complicated and much more based in reality than any scene from a movie. Indeed, the very concept of the Human Cloud would have once been considered pure science fiction, a type of technology that might occur in some far off future. But the future has arrived, bringing a virtual technology workforce that is fast becoming a booming industry.

What is a Human Cloud?

So what exactly is this Human Cloud thingy everyone has been talking about? It’s a virtual world where people are hired via the internet to do all kinds of tasks. These tasks include everything from freelancing for a magazine to technology management for people based in the IT world. With our economy the way it has been the past few years and jobs being cut, employers are forced to find ways to curb their in-house staff but still have productivity. Gone are the days of the regular 9-5 job. As a technology workforce, people can work their own hours and do it from any number of locations. Social media like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkIn make it possible to communicate and check email from almost anywhere! Remember the common place sight of office chatter around the water cooler? Picture that water cooler as a portable laptop and your office space a coffee shop or an airplane. Now you’re getting the idea of what a human cloud is really all about.

Where do employers find their virtual workforce if they aren’t hired in the traditional way? Elance and websites similar to it act as a virtual middleman, bringing the employer and employee together in a human cloud scattered across the globe. On Elance, an employer lists what kind of project they have available. The potential worker can view it and decided whether or not it’s a good fit for their skills.  That means that in addition to hiring one individual for a project, it’s also possible to outsource projects to a team of people located as far away as Bangalore or Shanghai. Due to the long reach of the human cloud, you may never meet this technology workforce team face to face but you can still expect and receive effective results.

Yash Talreja