Ethical Freelancing: Building Trust and Credibility
In the ever-changing world of freelancing, reputation is important. Success depends on trust and credibility. It is crucial for sustainable success. To make it, clients need to trust you. You have to work ethically. Doing the right thing builds strong client relationships. This will help you grow in your career. In this article we are going to learn about Ethical Freelancing and Building Trust and Credibility.
What is ethical freelancing? Ethical freelancing is working as a freelancer with honesty, integrity and fairness towards your clients. Ethical freelancing goes beyond simply following the laws. It involves a set of moral values that promote trust, credibility and sustainable success. These include a long list of working practices that you should not do. Plus things that you should avoid doing.
Who are the parties that influence ethics in freelancing? Ethical freelancing concerns both you as the freelancer as well as your clients.
What practices contribute to unethical freelancing? Here, we highlight importance of practices that are sensitive to ethics in freelancing.
1. Avoid Plagiarism at all cost.
Plagiarism is a serious ethical offense. It is a theft of intellectual property. Presenting someone’s work as if it is yours and without giving proper credit to the owner is plagiarism. Plagiarism can take place intentionally or unintentionally and can happen in various ways.
In the indirect form of plagiarism, the freelancer copies and pastes other people’s work directly without giving them credit. This includes work and content from books, research papers, websites, blogs, or even other freelancer’s work. Paraphrasing someone’s work by changing it a little and without giving credit is also plagiarism. Another one is when one pieces together phrases or sentences from several sources without giving credit. This can also be reusing portions of your previous work without giving proper citation. Plagiarism takes many more forms. You can learn more about them at Grammary.
Plagiarism should be avoided at all cost. Always ensure that if you use other people’s work, you mention them properly by giving citation or references..
2. Violating Client Confidentiality.
Whenever you share your clients’ information without their permission, you violate their confidentiality. All the information you know about your clients or their projects is supposed to remain private.
Client’s confidentiality is very important in freelancing. It creates trust and ensure sensitive information is protected. It also creates a safe space for you and your clients to share freely. However, client confidentiality can be breached easily in various ways. The breach can be intentional or unintentional.
Accidentally leaking of data can expose your clients information. It can happen when you mention confidential details in public settings. Can also happen in casual conversations about your clients. It can happen when you lose physical documents or electronic devices containing client information.
Legal situations such as court order can force a freelancer to reveal a client’s information. This will also contribute to exposing your client’s information. Any activity that involve you revealing your clients’ information for personal gains is like selling. Selling your clients’ information is breaching confidentiality with your clients.
Clients information and information about their projects should be protected. Your clients are also obliged to protect and maintain the privacy of your data. Look at Fiverr to learn about Non-Disclosure Agreements.
3. Falsification of Credentials.
Lying that you have more qualifications, skills and experiences than you actually have is misrepresentation. Falsification of credentials is happens in various ways. Such include presenting fake degrees or academic certificates. The freelancer may exaggerate their experience on their CV.
Freelancing depends on the trust clients have in the freelance marketplace. However, falsification of credentials undermines this trust. You can learn on how to identify fake documents on Inscribe.
4. Misleading Advertisements.
Misleading advertisements are promotional activities that lie about the nature of freelance work. They can lie about the skills and experience needed, or the potential benefits.
It is the obligation of the potential freelance work clients to avoid giving misleading ads. Misleading ads that give unrealistic promises or rates may attract low quality work. Freelancers without enough skills can get the work and fail to deliver the required quality. The potential clients should avoid such adverts.
On the other hand, the freelancer may use misleading ads promising service rates that are lower than the industry standards. All these forms of practices should be avoided.
5. Cutting communication abruptly.
Stopping communication with the clients, or with the freelancers before completion of work is ghosting. If you are a freelancer, you should not ghost your clients. Even when you are unable to complete their projects. Likewise, as a client, you should not ghost freelancers. Even when you don’t want to pay the work they have delivered. If a concern arises, the right thing to do is to consult the other party and talk your way out. This gives an opportunity for new agreement to remedy the old one.
6. Unethical SEO practices.
SEO becomes unethical when black hat methods are used to improve search engine rankings for website and pages. Such methods include black hat hacking techniques. Black hat SEO manipulates search engine algorithms. Black hat practices are against the rules set by Google and other search engines.
Victims of black hat SEO risk loses because the unscrupulous methods can be discovered. Learn more about SEO at Google’s SEO basics page.
7. Selling your work multiple times.
Most freelance work involves creating original content like articles and graphics designs. For such work, the client automatically assumes the copyright of the works as according to the agreement. Selling of the work again to other clients will be a breach of the copyright. If you are good at copyrighting work, look at MillionFormula and Upwork for opportunities.
8. Crossing professional boundaries.
You should avoid getting too familiar with the clients. Getting too familiar with the clients damages trust. A freelancer can cross professional boundaries by working for competitor as well. For example, he/she may have been working for a competitor blog. Then he/she may refuse to disclose this to a client hiring him/her to work for another blog.
9. Exploiting vulnerable clients.
Inexperienced clients may lack adequate knowledge on how the industry can be exploited. They may be aware of the industry rates. An exploitative freelancer may charge such clients excessive prices or even provide low quality services.
Freelancers new to the industry can be exploited on similar basis. Clients may offer exploitative jobs for such clients to pick and work on. Find out more on exploitative freelance jobs on Fast Company.
10. Discrimination.
Discrimination against clients or freelancers can happen based on many factors. These may include race, gender, nationality, age, religion, disability or sexual orientation. Discrimination leads to unfair and unequal treatment.
Avoiding discrimination is important in promoting fairness and equality. It will also bring respect for all individuals in the freelancing industry.
Concluding remarks.
Trust and credibility are two important qualities in freelancing. They help create perfect working relations between freelancers and clients. You must always strive to achieve them at all cost. Freelancers are required to be transparent in communication, honest in estimating, and clear in contracts. They should also demonstrate respect and set realistic expectations.
Ethical freelancing shows professionalism and integrity. It demonstrates commitment to continuous learning and improvement. This promotes excellence and reinforces your credibility as a reliable and valuable partner.