Tag: Productivity Tools

Has Remote Work Impacted Our Relationships With Other Employees? Find Out.
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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The concept of remote work and the impact it could have on the productivity and motivation of employees, has been in discussion long before the Covid-19 pandemic. A 2013 Stanford University study with 500 employees in China reported that employee productivity increased by 13% as a result of working remotely in quieter environments.

The pandemic forced employers and governments across the world to adopt the remote work model. According to Statista, the global collaboration software market revenues rose by a whopping $15.9 billion in 2019 to $19.2 billion in 2021. These figures are expected to increase over the next few years, as digital transformation and remote work are here to stay.

Some companies believe that the best practice is a hybrid-first work model, while others are pursuing efforts to bring employees back to the office. In September 2022, Kastle Systems, a key-card property management company that monitors entries and exits from office buildings, reported that some businesses are close to 50% office capacity.

So, how has remote work impacted the relationships of employees? The way they connect on a professional level or even in a friendly manner?

We conducted a survey in the United States across a wide age range, asking the participants about their experiences with remote and hybrid work models, and how it has impacted their productivity and their relationships with their colleagues.

The participants

To understand the role of remote work in the internal network of employers, we included participants across 31 states who are either working entirely remotely or with a hybrid work model. The survey sample included a diverse audience, as people of various ages and industries have varying preferences when it comes to the methods and tools they use to perform.
- 82% of the participants were aged between 25 and 44 years old.
- 18% were aged between 45 and 55 years old.
The majority worked across different industries including, but not limited to, finance, software, healthcare and information services.

Related: Employers: Productivity Among Your Remote Workers Isn’t A Problem — Your Proximity Bias Is.

Remote work and productivity

71% of our participants claimed that their productivity has improved over the past two years. A further 21% stated that it remained unchanged and 8% believe that it deteriorated.

This came as no surprise. Removing the hours of commute, preparing food at home and being close to the family are all elements that employees have appreciated. In the words of Allyson Zimmermann, Executive Director at Catalyst, “access to remote work increases employee wellbeing, productivity, innovation and inclusion.”

Whereas, no one under the age of 34 found their productivity deteriorating.

Remote work and relationships with colleagues

Despite the fact that remote work removes the boundary between work and home, people have been able to establish methods to communicate with colleagues without it becoming a burden. So much so, that for some, remote work has improved their relationships with their colleagues.

67% of our participants believe that their relationships with their colleagues have improved during the last two years. This figure was sufficiently higher among the younger ages, as 73.8% of the respondents between the ages of 25-34 answered positively.

This is in line with the findings of Dan Schwable, Managing Partner of Workplace Intelligence, who highlights that “over the past year their relationships have improved with their managers (32%), peers/colleagues on their team (25%), and peers/colleagues on other teams (21%).”

“When people trust one another and have social capital, you get a willingness to take risks, you get more innovation and creativity and less groupthink.”

Methods of interactions

No matter the benefits of remote work, employees can get lonely. Nancy Baym, Jonathan Larso and Ronnie Martin from Harvard Business Review elaborate, “the spontaneous informal interactions at risk in hybrid and remote work are not distractions or unproductive. They foster the employee connections that feed productivity and innovation — these interactions are the soil in which ideas grow.”

Our survey participants, however, have shared different methods that their employers promote in-person interactions:
- 26% said that social outings have been their company’s go-to method.
- 23% of our participants stated their company does so through work retreats and off-site gatherings.
An interesting point to note is that some companies encourage remote interactions with colleagues:
- 23% connect through digital Interactive Office Solutions.
- 11% interact through online video game sessions.
Admittedly, we have tried the last two points at Covve by hosting virtual game nights and online yoga sessions once per month with great success, connecting our teams.

In addition to the above responses, we invited the participants to share other activities that would help them interact better with their colleagues at work. The most prominent responses were:
- The inclusion of outdoor activities and sports in the company’s schedule.
- Department-wide lunches or occasional dinners with colleagues. This is a technique introduced at Google (and then the wider Silicon Valley) to encourage employees to eat together, connect and share ideas for new projects.
- The introduction of biweekly or monthly mentorship sessions.
- Working together on volunteering activities and community service projects.
Related: How to Strengthen Communication Within Remote and Hybrid Teams

Conclusion

The key message from our findings is that while remote work has increased employee productivity and improved their relationships, it did not eliminate the need for social interaction.

