Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

June 2022

7 Strategies for BPO Firms to Retain Top Talent

The ‘war for talent’ is as intense as ever. A quarter of a century since global management consulting firm McKinsey first used the term when highlighting the increasingly fierce competition to attract and retain employees, the global pandemic has taken the challenge to a whole new level, so much so that one global survey of almost 1500 C-suite executives and board members has revealed the issue is now the number one concern for business leaders.

The Negative Impacts of A Non-Productive Culture

The lack of a productive culture can signal serious problems for an organization, especially in the fast-paced and highly competitive Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector. So if your organizational culture is unproductive, you’ll need to identify the reasons why and develop solutions to motivate your workforce. In this article, we’ll look into the effects of an unproductive culture, discover the leading causes, and tell-tale signs indicating the lack of a productive culture.

Can Microsoft Teams Monitor Employees?

Let’s address the elephant in the room. Yes, Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) can help employers monitor employees. As a manager, you can track almost everything your employee does within Teams. This includes text conversations, recorded calls, Zoom meetings, and more. Now, this opens you up to more questions. How can Microsoft Teams monitor employees? What exactly does it track? Are there any privacy concerns you should be aware of? Don’t worry.

14 Notable Free Employee Scheduling Software

Scheduling employees manually or using spreadsheets can be a long, tedious process, often resulting in overlapping shifts and unproductive schedules. In fact, businesses like restaurants spend nearly 2-8 hours scheduling their shifts. That’s why many companies now opt for scheduling software that helps them save time, create productive schedule shifts, and avoid miscommunication.

IT Time Tracking: Benefits, Top 10 Tools

Your IT teams may be working for multiple clients and projects at a time. To effectively manage their productivity, you’ll need to ensure they accurately track their work hours. Today’s time tracking tools come with features like accurate time tracking, payroll, and project management. They can drastically boost your team’s productivity and increase company profitability. In this article, we’ll take a look at the top benefits of tracking your IT team’s work hours.

11 Best Invoicing Software: Features, Pricing, Reviews

The invoicing process can become more time-consuming as your business grows due to more significant volumes of sales and clients. Fortunately, invoicing software can help your business automate invoicing and collect payments too. In this article, we’ll compare the 11 best invoicing software based on their features, customer reviews, and pricing. We’ll also discuss what to look for in an invoicing software solution. Let’s get started.

4 Free Software Development Timesheet Templates

Timesheets offer a simple and convenient way to track project durations and the efficacy of every software developer in your team. They also help you calculate billable hours at the end of each pay cycle to make payments and create client invoices. To make the timekeeping process consistent and faster, you can opt for a customized software development timesheet template. In this article, we’ll share four customizable Excel timesheet templates for your software development projects.

10 Free Time Tracking Software (Plus a Robust Alternative)

Tracking time can help you understand your employees’ time usage and improve your business’s productivity. If you want to try out a time tracker, some time tracking software solutions have a free plan. However, such free plans often limit the number of seats, projects, or features included. A free time tracking software can be good for freelancers and small teams with basic time tracking needs. But a large team with complex needs a sophisticated and comprehensive time tracking software.

A Guide to Providing Equipment For Remote Workers: Best Practices & Essentials

Wondering whether providing equipment for remote workers is a good idea? This guide is for you. We have seen much of the world tentatively revert to traditional workspaces. However, some organizations have decided to permanently adopt hybrid workplaces – a working model combining remote and office work. This will essentially keep much of their workforce operating remotely, occasionally. Nevertheless, organizations with permanent remote or hybrid workforces must rethink workplace policy.

10 Tips for Task Prioritization When Working Remotely

Remote working has been increasingly prevalent in recent years. However, it has further accelerated during this pandemic. The Owl Labs’ State of Remote Work 2021 report states that about 70% of full-time employees in the US have worked remotely. Many employers have begun adopting the hybrid work setup, meaning employees sometimes work from home and go to the office. Most employees find remote work effective for boosting productivity.

Creating A Strong Remote Work Culture Within Your Organization: Tips and Tools

The COVID-19 pandemic ushered the world even further into the digital age. Companies in all industries had to adapt to remote working conditions with little time to prepare. This presented many challenges – communicating effectively with employees working from home, monitoring progress on key initiatives, ensuring deadlines are still met, continuing to grow as a company, and many more.

