Month: July 2020

Our competence to connect, share and exchange information with other peoples are more profoundly impacting our daily lives, our habits, and our identities. Mobile integration is changing how we work by making us more productive and efficient, whether we’re communicating with colleagues in our same office or halfway around the globe. The mobile app revolution has an especially powerful impact on small businesses by helping these companies reduce expenses and needless processes to be leaner and more cost-efficient. In response to the mobile app revolution, web-UI based solutions are also increasingly app-friendly. It’s not only digital marketing that’s being reshaped by the mobile revolution. Mobile apps are also getting down traditional 9 to 5 jobs by empowering a new class of freelancers and telecommuters. In this blog, we’ll check out the top 5 apps used to be super-efficient in a Digital Workspace.

Best app for the free mobile organization: Trello

Isn’t there anything more frustrating than trying to keep track of a lengthy email thread or an outdated spreadsheet? I’ll admit to once using sticky notes to quickly note down ideas when we’re on the phone with clients and then wonder weeks later where that particular note went. Trello is a free app for a flexible virtual organization that’s a board filled with lists and cards. You can create different boards for different clients and projects; take a quick note, save it to the board, and then drag and drop notes between these various boards to manage projects.

Best for free accounting: Wave

Wave is a free, online web-UI, and mobile app alternative to QuickBooks. Used by more than one billion small-medium businesses, Wave helps SMB owners track more than $60 billion of income and spending, all for free. Wave app includes accounting, payroll, payments, and invoices, including a free, unlimited invoice for iPhone users. The invoices function include fully integrated invoice scanning that goes right to Wave accounting from your smartphone. Come tax time; no one wants to get stuck manually entering a stack of invoices into an excel spreadsheet or dig through their wallet, desk, or car trying to find a significant client invoice they misplaced!

Best for managing legal contracts: Shake

Shake is one of the best apps because it makes sending and signing legally binding agreements a breeze. Shake handles everything from NDAs and freelancing contracts within a single platform. The app is simple to use, and it takes a few seconds to create and send legally binding agreements.

Best for tracking time: Toggl

Tracking billable hours can be difficult, especially when you hop from one project to the next. Most freelancers don’t spend their entire day working on a single client or project. With Toggl, you never lose even a single minute of billable time. Organize time by projects or tags, color code projects for easy virtual time tracking set billable rates for different hours, and instantly get an overview of weekly or monthly productivity on the dashboard. Toggle works great with groups to set up your entire project team and monitor their hours using the app.

Best app for time tracking, expense accounting, resource management: xTimesheet

xTimeSheet allows professional conveyance of services to your clients and peace of mind for you. Its advanced technological tools help you focus more on your business and less on IT. It is a service delivery platform that allows time and expense management approval and invoice management. xTimesheet is a simple Web UI timesheet service that comes with a wide range of features. It will enable you to organize your work hours statistics into charts or graphs with easy accessibility at any point in time, with xTimesheet Statistics. It is embedded with various statistics like progress tracker, employee work hours, etc. Gives reminders notification via email, push notification on your device also handles the timesheet approval system efficiently. Billing hourly couldn’t be more stress-free with xTimesheet’s invoice generation features, so your client gets invoiced precisely based on work hours put into the project. xTimeSheet maps the employees’ total working hours by using the InTime & OutTime and generates reports and statistics of the same. It also allows you to export your monthly data into an excel file or other formats.

It is well said that a business is like an airplane: It has to work throughout the time. Well-serviced or finely tuned, the company should operate and continue working for both owners and consumers in the same way. Unfortunately, inefficiency is the truth. As we know, the world is becoming increasingly competitive; it has become essential to make your business more efficient. With many companies struggling for their slice of market share, there is no room for those who don’t have streamline in their business processes. As Peter F. Drucker said, work is a process, and any process always requires to be controlled. Therefore, to make work productive, it requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work. Effective time and resources management gives you control of your day. It is the cornerstone skill that will help you with everything from increasing productivity to building good habits, setting proper goals, avoiding burnout, and finding work-life balance. In this blog, we present some best practices for managing the time and resources of your business effectively.