Company networking and bonding is still heavily facilitated at company outings and gatherings. Although online interactions and even video games are novel and rising methods in connecting employees at the remote or hybrid workplace, employees still need to connect over drinks, food, exercise, or even volunteering. This is well explained by a research-backed op-ed by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler featured in The Washington Post, which claims that “over the medium to long term, long-distance employment can’t deliver key benefits — including learning and new friendships — that come from face-to-face contact.”
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Gleb Tsipursky

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January 9, 2023
78% of Employers Are Using Remote Work Tools to Spy on You

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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

78% of employers use software to spy on employees. But the research — and common sense — shows that this tempting practice does far more harm than good. And 83% of employers acknowledge that it’s ethically questionable. When you spy on your people, you trade trust, culture and morale for sketchy data and productivity theater.

Work-from-home and hybrid models are here to stay. Companies everywhere are investing millions in digital employee experience (DEX), which reduces IT friction and makes employees happier and more productive. Separately, the same remote and hybrid shift has encouraged companies to deploy so-called productivity surveillance technologies. These have the opposite effect and even punish those who allegedly waste company time.

DEX and productivity surveillance are very different. DEX helps employees and their companies, while surveillance harms both. What’s more, data from productivity surveillance is, ironically, a terrible measure of productivity. Many companies have good justifications for specific, security and compliance monitoring practices. But we shouldn’t let productivity surveillance hide in the shadow of necessary measures that prevent disasters like data breaches.

What’s productivity surveillance, and what does it measure?

Leaders are worried about productivity. 85 % blame hybrid work for obscuring whether employees are being productive, even though 87% of employees report they’re more productive working from home.

Productivity surveillance includes things like taking screenshots throughout the day, logging keystrokes and clicks, analyzing message frequency and length and tracking website usage. All in order to measure, safeguard and (managers hope) increase worker productivity.

Companies implement productivity surveillance to police how employees are spending their time. But, the proxy measures they use are extremely problematic. Screenshots, keyloggers, mouse trackers and message frequency logs don’t capture the important work that takes place away from company devices. Social workers, for example, have been penalized for visiting clients. Companies have docked pay for routine bathroom breaks. And none of these intrusions measure true productivity, like outcomes, work quality or goal attainment.

This technology is doing real harm to people who don’t deserve it. And for what?

Related: Can Employee Monitoring Be Done Ethically?

The not-so-hidden harm and unbearable cost of surveillance

Productivity surveillance damages the relationship between workers and companies and makes employees more likely to lie, cheat, steal, pretend to work and quit.

43% of remote workers feel employee surveillance violates their trust; 59% feel anxiety; 26% feel resentment, and 28% feel underappreciated when subjected to such technologies. Tracked employees are nearly two times more likely to fake work and they spend over an hour extra online every day on average just to be seen by colleagues and managers.

The authors of two 2021 studies discovered many paradoxical effects of employee surveillance. Monitored workers are “substantially more likely” to engage in myriad negative behaviors, including damaging and stealing workplace property, taking unapproved breaks, disregarding instructions and cheating, working at a purposefully slow pace and blaming others for their actions.

During the pandemic, people took stock of their priorities. Millions have quit jobs because of poor working conditions and bad work-life balance and productivity surveillance decays both. Nearly 60% of tech workers said they would reject a job offer if they were surveilled by audio or video to enforce productivity. Roughly half would leave a job if their employers used audio and/or video surveillance, facial recognition, keystroke tracking or screenshots.

Related: Your Boss is Watching You. Here’s Why Monitoring Workers Can Be …

DEX vs. productivity surveillance

DEX, on the other hand, is a category of technology and strategies to empower — not punish — workers. DEX tools find and fix IT issues before they cause delays and frustration, and track employee sentiment about IT experiences to continuously improve them behind the scenes.