Time Doctor's Study of How One BPO Transitioned to Work from Home and the Impact on Workplace Productivity

In an effort to better understand the impact of the pandemic on workplace productivity, Time Doctor teamed up with one of our major outsourcing clients in the Philippines to examine their data and uncover insights. We compared performance data from the two months prior to the pandemic to the two months following their transition to WFH to discover how remote work impacted agent behavior and affected productivity. Some surprising insights followed.

Inhouse Vs Outsourced Software Development

In the digital era, more and more businesses rely on software development in order to enhance their business processes. Therefore, the need for software development is increasing at a mind-boggling rate. Inhouse software development is the first choice of businesses around the world. However, the shortage of developers or skilled professionals compels the business leaders to go for outsourcing. More businesses are relying on external teams in order to handle their software development projects.

10 Innovative Workforce Software: Features, Pricing, Reviews

Whether your team is large or small, in-house or remote, workforce software is critical to ensuring an integrated employee experience. These tools help with workflow optimization, performance management, time tracking, and enhancing operational efficiency company-wide. And since there are so many tools to choose from, we’ve compiled a list of the most user-friendly and innovative software for the modern workforce.

Free Biweekly Timesheet Template (Excel, PDF, Word)

Paying employees every other week (semi-monthly) has become a standard practice in the business world. However, you first need to accurately track the billable hours on a timesheet to pay an employee. And that’s what a biweekly timesheet template is for. In this article, we’ll share a free biweekly timesheet template that you can download and customize for your company. That said, creating a manual biweekly timesheet is still a time-consuming process and is also prone to human errors.

Top 10 Capacity Planning Software Options for Your Business

Every project manager needs to ensure their team’s available capacity aligns with the business demand. Effective capacity planning can help you balance this supply-and-demand relationship and ensure team members work to the best of their ability without experiencing burnout. This is where capacity planning software comes in. A good tool can help you accurately forecast demand and ensure you have the right resources to meet that demand.

Why Monitor Employees? (Reasons And Ethical Considerations)

Employee monitoring tools are popular among small businesses and major companies, especially with the growth of remote workspaces due to the pandemic. But why monitor employees? Employee monitoring tools help track time and productivity levels, among other features. The right monitoring tools are employee-friendly, helping teams track and improve their work efficiency. In this article, we’ll explore seven reasons why you should monitor employees.

Time Tracking Notebook: Benefits, Drawbacks, Alternatives

Businesses use a time tracking notebook for recording details on employee work time. This includes clock in and out times, total working hours, etc. These notebooks can also help gauge project progress using relevant attendance data. But a time tracking notebook may not suit all businesses as it requires employees to enter data manually. You’ll need to learn in detail about a time tracking notebook to ensure it’s best for your business.

15 Excellent Resource Management Software: Features, Price

Resource management software is a virtual tool that aids managers in successfully delivering projects. These tools cover the entire scope of resource management, including resource planning, scheduling, utilization, forecasting, and capacity planning. In short, they reduce the effort required from a project manager and increase the efficiency of the project workflow. In this article, we’ll explore the 15 best resource management software – their key features, pricing, and customer ratings.

9 Best Timekeeper Software For Businesses

Successful businesses recognize the value of time and spend it on growth opportunities that offer the highest returns. Moreover, you can accomplish business goals faster and strategize better to scale operations when you manage time better. And that’s why you need timekeeper software! With this automated time tracking system, you can manage employee time, create work schedules, reduce attendance errors, and boost organizational productivity.

13 Powerful Task Tracking Software for your Team

It can be difficult to monitor progress when working on overly complicated project pipelines or multiple projects from different clients. In such cases, manually creating a lengthy task list and updating it can be a tiresome job. Fortunately, most task tracking software can effortlessly replace and automate these processes for you. These tools can help manage multiple task deadlines, dependencies, priorities, and so much more!

The Best 13 Team Management Software You Can Use Today

There’s only so much your team leader can do if they don’t have insight into what their team needs. For instance, without looking into how much time each project takes, you might constantly fall behind schedule and submit things late. However, with the right team management tool, you can improve collaboration and empower your team leaders and members to take charge of their workflows.

10 Best Employee Time Clock Software

Time clock software is a tool that tracks employee attendance and work hours and stores the data digitally. It’s a step up from traditional punch card systems and helps companies stay compliant with timekeeping regulations, identify issues like absenteeism, and ensure overall productivity. But finding the perfect employee time clock software could be a daunting task when there are tons of options available. To help you save time, we’ve hand-picked the best timekeeping tools to choose from.

