Whether the Work Is Any Good
Judging the work is yours and always was, and nothing in the service agreement does any of it for you.
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.
Judging whether the work is any good is yours and always was. Nothing in the service agreement does any part of it, and the provider has never seen a line of what this person produces.
The practical lesson in “Whether the Work Is Any Good” is that a third-party arrangement still leaves day-to-day management with the operating team. Used for how to handle multiple clients, see the relevant Monitask landing page can make time and project context easier to review, provided the purpose is disclosed, access is limited and every consequential inference receives human review.
That is obvious stated plainly and is forgotten constantly in practice.
Teams reviewing “Whether the Work Is Any Good” can cross-check their approach against the OAIC organisational privacy guidance. The comparison should produce written questions for the provider, adviser or internal owner instead of a copied checklist.
Why it gets dropped
Managers who have been told this person is not their employee conclude that evaluation now happens somewhere else. It does not happen anywhere.
The provider confirms that somebody is employed and paid. Whether they are any use is a question only you can answer and only you will.
What you can say without reservation
That a piece of work met the standard or did not. What was wrong with it. What you expect instead. That the last quarter was strong.
All of it is feedback on work, requires no process and involves no third party.
Give it in the same way and on the same frequency as you would to anybody else. A person who notices they receive less feedback than their colleagues draws the obvious conclusion about how they are seen.
Where the line is
Feedback is yours. Procedure is not. A conversation about quality is management; a conversation framed as a stage, a warning or a formal concern is an employer's act.
Say the substance and avoid the vocabulary:
This piece was not good enough. Here is what was wrong with it, here is what I expect instead, and I want to see that by the end of the month. This is me telling you it has to change, not the start of something formal.
The substance is what changes anything.
Keeping a record for yourself
Notes on what was delivered, what was said and when. For your own use, proportionate, and the same as you would keep for anybody.
Where a situation eventually has to be raised with the provider, a record of specific work on specific dates is the difference between a case and an impression.
Reviews
Your own review cycle is for employees and this person is not in it. Running something equivalent for them is entirely available to you and entirely optional, which means it usually does not happen.
Do it anyway. A person outside the formal cycle receives no structured feedback at all unless somebody decides to provide it.
Rating and ranking
Most companies' rating frameworks are tied to the HR system and to pay decisions that work differently here. Forcing this person into the framework is usually clumsy.
What transfers is the conversation rather than the form. Have the conversation on the same cadence as everybody else and skip the apparatus.
When the work is consistently poor
Say so early, specifically, with examples and expectations, as you would with anybody. Most situations resolve at this stage and never become anything else.
What is not available is the escalation ladder. The next step, if there is one, involves the provider and has its own note.
Telling the provider
Only when something has to be done that is theirs: a formal process, a probation decision, a termination. Routine performance information does not need to travel to them and should not.
A provider receiving a stream of complaints about a person they cannot observe is being asked to act on hearsay, which helps nobody.
When the problem is the arrangement
Sometimes the work is poor because the brief is poor, the context is missing, the time zone is impossible or nobody has spoken to the person in a month.
That is worth ruling out first here more than anywhere else, because every structural factor in this arrangement pushes toward exactly those failures.
Ask the person what would make the work easier before concluding anything about them. The answer is frequently something cheap that nobody had thought to provide.
Probation as the real decision point
The one moment where ending things is relatively straightforward, and it arrives on a date nobody in your company is watching.
Ask the provider to notify you a fortnight before. Then actually decide, rather than letting it pass because nothing has been formally raised.
Good work, and saying so
The other half, and the one more often neglected. This person misses your award schemes, your promotion cycle and most of your internal recognition.
What they get is what you say. That makes saying it worth more here than it is for your own staff, and it costs the same nothing.
What evaluation cannot do here
Produce consequences by itself. A judgement that somebody is excellent does not reach their pay without six weeks and two other parties, and a judgement that somebody is failing does not reach a process you can run.
Evaluation stays entirely yours and its consequences do not, which is the pattern this whole collection keeps describing. The practical response is to start acting on the judgement earlier than you would internally, because everything that follows from it takes longer.