DEX is distinct from productivity surveillance because it scrutinizes things, not people: device performance, network speed, application crashes and the like. Companies use this data to enhance the technology experience for workers, not to evaluate productivity or punish them. This is precisely what employees want: 90% say their company’s digital experience has room for improvement, 82% say the delayed resolution of IT issues slows employees down and 68% say DEX has a high or critical level of influence on revenue.

Related: How to Effectively Measure and Track Employee Productivity

The contrast couldn’t be clearer. DEX makes workers more productive, makes the workday more enjoyable and makes companies more money. Policing productivity with surveillance makes your employees feel demoralized, untrusted and eager to find a better job. For leaders, it’s time to take a hard look at your so-called productivity surveillance technologies, practices and data. It’s also a moment for introspection. Let’s end this misguided trend before it goes any further.

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Mark Banfield

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December 23, 2022
The 5 Steps of Competitive Analysis On Social Media
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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Competitive analysis is an analysis of who your potential competitors are, what marketing activities they do and what results their campaigns get. It is a crucial part of the groundwork done by every business hoping to stand out and sell well.

When doing detailed social media competitor analysis, people usually start with the number of followers, content assessment and the level of engagement. After this, they should go deeper into the social listening stats.

With social media competitive analysis tools, you can reveal:
- Competitors’ online visibility and brand recognition 
- Real-user feedback on products and services
- Customer insights
- Influencers and mass media
This is a simplified version of a multi-layer process. Knowing your competition lets you perfect your unique value proposition, develop best-selling products, improve your marketing strategy and identify new market segments when done right.

When done via social listening, competitor analysis is not only doable but also worth doing, even if you’re going for it on top of your daily tasks. 

Let’s walk through competitor analysis with the help of a social media competitive analysis tool, one step at a time.

Related: 3 Reasons Why I Gladly Welcome Competition

Step 1: Pick competitors and start monitoring

While this might seem self-evident, picking the right competitors to benchmark yourself against is a task of its own. If you’re thinking big and want to conduct comprehensive market research, you need every name of the competitive brand on the list. Big and small, well-established and new to your industry. 

For more customizable competitive analysis, you’ll need direct competitors only, preferably a company list of comparable size.  As soon as you are ready with the lineup, jump to a tool. We need to set up mentions in a monitoring tool to start tracking. You’ll need to put in your brand name as well as your competitor brand names; you can use Awario for it or try other similar tools.

When you set up your alerts, give the tool some time, and it’ll pick up recent mentions as well as some historical data — this way you’ll be able to do an initial analysis. The more information you have, the more thorough your competitor analysis will be.

Related: Five Reasons Small Organisations Should Invest in Social Listening

Step 2: Go through basic social listening stats

Once the tool has collected data, you can visit the dashboard and look at the analytics.

Mentions and reach

The mentions and reach metrics will show you how much weight each of your competitors’ accounts has on social media platforms. The buzz a name generates corresponds to brand recognition and overall visibility.

In social listening terms, measuring share of voice — the number of times a brand is mentioned on the web and in social media posts vs. the number of times competitor brands are mentioned — is the closest to measuring market share. 

Countries and languages

The countries and languages sections will give you an idea of the geographical distribution of mentions. Depending on the markets you operate in, you can check specific locations to see if any market segments are overlooked and underserved by business competitors. You can see how the competition spreads and analyze what that means.

Age and gender

These sections show who mentions your brand most and reveal the age of people that post messages on the web about your company. It helps you to meet your target audience.

Sources

Next is sources —the distribution of the buzz among social networks and the web. This is an important metric that shows where the mentions come from, platform by platform. More often than not, there are unexpected insights into how well content competitors create, how their advertising is performing across social networks, and how much buzz is coming from the web and news. 

Related: Don’t Use The Same SEO Playbook As Your Competitors. Use These 3 SEO Tactics Instead.

Step 3: Dive into mentions

The mentions feed is the storage of all the mentions collected by the tool.

Here, you can access raw data and filter it in the way that serves you best. Say you noticed a spike in mentions of your competitor, and you know that most of them appeared on Twitter. Therefore, you want to do Twitter analytics and pull the influencers who have talked about the brand in the last month. Go ahead and apply the filters.

Meet the influencers

Influencers are the biggest drivers of brand visibility. When applied wisely in social media management, influencer marketing is an effective and often free tool used to generate engagement and build that genuine brand-to-customer connection other forms of marketing may fail at.