Set and track attainable goals

First, you need to step back and think about what you want your team to be working on. Define critical goals and take into consideration your team’s capacity to execute on them. Make sure you have proper processes and consider xTimesheet software to track your progress. Also, don’t forget to keep the goals attainable. Assigning one comprehensive project even with a fair deadline could be immense. Alternatively, breaking extensive projects into smaller ones shows clear progress and drives teammates toward the final product.

Clarify roles and tasks

The next step is one-on-one communication with your team members to communicate the priorities and expectations for their roles. Firstly, describe the top two or three high priority tasks you want them to focus on. Then find out the estimated time your employees should invest in these tasks. Simultaneously, it helps them understand the expected quality of work. Also, make sure to explain the result you are trying to achieve. And finally, give your employees the freedom to work in the best possible manner.

Give and receive feedback

Develop a custom of trust in your team, providing constructive and meaningful feedback regularly. For instance, ask about the challenges, issues faced by your employees, how we can help them to manage their time more effectively, and whether they need more resources. xTimesheet helps make sure the process is useful, and all employees are performing to the best of their ability.

Don’t let meetings ruin your productivity

Improve the way you run meetings. Although meetings have a bad name in terms of performance, you need to share all the required information with them and make decisions. Invite only those who need to be involved, create a goal-oriented plan, and sum up every meeting with clear resolutions and goals. As a consequence, the meetings will gradually decrease. Try to conduct daily a crisp ten minutes meeting to get a clear idea about things. Also, don’t be afraid to experiment. You can go for stand-up or walking meetings, and you will benefit from your health.

Get all your team under one roof for the ongoing projects

Teamwork gets messy and mixed up without a centralized space to manage projects effectively. In the same manner, collaboration software is especially important if your coworkers are located in different offices and work remotely. The problem is that one can be quickly confused about where all project data is located, who is doing the tasks, how much they have done, and how much work is left? Having a real-time planning tool accessible from everywhere, your team won’t get sucked into hours of meetings and email correlation. Project management software such as xTimesheet can help coordinate all the activity in one easy-to-manage, simple fluid web-UI based tool.

Don’t overdo…

Less is more. There can be several methods and tips the company can utilize. Without pre-established business processes at the office, productivity is hampered, instead of getting improved.

… and don’t stopover

Productivity can never be achieved by accident. If you will not be disciplined with your actions while trying to improve your team productivity, the only goal you’ll reach is wasted time. To increase productivity in the workplace, you need to monitor your company’s workflow continually and never stop.

Monitoring and tracking of time are essential for carrying out initiatives efficiently. Businesses who fail to track their time end up paying in several ways – and the cost of poor time management can be enormous. Poor time management can result in you working longer and longer hours to get your work completed, resulting in tiredness, stress, burnout, poor health, and less time for your personal life. Moreover, it can cost you substantial financial losses. Poor time management can lead to a detrimental impact on a business. Organizations unable to manage their timelines properly experience many problems that affect their day-to-day operations, long-term strategies, and financial standing. Having a good understanding of the value of your time and enhancing your time-management skills could have a significant pay-off on your income. Several factors influence an organization’s success or failure, but poor time management skills may be one of the most significant. A lack of proper time management can have long-lasting effects on employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction and can carry financial implications that can make or break a business.

Could poor time management impact your business financially?

