LXD Spotlight: Kristin Pinyan on How We Work at Scale

The LXD team uses contractors as a way to expand or contract as needed in order to respond to client needs. My role as a project lead is to support our contractors and provide them with detailed guidance. At the beginning of a project, I provide them with project guidelines outlining the client's expectations and requirements and make sure they know how to access that information. Throughout the project, I ensure our contractors stay up-to-date on any changes in process or requirements. At the end, I perform the final quality checks to make sure all their work is consistent, both with what other project contributors are doing and with the client's standards for that project.

It's a combination of guidance and mentorship throughout—and then at the end coming in and smoothing any inconsistencies to create a uniform product that meets the client's standards.

We apply the same quality standards to every instructional designer on our team, whether they are full-time or a contractor. When an instructional designer is assigned to a client, that client should feel confident that they are going to have high-quality support no matter what the ID's employment status is. We know our contractors are some of the best in the business—many members of our full-time team started out in the contractor pool, myself included!

That's why the project lead role is so important. Part of it is training and providing strong documentation, making sure the IDs know where to find it, and making sure that documentation is continually up-to-date. Another big part of it is review and quality control. I meet with IDs regularly as they develop courses to ensure that everything they are doing meets our standards. I also review the work before each deliverable is finalized and approved.

Our rigorous review process ends up creating a consistent product in the end, but there has to be a balance of training and review. Project leads are always the last eyes to look at something, but we have to make sure contractors are sufficiently trained so that major issues are not coming up at such a late point in the development process.

Before I became full-time at SRM, I worked as a contractor for several companies, so I have a lot of understanding and empathy for what contractors have to go through. At more than one of those companies, I felt unsupported and adrift—there was very little guidance, and expectations were often unclear. It was extremely frustrating.

But my experience as an SRM contractor was different. I was drawn to the company because everyone treated me like a human and a colleague rather than a cog in a faceless machine. As a project lead, I do my best to maintain that same sort of culture for the contractors that I manage, providing detailed, organized trainings and guidance and just being available when they have questions or need support. We are a team, working together toward the same goal, and I want them to feel like the valued team members they are.

Having engaged, happy contractors really helps us make sure that we are producing a consistent, strong product. When we have the same contractors working on a project for months—or even years—they become repositories of project knowledge as much as our full-time team. This strengthens our projects in the long run.

For example, when we work with higher ed clients on multiple rounds of course builds and are able to use the same pool of contractors for each round, we have IDs who already understand the client institution and its needs. They have already formed relationships with faculty members and understand their teaching styles. They even know the contents of other courses in the program and can advise faculty on how their colleagues have approached specific challenges. If we didn't retain those folks and had to hire new contractors each round, we'd lose some of that valuable knowledge.

It also makes my job as a project lead much easier. I notice that when our contractors have fully absorbed project guidelines and they just innately know what they have to do, there is less of a burden on me as the project lead to come in at the end and create consistency—the consistency is already there. In this way, creating a strong environment for contractors leads to better results for our clients. That alignment between how we treat our contractors and what our clients experience isn't incidental. It's by design.

I've explored a variety of different ways of doing this. For small changes, I often just send a quick email update. When there have been larger changes to our processes, I've put together presentations at the beginning of a new cycle of development outlining the changes since last time. Sometimes these are done as videos, and sometimes they're live trainings.

We do have to strike a balance between providing adequate training for our contractors and ensuring that everyone is up to speed on the project while also respecting their time because they are not at our beck and call full-time.

One of my projects just passed the midpoint of a four-year contract. Before the last round of development, we retrained all our IDs. I normally have a training session for new contractors coming onto the project, but this time we asked all our IDs to come just as a refresher. It had been so long since the project began and some of our processes had evolved so much that we thought it would be useful for even our most experienced contractors to hear the whole presentation.

This is absolutely something I've encountered as well. I've tried to manage it by setting up our project guidelines to have brief overviews of the process paired with places where they can dig deeper. To cover all the bases, I provide documentation that has a lot of links to different areas so you can look at the high-level overview, the more in-depth process, and then the nitty-gritty details as needed.

It is a big challenge, but I see it as one of my jobs to direct people to the right information so they're always looking at the most up-to-date project guidelines.

At first I thought our contractor pool would consist of people who were new to instructional design and were trying to work their way into the field. That was my own experience: I came to instructional design from a faculty role in higher education and was advised to work as a contractor to get my foot in the door.

But every time I do a new round of hiring, I'm surprised by the quality of candidates out there who are looking for this kind of work. A lot of people applying for contract roles are extremely experienced and knowledgeable. They are sometimes people who already have full-time jobs in the field and are looking for some extra income on the side, or people later in their careers who are contracting instead of working full-time.

My biggest initiative for this year is going to be trying to help improve the onboarding process. Currently it's a little inconsistent across teams. Most of our contractors who stick around have a positive experience with us, but sometimes the very beginning of onboarding can be a bit rocky, so we want to smooth that out.

We've had feedback from a number of our contractors that the organization we provide really helps and that they find working at SRM a more positive experience than working elsewhere. Actually tracking retention is tricky because it's dependent on so many factors, but the fact that many of our core contractors come back cycle after cycle says a lot. Their assignments aren't always easy. The fact that people are sticking around surprises me sometimes—but also shows that we're doing something right!