Exploring influencers working with your competitors is made easy with competitive analysis tools. First, you can filter mentions by reach to find the most influential people who’ve talked about competitor brands. This way, you discover significant and minor influencers as you go through the mentions sorted by Reach. 

Related: Influencer Marketing 101: A Blueprint for Running a Successful Campaign

Step 4: Explore social listening reports 

It’s a shortcut to the insights social media competitor analysis tools uncovered. For a marketer, reports offer an overview of all the metrics discussed in this guide. With them, you can measure competitive performance on social media in detail.

Compare brands and get back-to-back performance reviews by:
1. Share of voice
2. Counties and languages
3. Sentiment
4. Topic Cloud
5. Top mentions
6. Age and gender
7. Influencers
8. Sources
Step 5: Sit back and feel proud of the work well done!

Good job! We’ve come a long 5-step way, having reviewed primary social listening stats and analytics.

You can try various solutions for analyzing your competitors. The metrics I mentioned are available in most of them. Some social media competitive analysis tools provide integrations with other marketing apps like scheduling posts or template-creating ones.

Please use this guide as a roadmap for future social media competitive analysis. Remember: the longer you track mentions, the more insightful and comprehensive your analysis gets. 
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Aleh Barysevich

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December 22, 2022
How Proptech Is Disrupting the Real Estate Industry

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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Over the last two decades, the real estate industry has experienced significant changes. These changes are due to the influx of new technologies and advancements that benefit many stakeholders, including agents, brokers, developers, property managers, investors, homeowners and entrepreneurs. The name that we give collectively to the synergy between technology and real estate is proptech.

Below are the four most significant ways in which this innovative technology has disrupted the real estate industry.

Related: Property Tech Is Creating An Incredible Real Estate Opportunity for Entrepreneurs

Enhancing transparency

The lack of transparency and sometimes accountability has been a long-standing problem in the real estate market, with no easy solution. At the same time, solving this challenge is of utmost importance as real estate concerns everyone. All of us need places to live in, work at and so on.

However, the root of this problem lies in the very nature of real estate. As such a large market (currently valued at $3.69 trillion), real estate has sizable capital requirements that few can traditionally afford. In addition, although it may not look this way from the outside, the real estate space is rather limited and only accessible to a relatively small number of professionals. For the average person, real estate processes and deals have always been notoriously convoluted and obscure.

Thanks to the changes it’s been bringing to the residential and commercial real estate market, proptech has made major advancements in this regard. The accelerated access to data, widespread use of technology tools and enhanced feasibility of fractional property ownership have largely contributed to growing transparency and accountability in the industry. Real estate trends, analyses, deals and operations are now much more transparent than just a few short years ago.

Related: New Real Estate Technology: Disruptive Ideas Transforming the Industry

Providing real estate access to just about anyone

Proptech’s contribution resulted in another major disruption in real estate. By enabling data, analysis and investment access to the average person, proptech has opened the door for just about anyone to enter and participate in the industry.

With the help of tech-based tools, even those with limited knowledge and experience can take part in real estate transactions. For example, the advancement of CRM, analysis, virtual reality and deal-closing online platforms has lowered the barriers to entry for real estate agents and brokers. As a result, the number of licensed realtors in the U.S. alone increased from 1 million in 2011 to 1.56 million in 2021. This is a growth of more than 50% over the course of only ten years.

Similarly, while investing in real estate has always been a tempting idea for millions of Americans, many were left out of this profitable strategy due to a lack of sufficient financial resources, market knowledge, data access or even time. In the last decade, we have seen a surge in the number of technology tools that address each of these challenges and more. Therefore, we can expect the number of small-scale, beginner real estate investors to grow exponentially in the coming years.

Related: This Tech is Disrupting Real Estate. Don’t Miss Out

Breaking the monopoly of big players

On the flip side, another way that this innovative technology is changing the face of real estate is by putting an end to the monopoly of big players. Traditionally, real estate has been dominated by a few large corporations and moguls that control each aspect of the industry such as development, brokerage, investing, market analysis or property management. The reason is simple — very large barriers to entry that only some could cross.

