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How to Introduce Time Tracking to Your Team
You’ve decided to start tracking your team’s time. You understand the benefits of time tracking and believe it’s right for your team and organization. Your next step is to get your team on board and kick off the time tracking program.
Time tracking is a powerful asset for teams of all sizes, including in-house employees and teams of outsourced freelancers. Time tracking offers better productivity, accountability among team members, faster work production, and accurate billing when used properly.
Some team members are naturally suspicious of team time tracking. This hesitancy is often due to preconceived notions of what time tracking is and how it works. They may assume that you’ll use it to force them to work unreasonably hard or fast. Obviously, this isn’t your intent, so thoughtfully introducing your time tracking program to your team is essential. You can soothe many of their fears with the right information.
Many teams welcome time tracking as a powerful tool to improve productivity and gain insight into their work. This article offers a step-by-step guide to introducing time tracking to your team. Then we illuminate some common concerns team members make about time tracking and how you can address them.
Time tracking offers better productivity, more accountability among team members, faster work production, and accurate billing when used properly Share on X -
The Complete Guide to Team Time Tracking
As a team leader, you want your team members to be as productive as possible to make the team (and your overall organization) successful. You also want them to be happy, satisfied workers who don’t struggle with burnout or underappreciation. You can manage both of these concerns with team time tracking.
At one point, we used time tracking only to calculate salaries and paid time off. But in the age of data, time tracking offers numerous additional benefits – for businesses and individual employees. To be competitive, you should take advantage of this powerful technique
In this guide on team time tracking, we explain what it is, how it works, the benefits you can get from it, and how to implement it in your team.
As a team leader, you want your team members to be productive, happy, and satisfied without struggling with burnout or underappreciation. You can manage all of that with team time tracking. Share on X -
The Top Hard and Soft Freelancing Skills You Should Spend the Time to Develop
As a freelancer, you’re in charge of everything, including your own personal development. No one will force you to attend classes, take courses, study new techniques, or practice new skills. That all falls on you.
If you’re thinking, “I don’t need to improve; I already know how to do my job,” you’re making a serious mistake. There is always something new to learn, some new way to improve yourself and the work you perform for your clients. To be competitive and find reasons to raise your rates, you must continually develop your skills.
But which skills should you improve? We can help with that. This article lays out the top freelancing skills that will help your career.
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Freelancing Red Flags: 16 Signs to Abandon That Problem Client
Freelancing is more popular than ever, which means more people and businesses are using freelancers to meet their needs. It’s a tremendous time to be a freelancer as nearly every industry is embracing this work model, especially since the pandemic.
But while many of your client relationships are healthy, productive, and lucrative, some just aren’t worth the trouble. As a freelancer, it’s smart to identify your problem clients and abandon them quickly. The sooner you call it quits with a bad client, the sooner you can start working with a good one.
How do you predict if a client will be a problem? By looking out for red flags that indicate the arrangement won’t be pleasant for you. This article lays out the top freelancing red flags and what to do if you spot them.
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Should You Call Yourself a Freelancer? Why Your Title Might Be Holding You Back
The words you use to describe yourself matter. Words affect your personal brand. They influence people’s perception of you, especially when a few words is all they know about you. If you want to be a successful freelancer, you need to be thoughtful with the words you use to describe yourself and your work.
The words we speak aloud can even affect our own brains. Simply introducing yourself to a client can change the way you view yourself. If you refer to yourself as an experienced professional, eventually, you will start to think of yourself as such. But if you refer to yourself as an amateur or newbie, that’s exactly what you’ll be.
Self-perception is important because words can influence your own mood and behavior. Having repetitive negative thoughts can activate the brain’s fear center. If you think of yourself as an imposter who lacks control over their work and career, you’ll present that message to clients and prospects through your behavior and language.
Your title is one of the first pieces of information that prospective clients learn about you. It should tell clients who you are and how you can help them. This begs the question: Are you introducing yourself properly? Does it make sense to call yourself a “freelancer,” or is there a different way to set the stage for client relationships?
In this article, we help you understand whether it makes sense to call yourself a freelancer or if a different term is more suitable for your career.
