Category: Growth

Employee scheduling issues can be a nightmare for managers and team members alike. Besides the obvious negative impact on workplace productivity and morale, it’s also one of the main reasons employees quit. If you want your business to continue running smoothly and prosperously in the long run, managing employee scheduling problems should be our top priority.

This guide takes a deeper look at common scheduling problems—its most common types and effective tips to overcome them—to boost employee productivity and organizational profitability.

Why Is Effective Employee Scheduling Important?

A well-planned schedule is the difference between satisfied, productive employees and lethargic, frustrated ones. Optimal scheduling also ensures you have the right people present at the right time to deliver quality customer service.

Here are five reasons to give you more insight into why resolving employee scheduling issues is worth it:

Adequate Staffing

As a business, ensuring customers have the best possible experience is your biggest priority. But to ensure this, you need to always have enough staff on duty, preferably with members who can deal with customer needs promptly and effectively.

Employee scheduling allows you to plan your staff needs ahead of time, eliminating common employee scheduling issues like last-minute cancellations and employee no-shows.

Smooth and Uninterrupted Daily Operations

For any business to thrive, smooth and steady daily operations are a necessity.

As a manager, you’re responsible for chalking out your employees’ job roles and informing them about their work hours. In turn, the employees should ensure they complete the assigned tasks within the allotted time frame. This will ultimately create a well-oiled system that helps maximize productivity.

Fair Treatment of Staff

Another advantage of employee scheduling is the fair distribution of workload.

Allocate and keep track of overtime hours to avoid overburdening employees. You can also allocate leaves using schedule reports,…

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Accurate is a comprehensive employee background check solution. It provides criminal background checks, drug and health screenings, monitoring services, and more to help employers make the best hiring decisions for their businesses.

Accurate is compliant with local, national, and international regulations, making it a secure choice for your business. It allows you to customize your screening services and uses smart technology to get you the background check results that hiring managers need during the prescreening and hiring process and beyond.

Accurate Background Checks Compared

Accurate ranks among the best on our top list, and it’s the most cost-effective service for small businesses to run background checks. Register for an account and get started with Accurate today.

• Intelius—Best for unlimited background checks
• GoodHire—Best for flexible pricing and intermittent use
• B&B Reporting—Best for next-day background check results
• Accurate—Most affordable background checks for small businesses
• Verifirst—Best background check service for property management companies

Find out how Accurate stacks up to other services in the industry when you read our review of the best background check companies.

About Accurate Background Checks

Accurate Background provides employee screening services for employers in the healthcare, insurance, retail, staffing, transportation, and gig industries. It performs a wide range of these services, and its thorough searches include checking court records, driving history, drug screening, and more.

Accurate’s goal is to help you make the best possible hiring decisions using important employee information. It helps you determine whether an employee is a good fit for your business.

For example, if a person has stolen money from a company before, you’ll want to know this before hiring them…

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Our recommendation for the best business text messaging service is SimpleTexting because of its versatility, reliability, ease of use, and fair pricing. Start your 14-day free trial today.

With consumers bombarded with dozens of promotional emails on a daily basis, it’s become increasingly difficult for organizations to reach their audience. Emails get ignored, deleted, or go straight to the spam folder. 

But texting is much more effective, as the message goes straight to someone’s phone—ensuring the message gets read. The business text messaging services in this guide will help you improve engagement, increase sales, and enhance customer service.

The Top 5 Best Business Text Messaging Services

The five text messaging services reviewed below are excellent options, and they each stand out for different reasons. SimpleTexting is the most versatile on the list, as it can be used for sales, marketing, mass messaging, and one-on-one texting. Try it free for 14 days. 

• SimpleTexting – Best texting service for marketing and sales
• Textedly – Best for bulk texting
• OpenPhone – Best for unlimited calling and texting
• Podium – Best for text-to-pay
• Sendinblue – Best for texting combined with email services

Continue below for our business text messaging service reviews and buyer’s guide.