As smaller players are now able to participate across the different segments of real estate, this is inevitably challenging the dominance of the traditional major stakeholders. While they might understandably feel threatened by this flipping reality, it will be beneficial for everyone if the industry becomes more accessible, transparent and democratic. The entry of new players will inevitably lead to accelerated growth within the industry, thus opening more opportunities for everyone involved.

Boosting productivity and profitability

Last but not least, proptech has forever transformed the way of doing business in real estate by raising productivity and profitability. This is arguably the most significant advantage that disruptive technology has brought to real estate professionals.

Investors, for instance, formerly needed months of research, data collection and analysis in order to find a single profitable deal. Now with the help of certain real estate tech tools based on big data and AI, they can locate good deals within a few minutes — whether they are interested in residential or commercial properties, the ownership of entire buildings or parts of properties.

Similarly, being a landlord and short-term rental property host used to resemble a full-time job between writing contracts, dealing with tenants, setting up rental rates, collecting rent, managing finances and all of the other tasks. Now, there are dozens of platforms that help automate and streamline the rental property management process.

The day-to-day work of agents, brokers, property managers, lenders and others has also been expedited and facilitated in a similar manner. The end result is that real estate professionals — as well as amateurs — can complete their duties much faster and more efficiently, all while making more profitable decisions about how to operate their businesses.

Final words

As a firm believer in the importance of technology across the board (but especially in real estate), I am confident that we are far from reaching the full potential of disruption in this industry. I expect these four proptech trends to continue developing in the coming years. , And, new disruptions will continue to emerge as so many entrepreneurs are eager to carry on with the democratization of real estate.

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Zain Jaffer

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December 21, 2022
This Top-Rated PDF Solution Is 66% Off Now

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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Paper has made its way largely out of business, but that doesn’t mean you don’t still work with documents regularly. Instead, we’re just working with them differently: with the dreaded PDF. These static files can be great if you’re positive that a document is ready, but a serious nightmare when you have to make changes. When you’re working with a lot of PDFs, you need a quality digital solution.

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Entrepreneur Store

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December 3, 2022
5 Ways to Clear Your Mind and Be Your Most Productive Self
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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You can be in flow one day and out the next. While earning my doctorate, I worked full-time while running a business and engaging in a dysfunctional marriage. I had committed to doing everything I had set out to do with no consideration for the impact of the pressures on my life.

But one day, I found myself unfocused and uninterested in completing my work. I sat at the computer for a while, but nothing came. I couldn’t produce. Does this sound familiar? If it does, you have experienced a mental block.

Related: 7 Unexpected Ways to Get Around Mental Blocks

Spotting the signs

I was in the middle of my doctoral program with tons of papers to write, but I was stuck. It lasted for days. Although that was the first time I had experienced a mental block, it wasn’t the last.

I realized I was prone to mental blocks when I was engaging in long periods of mental stimulation, experiencing prolonged stress, and in a highly creative period. Here are some signs to watch out for in yourself:
- Feeling frustrated and overwhelmed
- Trying to push through to finish a task but feel stuck
- Difficulty completing any tasks that required me to think, strategize or create
- Trouble producing anything of high quality
- Finding it hard to describe how you’re feeling and what you’re experiencing
One of the hardest things about experiencing a mental block is that it cannot be seen, which makes it hard to identify. Furthermore, a mental block can happen to anyone, varies in length and can happen at the most inconvenient time. They can range from acute to severe.

