Over the past four Mondays, I’ve sat in on a series of “bootcamps” for the firm’s project managers on a variety of topics. Given that I don’t do any project work, these bootcamps weren’t all that relevant to me.
But—they were very illuminating when it came to understanding my colleagues.
The most recent bootcamp focused on additional services—services that fall outside our contracted scope of services on a project.
There are obviously technical concerns about additional services—how to develop the fee, how to set up exclusions in the original agreement—but the most interesting part was the internal conflict that my colleagues have to manage in navigating additional services. There’s a choice they have to make:
Do I charge them for this work or not?
In other words,
Do I value my time or my client relationship?
As an “overhead” employee—I’m basically just a cost center that doesn’t generate any revenue—the value of my time isn’t something I have to worry about.
But that’s not the case for my colleagues who are architects and designers. For the firm, their time are quite literally money. If we aren’t billing for that time, the firm pays for it.
Additional services pose a choice between doing extra work for free OR charging for that work.
Why would we do work for free?
- Law of reciprocity. By giving something away, we activate the law of reciprocity—creating a sense of obligation on the client’s end to “pay us back” in the future.
- Ease. Sometimes, it’s not worth the paperwork. If the extra work is an hour and the paperwork involved takes two hours, we would just be extending our loss.
What we want to avoid is creating the expectation we will just work for free when extra work comes up.
Taylor Coe 