Direction, Which Was Always Yours
Deciding what the person works on never left you, and it is the one thing you can still simply do.
Direction of the work
Whether the work is any good
Equipment and systems
Whatever the agreement did not list
YoursThe provider'sCrosses the twoNeither contract
Four matters, and no share: what any one agreement covers differs by agreement. One crosses both, and the handoff is where these arrangements fail. Everything the fee did not buy stayed where it was.
What one buyer found it could still simply do, once it stopped checking everything
YouThe providerNeither contractDeciding what the person works on and in what order
Never left, never needed anybody's agreement, and the thing managers most often asked permission for
Setting the standard the work has to meet
Yours entirely, and nobody else in the triangle has seen the work
Telling them the work is not good enough, with examples
Feedback is direction; it is the process that follows that is not
Running a formal performance procedure
An employer's act, with local rules, and a half-started one is worse than none
Changing the job so substantially that the contract no longer describes it
A management decision that needs a document somebody else issues
Across the handoff: A revised job description, an amendment from the provider, and the person's agreement
Whether the person wants to keep doing it
Owned by no document and by nobody, and the reason most of these arrangements end
YoursThe provider'sCrosses the twoNeither contract
Six matters drawn · no share
Six things, and the three that are yours outright are the three managers hesitate over. One buyer's own practice, written down after a year of asking the provider questions it did not need to ask.
Deciding what this person works on never left you. Direction, priorities, standards and feedback are yours entirely, need nobody's agreement, and take effect the moment you say them.
The management gap in “Direction, Which Was Always Yours” becomes harder when distributed work is visible only through anecdotes. A team considering employee monitoring software for employee monitoring software can add transparent time and project context, but performance conclusions should still combine agreed outcomes, direct conversation and a documented opportunity to correct the record.
Managers in these arrangements routinely ask permission for all four, which is the opposite of the problem everybody warns about.
For a separate perspective on “Direction, Which Was Always Yours”, consult the ILO guide for employers managing remote work. Compare it with the actual contract, country and operating process rather than using a general resource as a local conclusion.
What direction actually covers
What to work on. In what order. To what standard. With whom. By when. What matters this quarter and what does not.
All of it is the ordinary content of managing work:
- What to work on, and in what order.
- To what standard, and with whom.
- By when.
- What matters this quarter, and what does not.
None of it touches the employment relationship.
Nothing in the service agreement restricts any of it, because the agreement is about employment administration. The absence is not an oversight; direction was never part of what was sold.
Why managers hesitate
Because they were told, correctly, that this person is not their employee, and they generalised from that to everything.
The generalisation is understandable and expensive. A person receiving no direction because their manager is being careful is worse off than one receiving too much.
The line, stated once
Direction is about the work. Employment is about the terms. You own the first completely and have no part in the second.
Anything you would say to a supplier about an outcome, and anything you would say to a colleague about how a piece of work is going, is available to you.
Feedback is not a process
Telling somebody their work was not good enough, with examples and with what you expect instead, is management. It requires no document and no third party.
What is unavailable is the procedural apparatus: warnings, improvement plans, stages, anything that is a step toward dismissal. Those belong to an employer.
Standards and how they are set
Yours to set and yours to communicate. The person agreed to do a job for a client who defines what good looks like.
Write them down where they are not obvious. The absence of a shared handbook here makes explicitness worth more than it would be internally.
Recognition
Entirely yours and entirely unconstrained. Saying the work was excellent costs nothing and goes through nobody.
It also matters more here than for your own staff, because almost every other form of recognition in your company — the review cycle, the promotion, the award — passes this person by.
Context
The reason the work matters, what the company is doing, what changed this quarter. Available to you, invisible to the provider, and the thing most often withheld by accident.
Somebody employed elsewhere frequently receives less context than everybody else simply because they are not on the distribution list.
Check the lists rather than assuming. The exclusion is almost never deliberate and is almost always traceable to a system that was populated from the HR record.
Setting priorities against their other constraints
They have working hours, statutory leave and in some countries protections about availability that you do not.
Direction operates inside those. Knowing what they are means you plan around them rather than discovering them as refusals.
Where direction turns into something else
A change so large the contract no longer describes the job, a change to hours or place, or a pattern of instruction so total that the arrangement starts to look like direct employment.
The first two have their own note. The third is the misclassification question, and it is a question about behaviour rather than documents.
How much is too much
The useful test is whether you are directing the work or administering the person. Telling somebody what to build is the first. Approving their timesheet, controlling their hours and rostering them is closer to the second.
Most buyers never approach the line. The ones who do usually got there by importing an internal process without thinking.
Delegating direction
Perfectly fine. A team lead who is not the contract owner can direct the work, provided they know what is not theirs.
That is the briefing covered elsewhere in this section, and it is the single control that makes delegation safe.
Keep one person as the route for anything that has to cross, and let everybody else manage the work normally. Splitting it that way is what allows the arrangement to feel ordinary from day to day.
What direction cannot reach
Whether the person wants to keep doing this. You can set the work, judge it, praise it and improve it, and none of that answers whether they can see a reason to stay.
That question sits in neither contract, is owned by nobody by default, and is the one this whole collection keeps returning to. Direction is the part of managing that survived the structure intact; the rest of managing somebody is the part you now have to construct on purpose.