Related: 7 Mental Blocks Preventing Your Success

Contributing factors

Several factors can contribute to mental blocks. Some of them include:
1. Mental exhaustion: As in my case, I was overworking my brain muscles all day and night by constantly engaging in creative activities. I was experiencing mental fatigue from excess decision-making. My life was structured so that all decisions had to pass through me and couldn’t be delegated to someone else. My brain was exhausted.
2. Lack of sleep: With 24 hours in a day, eight were dedicated to my full-time job, six were going to my business, two were for traveling back and forth and three were used for cooking, bathing and spending time with my family and friends. On average, this schedule left me with five hours each day to sleep. The recommended amount of sleep per day is six to eight hours. I was not giving my brain enough time to rest to function correctly.
3. Environmental disorganization: Your workspace should reflect the clarity you want when working. When my environment is in disarray, I have the most difficulty focusing on a task. When I earned my doctorate, I was in a dysfunctional marriage. My ex-husband was verbally abusive and battling drug addiction. He would often throw fits and destroy the apartment. On days I would arrive home, items would be all over the floor and out of place. I would need to leave home to think clearly. This was one of the contributing factors to my staying so busy and out of the house as much as possible.
4. Impostor syndrome: I doubted my experience and abilities at the highest level while earning my doctorate. It felt like I was in an in-between space where I had years of professional experience, but I didn’t feel like an expert in my field. This led me to question my abilities and hesitate before writing a paper. I wanted everything I submitted to be perfect and I feared judgment. So instead of creating, I would find myself stuck on validating myself.
Related: 6 Powerful Ways to Get Out of a Mental Slump

Overcoming a mental block

Once you can identify the root cause of your mental blocks, that is half the battle. The next half consists of taking some actions to help overcome it so you can accomplish your goals. Here are a few things to try:
1. Turn up your physical activity: This is my go-to anecdote. We are full of energy, and mental blocks are created when that energy becomes stagnant. Engaging in regular physical activity helps prevent and remove blocks that occur. Physically, exercise pumps blood to the brain, which can help us think more clearly.
2. Grab a coloring book and start coloring: Coloring is relaxing and allows you to get your creative juices flowing without using much brain power. It can help your brain and body relax to improve brain functioning. When coloring, various parts of our brain’s cerebral hemispheres are activated.
3. Schedule your sleep: Putting your sleep on your schedule helps to regulate the amount you get. By getting more sleep, your brain has time to relax.
4. Meditate daily: Meditation is a powerful tool that can help us remove distractions and negative thoughts. It helps us to get in touch with our subconscious mind and release the thoughts holding us back. It also produces peace within us, which helps us gain clarity in any situation.
5. Tap into music: Music can serve as a form of therapy to help us process emotions and act as a calming agent. Listening to music also has incredibly positive effects on our brains.
The most important thing to remember when feeling stuck is that stepping away from what you are working on is always an option. Take some time to relax and shift your focus. After all, continuing to work will only frustrate you, which is never helpful. Instead, take the time to try some of the suggestions above.
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Fanike-Kiara Young

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November 4, 2022
How to Outsource Product Development
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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
According to Statista, around 74% of businesses outsource IT services, and 87% have stated their desire to maintain or increase their IT spending.

The trend of working with remote development teams, which companies often use to outsource their product development, is prospering and will continue to do so in the future.

Let’s discuss the significance of outsourcing your enterprise product development, compare it with an in-house team and discuss the considerations to understand the outsourcing model.

How does outsourced product development help?

When companies opt to outsource their product development, they’re looking for opportunities for various tech solutions and speeding up development at a lesser cost.

Moreover, companies get access to modern tools and tech stacks, new resources, and top talent, optimize their IT processes, reduce costs, and make reliable forecasting regarding their short- and long-term IT objectives.

Related: 3 Strategies to Optimize Innovative Product Development

Outsourced product development vs. an in-house team

In-house

In-house teams are created from the ground up. You’ll fill the positions based on the talent and expertise needed for product development. Building an in-house team is comparable to hiring permanent employees for your business. You’ll shortlist candidates, conduct interviews, and onboard them through typical on-prem proceedings.

The benefits of hiring an in-house team are that they’re in direct communication with the team, offer immediate support and, most importantly, are aligned with the company’s goals and vision.

On the downside, in-house teams:
- Are costly prospects with high turnover rates
- They lack versatile expertise and problem-solving depth
- Are not easily scalable for team upskilling
Outsourcing

Outsourced teams offer many benefits for businesses by providing a vast talent pool and no technology limitations, allowing businesses to exercise more control over budgeting and acquire better expertise.

The only cons are the communication barrier and trust issues in the team. Moreover, legal issues regarding the hiring process, regulatory compliance issues, information exchange before and after the project completion, cultural intricacies and time-zone differences can cause a problem.

The following are four things to consider when outsourcing product development.

1. Analyze your problems and requirements

Start by analyzing your problems, requests and requirements.

