Supplemental Policies for Remote Employees and Contractors
For contractors and remote employees, there are some additional policies that are required for you to be paid in full for your work at OMAlab.
You are budgeted at 7 hours per day of productive work.
This means that you are expected to work that amount of time regularly and consistently, and at peak performance. Sometimes we might have to work more, but the plan is for you to work 7 hours per day. This is, of course, unless your contract is for less working hours).
If you are billing more than 30 hours per week, you are expected to be a FULL time person. This means you don't work other jobs outside of OMAlab.
We manage you to 7 hours per day of productive work, because simply put it is not possible for a person to work 70 hours a week regularly and not burn out. So, given that we are expecting you to have a reasonable work schedule, this does NOT give you the right to add another 25 hours/week job on top of your work. It is expected you will rest and renew on other times/days.
To be clear, if we find you have abused this policy by taking other signficant work, you will be immediately terminated, and your final invoice will not be paid.
You must COMPLETE work, on time, to get your full compensation.
You are not paid to do work. You are paid to COMPLETE work that moves the company to our goals. If you are working, but not completing, expect that some of your work payments might be deferred until your activities are completed. If you continue to miss deadlines and otherwise deliver incomplete or unfinished work, the company has the right to reduce your payments to reflect poor work quality and deliveries. And, to be clear, continued missing of deadlines and delivery of poor quality work will result in termination--including reduction of your final paycheck and non-payment of deferred compensation.
Up to 50% of your compensation will be deferred and payable on major deliverables.
You are paid to do work regularly and recurring. As such, the usual and customary procedure is that there will also be a bonus component to your compensation. This is to ensure you understand that while we value you "working", we value more you COMPLETING more than working. This will be 20-50% of your total compensation. So, get things done.
You will bill 100% of your time. Our accounting department will "defer" payment of a percentage fo this compensation to reflect this deferred compensation component. When you complete the major deliverable, your deferred compensation will be paid on your next payment (and your balance will revert to 0, starting to accure for the next deliverable).
This is to keep you focused on your main goal/initiative, and to reward completion of activities.
If you leave the company with unfinished work, your last paycheck will be reduced for incompleted work.
Transitions happen. However, if you choose to transition without a graceful transition period (in your offer letter, or 1 month), expect that your last paycheck will be reduced to reflect the uncompleted work and lack of transition costs to the company.
If you miss a deliverable, even if you don't bill for the time, you acknowledge there is STILL a cost to the company.
When you have a task, committed on a particular date, and you do not deliver, it affects everyone related to your work--not just you. There are other substantial expenses that are incurred, promises made to clients/customers and other third parties based on your efforts, and frankly the promise made (by your deliverable commitment) made to other members of your team.
When you do not deliver, you cause us to lose calendar time. This causes the company to be less productive, and our costs and expenses to rise.
It is your responsibility to inform your manager and other stakeholders when you will miss a deliverable as soon as is humanly possible. In that notification, you must provide a revised estimate of the delivery date.
Not doing this lets down the team, costs the company money, and is grounds for termination if not done.
You will only work on items that have been assigned to you, unless otherwise instructed.
You are not to "run up" your hours working on items that, while need to be done, haven't been expressly assigned to you. It's a common problem, a contractor or hourly employee will run up their hours doing work that isn't the priority (i.e. easy work), continuing to charge for work that is "filler" work, or work extra slowly. This is totally unacceptable.
It is YOUR job to ensure that your manager understands what you are doing, when you will be done, and when you will be free to work on something else. Having a next job assigned to you is NOT an excuse.
You will only be paid the hours you bill on items expressly assigned to you.
If you are hourly, you must supply detailed time/task logs for every hour billed.
If you are paid on a monthly contract at a fixed rate, you MUST supply daily detailed time logs tracking the time of your actions and activities against assigned tasks. These items should account for at least 80% of your total billed time. If they are less than a 80% threshold, we reserve the right to adjust your invoice to the actual time worked on tickets and tasks.
In both cases, it is not acceptable to submit daily time tracking for billing that has an undescriptive or generic generation of your activities. When this occurs, we cannot correlate your work to an actual task without significant effort on our part, it will not not be recognized as valid hours for the purposes of billing and payments.
Ultimately, it is your responsibility to ensure your time tracking and billing shows the specific action and activities you worked on, submitted in a verifiable way. Without this, we cannot pay you for this work.
Failure to comply with this policy is grounds for immediate termination.
You must track your time using Hubstaff, with live screenshots, unless you are on UpWork or similar service.
If you are billing directly, or you are billing through a service like UpWork using manual hours, you are required to track your time using Hubstaff. This both makes your time accountable and trackable, and we can see exactly what you're working on.
Hours billed but not tracked in Hubstaff are subject to non-payment. And, failure to regularly comply with this policy is grounds for termination.
You must give your manager a status at least once per day.
You will update your manager daily on your working activities and how much time they took, estimated completion, and what you are scheduled to work on next. This can be delivered via email or Slack communication.
You will maintain a way to reach you outside of through Slack or email with a mobile phone number capable of working in your native country and receiving SMS and phone calls.
As a person working with us, there will be times occassionally when someone has a question after hours. You must maintain a phone and provide a phone number for us to use to reach you via both SMS and phone calls. Our primary communications are through Slack. However, when Slack fails, you should be reachable via this alternative method.
Secondarily, by maintaining this, you can reach us and provide a status update, even if you computer is not immedately available (for example, a family emergency that will cause you to miss a deadline).
Not providing or maintaining a properly working phone, as well as providing us access, is grounds for termination.
You will check in your work/code daily into our systems, or when changing locations.
