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On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 1:07 PM, Bonnie Granat <bgranat -at- granatedit -dot- com> wrote:
> If I were you, I would:
>
> - Renegotiate employment with the company from scratch.
That's certainly one way to go. Other people have made other suggestions,
some of them distinctly sensible, I think especially Bill's ideas on how to
start managing the problems.
Another approach would be to tell the contractor you simply will not pay
him to format documents; that can be done for far less than his rates.
If he wants work writing, and doing the research that entails, fine. You
have work like that which needs doing and are quite willing to let him
take a crack at that. Performance will be judged solely on content
(not formatting) quality and meeting deadlines.
The gentle way to do this would be to start a conversation about what
the customer needs -- clear instructions that actually work, i.e. that
have been tested at least by the writer, and preferably by others --
and from there to value to the company. Lead that into the topics
above.
I might be less subtle. Create a set of the simplest templates that
will get the job done, get them approved, then give him those and
make it very clear that he will not be paid either for docs delivered
using any other template or for any formatting work beyond the
few minutes a page it takes to apply styles given a good template.
I'm not saying this is the best approach, just one more possibility
to consider.
--
Sandy Harris,
Nanjing, China
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