15 Next-Level Work Management Software For All Team Sizes

Work management software is a great solution for companies looking to streamline workflow, improve collaboration, and increase productivity. By bringing together all the relevant data relating to projects in a single app, this software can help you avoid resource, time, or task management issues and achieve your company goals. But with tons of work management tools on the market, selecting the right one may seem challenging. Fortunately, we’ve got you covered.

5 Helpful Tools in Transitioning BPO Workers to a Productive Remote Work Setup

The pandemic catalyzed the advantage of the hybrid work model for many industries, including the BPO or business process outsourcing industry. The sector’s quick adoption of the remote work model has helped many partner companies minimize disruptions and mitigate other impacts of the crisis.

Outsourcing Translation Services for Global Business Growth: 6 Reasons + 5 Tasks to Outsource

Every business wants one thing—growth. And today, businesses are starting to look past their own borders to achieve that growth. Translation services have become a major partner in this goal, enabling businesses to communicate past language and cultural barriers. But how exactly do they help? In this article, we give five major reasons why you should outsource translation to language service providers, and tips on how outsourcing translation services works.

What is Work Fatigue? How to Overcome It

Work fatigue is something that we all experience. If you spend a good deal of time at work, then you might be familiar with this problem. You feel tired, your eyes are getting red, and you just can’t take it anymore. Work fatigue is a physical, mental, and emotional condition that affects the way we work. It’s almost like a form of stress that happens when you do a single task for too long. We’ve all been there before — feeling the effects of work fatigue.

The Best Time Tracking App For Small Business

Small business owners often fall short of time to attend to every task or closely monitor their employees’ performance. But with the right time tracking app at your disposal, you can skyrocket your productivity and profits! From recording employee work hours to streamlining timesheet management, investing in the best time tracking app for small business can work wonders for you. In this article, we’ll explore the 10 best time tracking apps in the market today.

Hourly Time Tracking App: Features, Limitations, Alternatives

If you’re looking for an app that tracks time, monitors employee location, and calculates your employees’ pay accurately, the Hourly time tracking app is for you! Although learning to navigate the app may take some time, Hourly offers incredible features like payroll tax filing and workers’ compensation, along with time tracking. But is Hourly the best time tracking solution for your business?

The Pros and Cons of Offshoring Accounting

Companies often prefer to offshore their accounting tasks to an external accounting firm. Why? In-house accounting services can often be overly expensive due to hiring and training costs and require too much management oversight. But with offshore accounting services, you get high-quality services at affordable prices due to the low labor costs in popular offshoring destinations like India, Mexico, etc.

Time Doctor vs RescueTime: Which Time Tracking Tool is Best for Teams?

A number of visitors to the site have asked how Time Doctor is different compared to RescueTime, a popular employee monitoring and time tracking software solution. On the surface, both programs appear to be similar, but each product’s approach and practical applications are vastly different. Both rely on software systems to monitor activity, track productivity, and generate reports. But this is where the similarities begin and end.

What to Consider Before Your Company Offshores Sales

Offshore sales or hiring a sales team in another country can help you scale your business and boost profitability. It can also help you reduce costs while using the latest technologies in the industry. However, offshoring sales can be tricky without a clear understanding of it. In this article, we’ll explore offshore sales in detail, its five benefits, and four challenges. We’ll also explore four popular sales and marketing services and suggest tips for smooth sales offshoring.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Successful Offshore Training

Offshoring has always been popular among businesses looking to access skilled international talent and cost-effectively scale their operations. And as companies look to offshore more complex business processes, training offshore employees becomes more important than ever. After all, you have to rely on your offshore team to manage your business efficiently while you’re far away on another continent.

What is Offshore Engineering? (Pros, Cons, Top Countries)

Engineering processes demand the latest technology and advanced skills to deliver the best results. To meet these demands, firms often offshore these processes to foreign countries. This is because firms get access to the best technology, skill, and productivity at low prices when they offshore engineering services. But can all industries offshore engineering services? In this article, we’ll discuss offshore engineering, its advantages, and its challenges.

18 Excellent Offshore Agencies You Should Know About

If you’re planning to relocate your business operations to a far-off country, working with an offshore agency can make things super easy. It can help you save time and money and find the best offshore team to handle your business processes. But with hundreds of offshore agencies available today, which one should you choose? In this article, we’ll cover the top 18 offshore agencies across various industries like software development, finance, and healthcare.