The Two Documents
One you signed and one you will never see, and almost every difficulty in these arrangements lives between them.
The service agreement with the provider
The employment contract with the person
Who the employer is in law
What you are buying with the fee
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. The distinction everything else in this collection rests on.
Two documents govern this arrangement: the service agreement you signed with the provider, and the employment contract the provider signed with the person. Almost every difficulty that arises lives in the space between them.
The practical lesson in “The Two Documents” is that a third-party arrangement still leaves day-to-day management with the operating team. Used for ethical employee monitoring, ethical employee monitoring for distributed operations can make time and project context easier to review, provided the purpose is disclosed, access is limited and every consequential inference receives human review.
Neither document mentions the other in any useful detail, and nobody is responsible for making them agree.
A broader benchmark for “The Two Documents” is the GitHub remote-work principles. Read it alongside the service agreement and employment facts so that general guidance informs, rather than replaces, case-specific judgement.
Document one, in outline
Your agreement. Scope of service, fees, term, notice, data terms, liability cap, indemnities, and a schedule naming each person covered.
Drafted by the provider, negotiated at the margins, signed by procurement, filed, and in most companies never opened again until something has already gone wrong.
Document two, in outline
Their contract. Job title, salary, hours, notice, leave, probation, confidentiality, and whatever the country insists on.
Issued by the provider under local law. You may be shown the template; you will rarely be shown the executed copy, and in several jurisdictions you are not entitled to it.
The gap, stated plainly
Your agreement says what the provider will do for you. Their contract says what the provider owes the person. Nothing says what you owe the person, because you owe them nothing contractually at all.
The gap is not an oversight. It is the shape of the product.
What falls into the gap
Notice that is one month in your agreement and three in theirs. Equipment your agreement is silent about. A bonus you wanted to pay that has no vehicle. A promise about remote working that exists in a job advert and nowhere else.
Each of those is an ordinary thing that becomes a negotiation:
- Notice that is one month in your agreement and three in theirs.
- Equipment your agreement does not mention at all.
- A bonus you want to pay, with no vehicle to pay it through.
- A promise about remote working made in a job advert.
Why the periods differ
Your notice to the provider is commercial: it ends a service. The person's notice is employment: it ends a job, and in many countries it cannot be shortened by agreement between you and the provider.
Where those two numbers differ, you pay for the overlap. Check them against each other before signing, not afterwards.
The schedule nobody maintains
Most agreements carry a schedule listing covered personnel, salaries and start dates. It is accurate on day one.
Eighteen months later it names two leavers, omits a joiner and shows three salaries that have moved. Fixing it is nobody's job, and it is the document an auditor will ask for.
Asking for the template
Reasonable, usual, and worth doing before the first hire rather than after the first problem. The template tells you the default notice, the probation rules, the confidentiality position and whether intellectual property is assigned.
A provider unwilling to show a template in advance has told you something useful about how the rest of the relationship will go.
Read it with the hiring manager rather than alone. The clauses that matter to them — probation length, notice, what a job title commits you to — are rarely the ones a lawyer flags.
Where your agreement should reach into theirs
A small number of points deserve to be specified in your agreement and reflected in the employment contract: assignment of intellectual property, confidentiality that covers your information, notice alignment, and any restriction you actually need.
Each has to be agreed with the person as well, because it is their contract. Asking for it at offer stage costs nothing; asking later costs a negotiation.
What cannot be pushed across
Anything local law gives the person that they cannot waive. Minimum notice, statutory leave, protections against dismissal, and in many countries a great deal more.
A clause in your agreement promising you something that local law gives the person is worth nothing, however firmly it is drafted.
Keeping both in one place
Hold the service agreement, the schedule, the contract template and the written confirmations of each change where the person managing the relationship can find them in a minute.
The common failure is the agreement in a procurement system, the schedule in somebody's mail and the changes nowhere at all.
The review that is worth an hour
Once a year: does the schedule match reality, have notice periods moved, has the fee structure changed, and is the indemnity still backed by the entity you think it is.
An hour, annually, against a document that governs people. Most buyers do not do it, and the ones who have been through a bad ending do it from then on.
What reading both will not tell you
How the provider behaves when something is genuinely contested. Two well-drafted documents are compatible with a supplier who answers in a day and one who answers in three weeks, and the drafting gives you no way of telling which you have.
That is learned by using them, which is the argument for a small first engagement rather than a large one. The documents establish what can be demanded; they say nothing about what will be offered without demanding.