Working around the world

Working around the world

Working around the world

One of the greatest challenges of working remotely is dealing with different time zones.

working remotely

When you have a colleague in Portugal and another in India, keeping track of time is harder. Additionally, team members can find it harder to collaborate in an asynchronous environment, and it can take a while for them to adjust. Moreover, scheduling meetings can be difficult, inconveniencing those who must attend, especially early in the morning or late in the evening.

You can, however, overcome these challenges with the right tools and approaches.

1. Immediately notify third parties of your location.
You should immediately let people know what time zone you live in. Let your colleagues know your schedule and preferred communication channels when introducing yourself. You can also use this opportunity to set boundaries. Give an example of a situation when you can be contacted — even though you’re off the clock.

2. Clearly communicate time zone boundaries.
You need to help your people clearly communicate their preferred work hours and set boundaries with the teams they work with, whether outside your main office or working on a hybrid team. A shared team calendar might be helpful as everyone can see each other’s availability.

3. Decide on a fair time for meetings.
Make sure you take everyone’s time zone into account when setting meeting times. What if there isn’t a way to make meeting times fair for everyone? To avoid inconveniencing the same people repeatedly, you may want to rotate the start time.

4. Use an online calendar.
It is common to waste a lot of time waiting for confirmation when booking appointments or meetings with remote team members.A time zone difference makes it even more difficult to get a real-time response. You will likely not hear from the other parties until the next business day if they live on the other side of the world. An email exchange might even take a week to nail down an appointment.

5. Be aware of cultural norms.
It’s important to understand the cultural norms and traditions of the countries in which your company has remote workers. Due to these cultural differences, they may work different hours, celebrate different holidays, or communicate differently.

To create a cohesive team, it is important to demonstrate an understanding of cultural differences.

6. Be patient if you need to send an unscheduled message.
Emails and messages shouldn’t be sent right when colleagues wake up or go to bed in different time zones. As a result, many global employees will snooze their instant message notifications when they have finished working or turn off their work devices when they are done working.

have your remote work team

As you will see, having a team in different parts of the world is possible. Would you like to know more about how to do it? Contact us

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6 ways to celebrate your team in your end of year meetings

6 ways to celebrate your team in your end of year meetings

6 ways to celebrate your team in your end of year meetings

Engaging tips to jazz up your end-of-year team meetings, all-hands, or town halls.

Celebrate
1. Review the year’s numbers in a quiz

The end of the year is a great time to look back at the key metrics and results you’ve achieved with your team. Give this exercise a new spin and present your business results as a quiz. Come up with questions around your key metrics, such as revenue, ARR, biggest sales deals, conversions, NPS, number of newly-hired colleagues – you name it.

2. Run a fun quiz to get to know your colleagues better

While the examination in the previous point was more about the business, also try a quiz that will zoom in on your people – the end of year meetings are perfect for team building and getting to know each other better.

Some good quizzes are: ‘Two truths and one lie’ or, go with a good old classic –team trivia.

3. Source the year’s highlights

Celebrate all the great things that you and your team have achieved throughout the year – either professional or personal!

This is a nice exercise to remind people of all the great things that happened and see the success behind their efforts.

Create an open text poll with a question:

  • What was your biggest highlight of the past year?
  • What do you consider to be the greatest achievement of our team in 2022?

Give people some time to think about and type in their highlights. Once the submissions come in, read them out loud to give a shout-out to all the good things.

4. Organize a ‘Thank you session’

Give space to your team to give thanks to their colleagues.

It’s simple: Before the meeting, encourage your team to think about the people who helped them the most in the past year.

During the meeting, dedicate the first (or the last) quarter of your meeting agenda to a ‘Thank you session’, where you activate an open text poll with a question:

“Who would you like to say thank you to, and why?”

Allow your colleagues some time to type in their messages. Then, share the screen so you can all view the beautiful notes that people have written.