Match Your Scenario to the Right Business Text Messaging Solution

Our research team here at Quick Sprout identified the top five reasons why an organization would need a business text messaging service. Then we found the best texting solutions that fit within that category—making it easy for you to find the best texting service for…

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Do I recommend it? Yes! SiteGround is a great web host for websites of all sizes. 

SiteGround is one of the most popular web hosting services out there—and for good reason.

They offer hosting options and plans suitable for a wide range of websites and businesses. Small personal websites, business websites, and large ecommerce sites alike can all use SiteGround.

That’s why more than 2 million websites trust SiteGround for their hosting needs.

If you’re just starting out, I can’t recommend SiteGround enough.

• Starts at $2.99/month
• Free SSL, email, CDN, & backups
• Recommended by WordPress
• 30-day money-back guarantee

Get an 80% discount

It’s also a great choice for anyone who wants to switch hosting providers. They offer a great WP Migrator plugin. This is a free plugin that makes the transfer of WordPress sites very easy.

Let’s dive into the plans, types of hosting, and top benefits offered by SiteGround. Use this guide to make an informed decision to determine if SiteGround is the best web hosting plan for your needs.

Benefits of Using SiteGround Web Hosting

There is plenty of upside to using SiteGround as a web hosting service. Below are the biggest benefits I think you’ll find from SiteGround.

High uptimes

When it comes to measuring how good a web host is, uptime is the ultimate metric. This is the amount of time that a server stays up and running.

Every second your site is down spells problems for your company. Customers can’t reach you, and employees can’t get what they need.

SiteGround runs on Google Cloud, which is one of the most secure and resilient networks in the world. How many…

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Paycom is a payroll and HR technology provider focusing on user experience, ease of implementation, and employee-managed data. Founded at the inception of the dot-com bubble in 1998, it’s considered one of the first fully online payroll companies.

Paycom’s payroll software has several easy-to-use yet powerful tools that streamline payroll processing and help eliminate errors. Paycom also has software solutions for other HR processes, such as talent acquisition, talent management, and labor management.

Paycom Compared

While Paycom is worth considering, it didn’t make it to our top list. The best payroll services provider for most businesses is Gusto, whose comprehensive suite of tools simplifies payroll management like no other. You can join more than 200,000 other businesses by setting up Gusto for free.

• Gusto — Best for dispersed workforces
• Paychex — Best for experienced payroll teams
• OnPay — Best for simplifying all things payroll
• QuickBooks Payroll — Best for solopreneurs and small teams
• ADP — Best for never outgrowing your payroll provider.

You can learn more about these services in our comparison article here. 

About Paycom

Paycom Software Inc. is recognized by Fast Company as one of the World’s Most Innovative Enterprise Companies in 2022. Paycom’s online payroll management system includes tools such as Beti and Paycom Pay that improve the experience for employees and HR personnel.

Paycom also has talent acquisition tools for applicant tracking, onboarding, tax credits, and innovative tools such as Enhanced Background Checks and E-Verify. Paycom provides all the fundamentals for time and labor management, such as tools for time and attendance, scheduling, and labor allocation. It also has talent management…

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The secret to long-term business success is knowing what you want to achieve and why. OKRs serve as an excellent goal-setting tool to communicate your goals and lay out milestones to accomplish them with your team. 

Business leaders traditionally use OKR templates to pair their objectives with key results, as well as set and enact strategies. The only catch? Creating a reliable template for your team can be a tedious task, especially if you don’t know where to begin.

This guide will go into the basics of creating an effective OKR template for your business and list pre-made templates you can use if you want to skip the hard work.

What Is an OKR?

Initially pioneered by John Doerr, the concept of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a proven goal-setting and leadership framework that individuals, team leaders, and organizations use to set ambitious goals and track outcomes. 

It pairs the objectives you want to achieve with the key results you’ll use to measure progress, effectively tying your goals to your team’s daily workflows and activities.

What are OKR Templates?

OKR templates are pre-made performance management frameworks to simplify setting team objectives and tracking results. It clearly lays out the objective you want to achieve along with key results to measure your progress.

Think of it as filling in the following blanks:

I will achieve (objective) as measured by (keyresult).