Poor time management can lower morale within an employee base. On a financial level, low employee morale can lead to lost revenue from decreased productivity. Furthermore, poorly time managed firms will often see low employee retention, leading to increased training and hiring expenses. In contrast, proper time management will motivate the employees and increase morale. This will create a productive base of employees that are happy to be there and ready to commit to their jobs in the long term. For a less negative impact on human resources, the business must have proper time management. Poor time management can also lead to reduced productivity on both an individual and company-wide level. Low productivity can reduce profits by slowing down revenue streams and creating bare-minimum work. Excellent time management can counteract this by defining and following clear deadlines to the employees and giving them an idea about how to invest their time. The best employees are a valuable asset, and no company wants to lose them. Unfortunately, these high-performing employees are often the quickest to go when time management strategies fail to maintain them. Not only will highly skilled employees be more immediate to leave under poor time management, but their time spent searching for other jobs will also slow down their productivity. A lack of employee talent will put any company at a competitive disadvantage, thus reducing profits in favor of other firms. If you are not managing your time well, you are likely to miss deadlines, which will impact your performance in your role and have a knock-on impact on others in and out of the company. If you are not efficient and effective at work, the company may need to employ additional staff or subcontract work to ensure that it meets its goals and objectives. But this additional employment will lead to massive expense to the company. Poor time management can also influence the service that your customers receive because you are not performing in an efficient, effective, and productive way. The customer service quality may suffer, or you may be late with delivering a product or service to the customers. This can, in turn, damage your organization’s reputation as customer complaints increase, and staff starts leaving for other companies. Poor time management will, in turn, result in you and the company not achieving the vision, strategy, goals, objectives, and plans as you are diverted on other tasks, you are not delivering on the key projects and service is suffering. And this in total will cost you thousands of bucks of financial loss.

Hence to avoid such financial losses due to poor time management, you need to adapt to new technological tools such as xTimesheet, which helps you manage, monitor, and track your time effectively.

Visit xtimesheet.com for more details.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way global workers think, move, and work. One thing everyone seems to agree on as we surf the pandemic wave is that life will not be the same once the worst of COVID-19 is over. Being forced to step back from jobs as workplaces shut down, or work remotely at home, has had a seismic impact, sending tremors of anxiety and uncertainty into people’s lives. What is apparent is how the pandemic has brought into sharper focus people’s relationships with their employers, as they have had time to examine their roles and their feelings about the meaning or value of their work. Amid the hardship, glimmers of optimism have emerged, and the next version of normal is slowly taking shape. Restructuring of the society, on this scale, was unthinkable as less as a year ago, yet here the situation stands. All of this has changed the way of conducting business. With such looming challenges on the horizon, there has been an increase in appetite for Working on time-bound deliverables. One needs to be well prepared to meet up the needs of giving time-bound deliveries. One can consider the following things for preparing for these time-bound deliveries, which will be useful in the post-pandemic scenario. Make deadlines a priority and follow them strictly. Those that bother about time-bound deadlines, and make it a priority to meet them, will stand out as uncommon workers and will, hopefully, be rewarded accordingly. If you work by yourself, be sure to be serious about the client’s time-bound deadlines. If you work with others, try to make them aware of how crucial it is to meet the time-bound deadlines. Remind them that a missed deadline could bring the whole team down and result in considerable business losses. Communicate with Your Co-workers to make them aware of the time-bound deadlines of the projects. Then, follow up regularly to track out that everyone is working to meet their deadlines. Prioritize your tasks according to the time-bound deadlines to smooth completion of work. Do not overcommit because it can prove out to be detrimental. If your workload gets to a point where you are too busy to meet deadlines, this can be a bad reflection on yourself and your organization. Also, before starting things, please don’t forget to plan and evaluate things for your ease. Get in use with advanced technological tools like xTimesheet, which would help you meet the time-bound deadlines. xTimesheet has been a pioneer of this new economic order, with its built-in advanced tools like project expense, progress tracker, employee work hours monitor, and many more. xTimesheet is an easy-to-use, simple fluid UI that will help you monitor, track & planning out all your work according to your required time-bound deadlines.