5. Recap the year with your team

The last meetings of the year also call for some looking back on the projects, successes, struggles, or failures throughout the year.

Run a little team retrospective. Prepare a recap of the outputs of your teamwork and trigger a fruitful discussion around what went well and what could be improved in the next year.

Create a short Slido survey with questions such as:

  • What went well?
  • What could be improved?
  • What was your biggest learning?
  • What should we do better next year?

Screenshot of a Slido survey with questions aimed to recap the year in a retrospective

Send the survey to your teammates well before the meeting, so they all have enough time to fill it out.

6. Set goals for the upcoming year

After a yearly recap, it’s only fitting to look forward. Take advantage of the last meetings of the year and use them for brainstorming or goal-setting.

Brainstorm ideas for projects, campaigns, or any interesting initiatives that you can take on in the next year.
You can ask questions such as:

  • Which projects should we prioritize next year?
  • What should be our number one priority in the next season?

We hope the above tips have inspired you and that you’ll pick one or two (or even all six!) ideas to make your end-of-year meetings special for your colleagues.

hire internationally without an entity

Recap the year, celebrate your people, use the time to listen to them, and engage in fruitful discussions. If you need more ideas and tips to organize your remote teams follow our blog

Throughout the year we upload material to help you work remotely with your team. And if you need personalized help, contact us! we are here for you!

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Remote work is good for employers and employees

Remote work is good for employers and employees

Remote work is good for employers and employees

With each passing year, the statistics on remote work increasingly support the fact that remote work is beneficial for everybody.

remote work
1. There are now three times more remote jobs compared to 2020.

Before the pandemic started, the share of remote-work opportunities in the United States was around 4% of the total available jobs. At the time of writing, remote jobs now make up more than 15% of the total opportunities in the U.S.

2. Remote work makes employees happier

For many of us, the past couple of years has been the first chance to work remotely–and the effects are astounding. According to research by Owl Labs and Global Workplace Analytics, 74% of employees feel happier when they work remotely. The reasons vary from not having to commute to have more flexibility and spending more time with their families.

3. Remote work does not eliminate burnout

One of the most significant issues in the workplace is burnout. With the increased flexibility of remote work, you would think that it would be a non-issue. However, research by Monster says otherwise. 69% of remote employees are experiencing burnout, which is an alarming statistic, but an important one to learn from.

4. You could save up to $11,000 per employee per year by going partially remote.

It’s common knowledge that employees save money by working from home. For starters, they don’t have to spend anything to travel to the office–but the cost savings go beyond that. As business owners, you can save, too.

5. Save money with remote work

According to research conducted by Harvard and Stanford, the average business can save up to $11,000 per year just by switching to a hybrid model, and that’s not even considering a fully remote setup. Companies can save on rent, utilities, and insurance expenses, and move towards virtual technologies by adopting the PBX system to save on communication and the associated costs of running an office.

hire internationally without an entity

Want to know how to hire employees remotely from anywhere in the world?  Contact us

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Best sites for finding remote work online

Best sites for finding remote work online

Best sites for finding remote work online

Want to work from everywhere? Some years ago, there were a few sites where you could find remote work; today, there are many. We collected some of them for you! Scroll down!

Remote Work
FLEXJOBS

FlexJobs has over 50 remote work categories, with pre-screened positions ranging from freelance gigs, to part-time work, to full-time jobs, with remote careers varying from entry-level to executive. The virtual job board currently hosts more than 20,000 working-from-home job and digital nomad job postings.

ARC

Arc is a remote-only job board for developers living across the world. If you’re new to tech, this could be an excellent resource for you. Scan their Remote Junior Developer Jobs & Internships page to get job listings specifically flagged for entry-level applicants. It can be tough to find entry-level developer jobs, but this is a great place to start.

REMOTE.CO

Remote.co hand-curates their list of remote jobs and allows you to search or browse by job type. These listings and job categories include customer service positions, design opportunities, developer jobs, recruiter and HR roles, sales jobs, and other online remote jobs (including writers, managers, and marketers).