Without a clear understanding of your requirements, you gain nothing from the contractor’s team.

Create a to-do list of items and activities you need to be done, state your budget, and set approximate deadlines for all the milestones, for example, UI/UX design delivery, development, app testing, etc.

Related: What Not to Do When Outsourcing

2. Select the suitable cooperation model

The most popular cooperation models are the fixed price and time and material models. Each has its characteristics and requirements; select the one that best fits your project.

– Fixed price model

As the name suggests, the fixed price model works through the fixed budget, timelines, and scope of work and is mainly preferred for small projects with highly limited functionality. Furthermore, the model doesn’t allow for catering to additional changes and iterations, is expensive, and there is a probability of possible tradeoffs concerning product quality.

– Time & material model

The time and material model is a flexible counterpart that infuses nicely with the agile principles. Unlike the fixed model, the T&M model allows teams to start development quickly. The flexible developer hourly rate allows teams to manage tasks and set deadlines and budgets. The agile approach benefits teams in determining the result or progress at each development stage.

3. Select an agency or freelancer

Deciding whether you need an agency or a freelancer isn’t as simple as people often think—if it’s a small project, hire a freelancer; if it’s a large, complex project, hire an agency. In my experience, there is always more to the story in most cases. You need to clarify you need specialists for which particular processes. Business owners often struggle with the prospect of how and from where to land the right contractor for their outsourced product development.

Here are some of the best sources to find a reliable contractor:

Social channels. Use social channels like LinkedIn to hunt full-fledged development companies or freelancers for your next project. Check out their social posts, read reviews from previous customers, see team ratings, and more to check their business credibility and trustworthiness.

Business review websites. See platforms like Clutch, Trustpilot, GoodFirms, etc., to inspect agencies and freelancers and review their ratings, customer reviews, and other metrics to understand better their credibility and what their clients say about them.

4. Create a design and software specification document

Write a design and software specification document that describes your product (at least an MVP), how it will perform, and how you want the end users to interact with it.

Despite being a laborious job, it is one of the essential things you’ll do in product design and development.

The design and software document will contain the following elements—a comprehensive project overview, problem statement, project goals, target audience, functional requirements, intended features, aesthetic details, non-functional parts, suggestions and restrictions, and questions.

Mistakes to avoid when outsourcing development

1. Selecting a misfit contractor

Business owners often mistake hiring the first contractor or agency they come across in their search. Hence, they hire a contractor whose location, experience, expertise and skills aren’t suited for their particular project. Take your time when organizing your search and starting the hiring process. The more detailed your analysis is, the better the chances for you to hire the right company and a responsible partner.

2. Not familiar with the cost of your product development

One of the most common mistakes businesses make is not examining the cost of outsourcing product development. The estimate might look reasonable on paper, but several underlying essentials might not have been included in the quote. Request the development agency to create and send a complete quote. Ask the right questions from the development team alongside the timelines that should help you analyze the actual project cost.

3. Lack of a strategic action plan

Having a sound strategic action plan is crucial when outsourcing your project. The inability to clearly outline your requirements and state deadlines of your deliverables isn’t something you want to experience.

Ask yourself the following questions:
- What are your project’s core goals?
- When do you expect to complete your product development?
- What are the developers’ working hours?
- How many remote developers do you want to work with you?
- Is your hired team experienced enough to cater to your custom project?
Related: 3 Mistakes (Nearly) Every Tech Startup Makes — and How to Avoid Them

Final thoughts

No matter your requirements and project specifications, there are always pros and cons of working with an in-house team and outsourcing your product development. However, take your time to weigh the considerations by analyzing your problem and requirements, selecting a suitable cooperation model, choosing an agency or freelancer, and creating a design and software requirement document. Last, avoid mistakes when outsourcing product development, including selecting a misfit contractor, inadequate cost estimation, and lack of a strategic action plan.
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Asim Rais Siddiqui

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November 1, 2022
This Military Tip Will Make You Rethink Productivity

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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

People have looked to the military for lessons in productivity for a long time. When the stakes are life or death, the necessity for efficacy is as high as it can be. It’s safe to assume that by now, the militaries of the world have figured out what works and what doesn’t. As such, uniform clothing has been implemented in nearly every conceivable institution, and many of the internet’s productivity gurus tout the importance of making your bed every morning. One lesson that has been wildly underemphasized, however, lies in the structural chain of command itself that is native to all militaries. I’ve found that an easy way to think about this lesson is through the metaphor “the soldier vs. the general.”