At the end of the day, or when changing location, (any substantial stop in your work), you will check in your work. This means that you will sync it to one of our repos (as a developer), or copy your working drafts up to your Google Drive or Dropbox. If we find you are regularly NOT copying your work to our servers, this is grounds for immediate termination, as it is a best practice.
We do this for a number of reasons. 1) We both can review your code and see your progress. 2) If you or your laptop are compromised or stolen, you have your most recent code. 3) If your equipment has a problem, someone else can pick up your work.
If you have a failure and lose code specifically due to this circumstance, you will be terminated.
Your working hours will overlap substantially with the USA Eastern Time Zone working time.
If you are a remote employee or contractor, and you are working with USA East Coast personnel, it is expected you will substantially overlap your working hours with the USA Eastern Time zone. It's understood you might be up early, or leave early, but you must overlap at least five (5) hours with the USA East coast time zone.
In addition, no accommodation will be made for your working schedule. For example, if we need to have a client meeting that you will be involved with, and the client chooses to schedule the meeting at 4pm, it is expected that you will accommodate the schedule without complaint and attend.
This is in your interest. Remote employees, especially new ones, that do not overlap often have questions they cannot get answered. Because they guess wrong, they make mistakes. This means we have to fix it. This drags down your productivity. And, this increases the risk you will be terminated. Time overalap with your manager or director reduces/eliminates this problem.
You are responsible for keeping your computer and internet up to the tasks.
As a remote contractor or employee, you are responsible for your own equipment and communication services. It is expected that you will keep these items operational so that they do not impact work and communications we are trying to have.
Our company regularly uses Google Hangouts for video to have meetings, and create a sense of team even though we are remote. If your system cannot support this, and we cannot hear or see you, you can't communicate reliably, or your setup always breaks and causes problems, then this is a significant detriment to the company overall.
If these problems regularly occur, is is grounds for immediate termination.
Everyone gets sick and has personal issues. But, sickness/personal issues are not allowed as an excuse.
As a remote person/contractor, sometimes you get sick or have personal issues. That happens, and we do NOT judge you on this.
However, if you have a scheduled deliverable, it is CRITICAL that you reach your manager letting them know that you have a personal issue (illness, funeral, other situation) and will not make your deliverable. You must also provide a revised estimate for your deliverable. Letting your manager know AFTER you miss the deliverable that you had a personal issue is grounds of immediate termination.
In addition, regular absences, especially around delivery times, is grounds for immediate termination. This is not an evaluation of whether you are truthful. We are required to get things done, and keep our manager informed. If your regular absences impact that, then there is little else we can do.
The same rule applies to "medical emergencies", family situations, and other things that cause people to be absent--basically anything that happens when you are not at work.
Before starting work, you will be sent materials that you are required to execute. You will not be paid without these documents being fully executed and received by the company. It is YOUR responsibility to ensure you have completed all these documents. If you receive payment from OMAlab, Inc. you acknowledge that this is considered execution of this agreement.
If you are working on UpWork or similar service, you are expected to bill your hours live (no manual work).
We require all UpWork-based partners to use screen recording to record their screenshots. This is to ensure that, as a remote, on demand contractor, we have a record/log of your actual time being billed to us.
The logic for this is simple: if you give us manual time, then we have to go back through all your work, and compare your billing to your deliverables, and try to estimate whether we have gotten what we are being asked to pay for. This is a lot of unnecessary work we have to do (which costs money), so you can have the pleasure of not having to track your screens. This is why we do NOT support this initially.
Once we establish trust, we can enable SOME manual billing. But, you must get approval for manual time before starting to log manual time. If you "have a problem" and "can't bill because of a problem" and need manual time, that will not be acceptable without showing us the logs of your request for help from UpWork technical support, and UpWork or similar's technical support stating that they cannot fix the problem.
If we are paying you directly, we will remove wire transfer fees from your payment.
It's expected that we will remove any wire transfer fees from the amount we pay you. This is to your benefit, as there is a fee of up to 10% we are paying UpWork. The wire transfer fee will likely be less than this.
Understand that we will require to a modification to our schedule (we won't pay you weekly), to confirm with the payment schedules of other payments. This can be either bi-monthly (with 2x the wire fees), or monthly. Your choice.
It is at the company's discretion when any of these changes to your billing relationship happen.
If you lose work through a computer fault, computer loss, accidential unrecoverable deletion, (essentially not following the rules above), you will be not be paid for the work.
There are rules in place, and the places and resuources available to you, to keep work from being lost. If your work is lost due to a personal issue, computing equipment failure, loss of power, or any other incident that loses work you are completing on our behalf, you will not be paid for this work.
From here, you have two options: All payments will stop to you until you either rebuild the lost code and deliver, or you will be terminated.
We have lost the calendar time that is assoicated with your mistake. There are other expenses that burn money every week, and cost money, even if you do not charge us time. There are people waiting on your work to perform their work, and you have made them less productive. In general, you have let down and not honored your commitments to the company and team.
If your billing is found to be in error (times worked versus billed hours), you will likely be terminated.
It's unfortunately common that remote contractors fake or bill extra hours. If we EVER find you have done this, you will be immediately terminated. In addition, to the fullest extent of the power we have, we will ensure that any thing party service we use, such as UpWork, is aware of the situation.
If it can be proven that it is an accident, then we will correct the issue on the next payment.
If the situation happens more than one time, it is grounds for termination.
If you need more work, ask for it. Don't fake your time.
These rules, and all decisions related to your employment and compensation are ultimately at the discretion of your manager and the leadership of the company.
The company has final decision-making authority on all matters. As a partner, and as a condition of your payment, you agree to this term. While we will always attempt to be fair and reasonable, we have to protect the interests of the company first and foremost over your personal interests.
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