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Is Freelancing Worth It? How to Determine if Freelancing is Viable
Like many professionals, you might be wondering if you can make a living as a freelancer. After all, lots of people are trying it. A FlexJobs survey found that 36% of U.S. workers freelanced during the pandemic. That’s an increase of 2 million since 2019. According to a Fiverr study, 68% of remote workers are interested in freelancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
That isn’t to say that people are only freelancing because of the pandemic. Countless professionals are tired of traditional employment. They want work that’s satisfying, fulfilling, and adaptive to their life goals. It’s no surprise that the freelance/gig economy is more attractive than ever.
For some people, the switch to freelancing is forced. They lose their job (often due to the pandemic) and have to make ends meet by finding new ways to earn income. Others do it by choice. They choose to abandon a life of traditional work in search of something more fulfilling. You’ve probably witnessed friends and family attempt freelancing.
In this article, we help you decide if freelancing is right for you. We’ll cover the benefits and drawbacks of the freelance lifestyle. Then we offer some questions to ask yourself to help you decide if you’re ready to make the switch.
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How to Use Time Tracking for Better Freelance Job Bidding
Bidding on new jobs is arguably one of the most complex parts of working freelance. You need to send proposals to secure more work, but you don’t get paid for sending bids. Plus, there is plenty of rejection involved, making bids feel like an arduous chore.
Producing accurate bids will ensure you get paid what you’re worth, but first, you need a clear understanding of your time. You need to know how long tasks take to complete to factor into your proposals. If you get this part wrong, you could make a lot less money than you intend, or worse; you could even lose money.
For instance, let’s say you expect it will take three hours to write an article for a new client. But when you get into the task, it actually takes five hours. That’s two hours of unpaid time. If you knew the article would take five hours, you might have asked for a higher rate. Getting the time estimate right is even more critical for those who bill by the hour.
So how do you get a firm understanding of how you spend your time? Guesses and estimates are not good enough. You need to create your proposals from a data-based perspective by looking at your history. To get this information, you need to track your own time using time tracking software to get this information.
In this article, we teach you how to produce accurate freelance job bids by using time tracking software. These tips will make sure you are getting paid for your work.
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Freelancing in a Post-Pandemic World
The COVID-19 pandemic changed countless industries in a myriad of ways. The concept of work is evolving. Where once work meant going all-in with a single employer, it is now more diversified and distributed. Freelancing is becoming a bigger part of our lives.
The pandemic’s damage to the workforce was quick. Millions of people were furloughed all over the world. Entire positions were eliminated, never to return. 40 million Americans were unemployed by May 2020. Millions were added to that number each week.
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How to Create Trusting Relationships with Your Clients (and a More Satisfying Freelance Career)
When your clients come to you for help, they are putting their problems in your hands. They seek your knowledge and expertise, your time, and your labor. Each client takes a risk when they hire you. Even if they already know the quality of your work, they assume an opportunity cost every time they engage with you.
If you want your clients to come to you right away when they need help, they need to trust you. They need to know that you have the solutions for their problems and that you will meet their needs in a fair, organized, and honest way.
We have to be honest though: Building trust with your clients is not quick. It takes time, effort, and attention to detail. You have to work for their trust, building it little by little over time. Some clients will trust you after the first job. Other clients require years of partnerships before you become a trusted ally.
In this article, we are going to explain why it is important to build trust with your clients, then we will offer some strategies to build that trust.
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Can You Trust That SaaS Product with Your Data? 6 Things to Consider
There are more than 15,000 SaaS companies in the world. Most of us use several every day for work, personal organization, or entertainment. While each SaaS product we use adds a lot of value to our lives, they also create some risk.
SaaS applications store your data in the cloud. This makes it easy to access from any location, but it also puts your data at risk. If you can access it anywhere, so could malicious parties who might want to use your data for nefarious purposes.
But what is “data?” Doesn’t that apply to big companies that collect mountains of information on their customers and users? Yes, but you create data as well. Many people think they do not own or use data in their day-to-day lives, so they do not consider the trustworthiness of their applications.
“In computing, data is information that has been translated into a form that is efficient for movement or processing,” explains Jack Vaughan on TechTarget. “Relative to today’s computers and transmission media, data is information converted into binary digital form. It is acceptable for data to be used as a singular subject or a plural subject. Raw data is a term used to describe data in its most basic digital format.”
Essentially, you create data whenever you put your information into a digital format, like when you add your gym schedule to your calendar, when you log tasks in your time tracking app, or when you tell Alexa to make a shopping list. You probably create a lot of data every day without realizing it.