When you work in the same physical space that you eat and sleep, finding the right balance between work and everyday life can be challenging. All too often, the boundaries begin to blur, and we find ourselves torn between the two. When we think of work-life balance, we often think of both being in perfect harmony and equal hours spent on both sides. However, a view of this literal is unrealistic and bad for our mental health. It will only leave you feeling incredibly overwhelmed and unaccomplished. Work-life balance while working from home is more of a juggle or a blending of both aspects of our life. Work-life balance refers to how people prioritize their time and effort between professional and personal obligations. It will look different for each of us and could change daily. It will contrast drastically if you are single, married, or have kids at home all day. It varies so much between us because we lead such individual lives, and we all have our unique priorities.

We used to find it difficult to spend enough time with our families because we spent too much time on our work. Now, we have the same amount of time, and we need to divide it evenly so that both family and work should benefit from it. We used to bring stress home from work. Now we bring stress to work from our daily lives where we need to deal with our general anxiety and depression, the increased load of housework, and internal conflicts. We used to endure heavy workload periods anticipating a holiday when we can get away from it. Now we don’t know when we can get to escape, and it seems futile to bet on an escape that might not happen at the time we would need it. In the search for balance, we don’t only need to let go of the idea of having an 8-hour regular workday where we get everything done. Still, we also need to let go of a perfectly clean, structured, and organized home routine with a squeaky clean and tidy flat around us. The physical separation can mean to designate a separate space for working — i.e., not working from bed — or to signal your body that it’s working hours but getting dressed and making the bed. Mental separation is about having a different mindset for work and life. We used to unplug from work, and now we need to disconnect from the external work to ensure that we stay mentally stable. We need the time out, and we need to learn to reach for it. Previously it used to be about getting home from work, and now we need to find another way. Exercising, meditating, mindfulness, journaling can be the ways that can offer us the solution to escape — even if we can’t leave the house. When working from home, one of the best time management tips is to set specific work hours – and make sure your teammates and manager are also aware of them. Notify your colleagues, or mark in your hours using xTimesheet. xTimesheet has been a pioneer of this new economic order, with its built-in features like project expense & progress tracker & employee work/hour monitor. This way, you’re less likely to receive emails and meeting proposals during your non-work hours.

Transitioning to working from home and finding a work-life balance can take a bit of experimenting. Be patient with yourself as you learn to adjust to a new situation and take an active approach to find your work-life balance. A perfect work-life balance may not be attainable a hundred percent of the time, and the constant search for it can be exhausting, so allow yourself to embrace imperfection now and again.

2020 has been a year that has experienced some of the most turbulent periods in history. The digital and tech space continues to evolve at break-neck speed. As we dive into a new decade, it feels like there’s a little more change in the air. Digital employment is seen doubling in 2020 at a time when increasing cost pressures and an uncertain business environment is prompting many companies to go slow on overall hiring across other domains. Some of the most significant and high remuneration openings are with industry leaders. The funded startups are also competing with the branded big boys chasing some of the best available talents in the market. Startups and eCommerce companies are also looking to add people in new tech for a better customer experience. Gigs in industries that are the organizations and independent workers which engage in short-term work arrangements have also boosted up this year.

Today’s workplaces are going digital and remote working has quickly become the new norm. Working remotely offers many advantages for both an organization and its employees. Remote work is changing how the global workspace operates. In a trend that is showing no signs of slowing down, remote work is rapidly on the increase all around the world. More and more employees are working in remote positions, either full-time or some days of the week, with a large percentage of the workforce looking towards finding job opportunities with flexible schedules. Companies are also embracing this growing desire, increasingly using flexible work options as a way to entice new employees. Remote work has undergone a lot of changes ever since the first flexible telecommuting companies showed up. New technologies have appeared, and older ones have faded away. Remote work is also an increasingly desirable trait an employer can offer, with 57% of the workforce saying that the option to work remotely is their preferred employment perk. Remote workers are more productive compared to office workers.