JUSTREMOTE

JustRemote covers many job verticals and remote work, including Development, Marketing and Design, HR, and Customer Success positions. You can filter roles by location, and their virtual job board highlights whether positions have specific country or time overlap requirements.

VIRTUAL VOCATIONS

Virtual Vocations jobs board features telecommuting positions in job fields like technical writing and paralegal and is run by an entirely remote team. In addition to their jobs board, the site’s blog has great tips.

How to hire employees in any country?

If you want to hire more employees remotely, remember its very simple:  Contact us

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3 remote work tools for remote working

3 remote work tools for remote working

3 remote work tools for remote working

When everyone is working from home, something can be more difficult. Here you can find some work tools to make it easier!

work tools
TimeBilling

When you have a team working in the office, everyone clocks in and clocks out. Usually, you have a centralized timeclock that allows this to happen. But when everyone is working from home, it can be more difficult. You don’t want to just assume people are working when they should be. You want to make sure that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do. That’s where TimeBilling comes in. This app will allow you to track the amount of time that your team members are spending working on different tasks in your business.

Trello

You can use it as an individual tracker to keep track of your assignments, or your entire team can use it to assign different tasks to different people on the team. It’s also a unique system because it’s the best Kanban-style option. For those who already know and love Kanban, that’s all you probably need to know. But for those who don’t, it’s a simple system to learn.

Miro

Do you need a way to share information and ideas with your team? Maybe you and your team (or at least a subset of them) need to be able to communicate about different tasks, or you need to be able to collaborate on a project. If that’s the case, then Miro is an excellent option for you. You can collaborate on Google Docs in the G Suite, but Miro gives you more of a whiteboard style. This can be even easier to collaborate on because you can work everything through the phases necessary to get from the beginning of an idea to the end.

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5 best practices to help you manage video conferences securely

5 best practices to help you manage video conferences securely

5 best practices to help you manage video conferences securely

The importance of staying safe.

video conferences
1. Use unique meeting codes for every online event and strong passwords.

While having the same meeting ID for consecutive meetings is convenient, it is equally convenient for malicious actors, who once they get a hold of an ID can enter the meeting uninvited. Never reuse the same meeting ID, especially for critical meetings.
Ensure your video conferencing application sets up unique video IDs as default, or you know how to set up unique meeting codes yourself.
While strong passwords may add some bother for participants, it adds an extra layer of needed protection, particularly for critical meetings. Ensure these passwords are at least 10 characters, include upper-case and lower-case letters, and include numbers and symbols.

2. Use a waiting room

A waiting room gives the host control over who enters the meeting. It doesn’t matter if they have the password, all attendees must be admitted by the host before joining. This adds another layer of protection from unapproved individuals attending.

3. Avoid posting meeting links on social media

Avoid posting links to your meetings on social media – even if they’re events open to the public. Once shared on social media you do not know who has access to the link, and this could lead to malicious actors entering the meeting. If you feel the link must be shared via social media, apply required registration so you can verify potential participants.

4. During public events, treat the chatroom with caution

For online events, ensure participants understand to approach the chat with caution, as malicious actors posing as regular attendees may use chat features to share dangerous links or attachments. If necessary, you may even be able to disable the chat feature until the end of the video conference or during a Q/A session, so that participants do not unknowingly click on a malicious file.

5. Don’t allow default screen sharing

In smaller work meetings with colleagues you are familiar with, default screen sharing is appropriate. As a general rule, it is better to ensure screen sharing for participants isn’t set to “on” by default.
The host of the meeting should be able to control who and when screen sharing occurs in order to efficiently manage the meeting and ensure the meeting isn’t interrupted by uninvited content.

work remote, work safe

Thanks to the fact that many of the jobs and meetings today are virtual, we can hire people to work for our company anywhere in the world. Do you want to know how we do it?  Contact us 

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