Related: Leadership Tips to Turn Around a Low-Morale, High-Turnover Team

In my early days of being an entrepreneur, I loved to tell people “I’m my own boss.” I thought it was just a clever way of saying that I didn’t have a boss. It turns out that I have indeed always had a boss, just not a good one. To be an entrepreneur is not simply to work without a boss, it is to function as both the employee and the boss. This is a distinction that I failed to fully grasp for years; I was a bad employee but a worse boss. I became much more productive and disciplined in my work life when I started thinking about my role in terms of military positions.

The soldier

Soldiers follow orders, or people die. There is much more mutual discourse within a conventional employment relationship than within the military. When I was an employee, I could argue with my boss, ask them to assist me with a given task and even sometimes convince them to change directives entirely. Soldiers cannot do this. The power hierarchy within the military is absolute and distinctly segmented. Soldiers do not strategize, because they are too busy taking action on the orders that have been given to them, and action is what wins battles.

Related: Military Service Is the Ultimate Training Ground for Entrepreneurship (Infographic)

The general

Generals are not the boots on the ground that get tangible results but they are indeed the reason why soldiers are so effective. The purpose of a general is to do all of the critical thinking for soldiers so that the soldiers can focus on action. Generals know that the time spent strategizing is time that cannot be spent executing, and vice versa, thus it is the duty of a general to relieve soldiers of the burden of strategizing. On the battlefield, latency and ambiguity cost lives. If a general fails to deliver well-thought-out orders, the lives of soldiers are wasted.

Related: 10 Lessons from America’s Greatest Military Leaders

The biggest productivity hack that I learned from the military is that the roles of soldiers and generals (action and strategy) have always been very clearly segmented from one another. As an entrepreneur, I am often an army of one. Entrepreneurs don’t always have teams of people to help with completing tasks, which means I must wear multiple hats, so to speak. I realized that at any given time during my work day, I function as either a soldier, a general or some murky combination of the two. It turns out that it is very easy to unknowingly start blending these two roles. Failing to definitively segment them was the biggest inhibitor to my productivity as a young entrepreneur.

Every time I started to reevaluate my plans while still in the midst of executing said plans, I failed to finish things promptly. Trying to take action while simultaneously trying to strategize is counterproductive, and it yields friction and latency. The most productive entrepreneurs are those who have clear boundaries set between the two roles. What this translates to in practice is having firm time blocks in place for each role. This is not to say that the secret to enhancing my productivity was simply to make a schedule (though that was definitely a prerequisite). It was more than that. The secret was to completely sever all executive decision-making from the portion of myself that was responsible for completing a given task. This is to say, the secret was actually to minimize the total amount of time that I was allowed to think.

I realized that if I could reduce the time spent thinking, I effectively created more time for action. What this primarily meant is that I needed to quit switching from the soldier to the general sporadically in the middle of the day; latency was killing me. I determined that routines and habitual schedules were key. Furthermore, I realized that as a soldier, I needed to start obeying the orders of the general in totality, without exception; if I started something I needed to finish it, without question.

I did this by only allowing myself to function as the general for one hour per day right before bed. During this hour I would map out all of the orders for myself the following day, along with priorities so that I knew exactly which task to switch to after I completed one. I started laying out my outfits for the next day and planned my meals. The goal was to eliminate any uncertainty; I needed to always know what was to come next.

The moment I started segmenting my responsibilities as definitively as military positions was the moment my whole career changed. I began achieving in a day what used to take almost a week. Things that felt difficult became the new standard. If ever I felt unproductive, I would first identify whether the soldier or the general was to blame, and that helped me resolve issues much faster than usual. The militaries of the world have shown us that the secret to being effective isn’t to be a one-man army, it’s to know your role.

Related: 26 Inspiring Quotes About Crisis Management and Teamwork from Military Veteran Entrepreneurs

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Austin Ambrozi

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October 17, 2022