Moreover, remote workers took fewer days off on sick leave. Since most remote workers choose their work schedules, they can organize their work to fit their most productive times and hence produce more quality work. But one major problem which companies face is managing the time and resources of the remote employees. To solve this issue, we have got for you xTimesheet for managing their expenses, keeping track of their project progress & many other aspects of their business. xTimesheet has been a pioneer of this new economic order. With its built-in features like project expense & progress tracker & employee work/hour monitor, xTimesheet provides an easy-to-use & efficient solution for business-owners, of all scale & size. With the help of determination, pragmatism & xTimesheet, your business, too, can wade through this crisis, to emerge stronger & perseverant than ever.

Visit www.xtimesheet.com to know more.
Download the free app via Google play store and Apple app store.

The most important element of an organization is its employees. To make the most of the available man-hours, i.e. to achieve maximum employee productivity has been consistently a huge task for the organizations. After all, productive employees are what makes an organization successful in the first place. Employee productivity, also known as productivity in the workplace or workplace productivity, is the measure of an individual employee’s output. The purpose of any company is to be successful – and employee productivity can make or break the success of a company. Thus it becomes very important for organizations to maintain high employee productivity. To make the most out of the available man-hours, i.e. to achieve high employee productivity in the workplace, you should implement some of the methods enlisted below.

• Improve employee skills with training

There are a lot of skills you can help your employees develop to improve their productivity such as from small day-to-day skills like touch typing and spreadsheet manipulation to bigger ones like developing their ideal time management style for their work. The proper training program also leads to greater efficiency and productivity. By improving your training procedures, you can train new hires without losing your mind.

• Don’t Be Afraid to Delegate

Delegation comes with an element of risk, but increased responsibility is important for improving the morale and job satisfaction of your employees. Give responsibilities to qualified employees that have a proven track record with success in a certain field, and trust that they will complete the tasks well. This allows your employees to gain skills and leadership experience that will ultimately benefit your company and provide your employees with a sense of achievement and direction in their careers.

• Reduce Distractions

Social media can be a huge productivity killer, but it isn’t practical to follow a no-phone policy. Instead, try to keep employees engrossed and involved while allowing them breathing room. Motivate your employees to switch off their mobiles but take regular breaks during which they can be free to check their phones. This will ensure that the time burnt at their desk is more productive.

• Improve workplace conditions

An environment that’s too hot or too cold distracts from concentration, as employees will spend more time walking around to get their cold-weather clothes or an electric fan. Ensure both heating and air-conditioning systems are in working condition for when the relevant season comes around.

• Focus on the future with effective communication

Communication is the key to success. Without effective and two-way communication, relationships end, and businesses fail. Managers who effectively communicate, clearing all the expectations and responsibilities to their employees will be rewarded with an engaged, productive workforce. Focusing on the future—instead of rehashing past issues helps demonstrate your commitment to moving forward. And that helps you find out positive solutions. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore past failures. Instead, learn to address negative situations in a positive, productive way.

• Offer Support and Set Realistic Goals

A common problem for managers is having no clear, strong idea of whether their employees are high-performing or not. Do your employees need an incentive to stay on track? Please help them by offering achievable goals. Provide clear direction to supervisors and employees to help clarify expectations. This will help to increase their productivity, as they will have clear attention and clear goals.

• Equip your employees with the right tools

Your employee’s skills are essential to business performance, but the tools they use in their work also play a vital role. Choosing the right tools will make their work easier and translates into a streamlined workflow. There are only a limited number of hours in a workday, and an infinite number of tasks your team has to complete. This is where time tracking apps, like xTimesheet, come in. xTimesheet makes it easy to track your team’s hours and productivity with activity rates, so your business can improve workplace efficiency. With xTimesheet, you can assign specific projects and tasks to each employee, so they know exactly what needs to get done and can track time more accurately.

• Ensure Employees Are Happy

A stressful workplace will not produce results. Workers that constantly work under highly stressful conditions are found to be less productive and have higher levels of disengagement and absenteeism. Hence, they need to be happy!