Your objective is the goal(s) you want to achieve. Ideally, it should be clear, short, defined, organized, and actionable which leads to significant positive changes in your organization. Examples include increasing brand awareness, driving employee engagement and impact, and creating delightful customer experiences.

The keyresult is the metric you’ll use to measure your progress toward achieving the objective. Examples include optimizing 50 articles each month, getting an order rating of…

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Streamline your recruiting process today with BambooHR, an intuitive, all-in-one HR software that seamlessly combines application tracking and HR management capabilities. Sign up for a free trial today and try out BambooHR risk-free for seven days. 

The typical recruiting process has multiple moving parts, including updating job specifications, preparing recruitment material, sourcing and attracting candidates, screening candidates, and conducting interviews. These tasks can be challenging to coordinate. Yet, despite the workload, recruiters and HR managers are expected to find qualified candidates and fill positions quickly and efficiently. Therefore, an applicant tracking system (ATS) is a must-have solution in a recruiter’s toolkit, allowing them to automate most of these tasks. 

The 4 Best Applicant Tracking Software Tools 

We tested more than two dozen applicant tracking systems to find the best one. Ultimately, four software tools made it to our list, which you can check out in our best applicant tracking software post. Below we have the best applicant tracking systems:

• BambooHR – Best for HR Teams that Handle Recruiting Themselves
• Workable – Best for Filling A Niche Position Quickly
• BreezyHR – Best for Lowering Your Cost to Hire 
• JazzHR – Best for Companies That Are Always Recruiting 

What is an Applicant Tracking System?

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is a computer software program designed to automate and streamline an organization’s entire recruitment process. The software features may vary depending on the provider. However, one of the software’s basic capabilities is tracking candidates throughout the hiring process, from reviewing resumes, scheduling interviews, compiling feedback, and extending offers to successful candidates. 

For example, even the most basic ATS has database functionality to store candidate information. The system also makes the data searchable, so recruiters or hiring managers…

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Set up your multichannel contact center with Nextiva, a cloud-based option that provides easy access to remote IT and customer support teams. Sign up now and get 30% off on all plans. 

Effective customer service involves multiple touchpoints, including voice, social media, SMS, and web. Case in point—customers will engage with three to five different channels to resolve a request. 

If your team isn’t responsive on these channels, your organization will likely collect bad customer reviews. 

The good news is that you can set up a multichannel contact center to keep up with the evolving demands of your customer’s communication preferences without investing in increased physical infrastructure. 

The 9 Best Call Center Software for a Multichannel Contact Center

Our team researched the best call center software and found nine affordable cloud-based solutions you can use to strengthen your customer relationships. Check out our in-depth reviews to find the best software to power your support.

• Nextiva — Best overall 
• RingCentral — Easiest deployment for SMBs
• Cloudtalk — Best call center software for remote teams
• 8×8 — Best contact center software for enterprise-grade security
• Zendesk Talk — Best call center software for support and automated ticketing
• Freshdesk Contact Center — Simple contact center software for teams of all sizes
• Five9 — Best all-in-one contact center software
• CrazyCall — Best call center software for outbound sales
• Talkdesk — Best call center software for end-to-end customer experience

What Is a Multichannel Contact Center?

A multichannel contact center is a call center software that integrates multiple communication channels, such as voice, social media, SMS, email, interactive voice response (IVR), and web chat, to provide customers with seamless…

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Hiring the right candidates for your open positions is only half the battle—new employees still need to be trained on company procedures and how to do their job.

And companies need to execute this effectively. Poor training programs result in lower morale among workers, higher turnover rates, and decreased productivity.

In order to make sure your training program is up to snuff, you need to measure it. This is where key performance indicators (KPIs) come in. You can identify areas that need improvement by tracking specific employee training KPIs and making changes accordingly.

What Are Employee Training KPIs?

A KPI is a quantifiable measure that helps you assess progress toward predetermined goals. In other words, it’s a way to track whether or not something is working.

Employee training KPIs are metrics that help you gauge the effectiveness of your company’s training programs. By tracking these KPIs, you can make necessary changes to improve your program and ensure that it’s meeting your company’s needs.

There are two main types of KPIs for employee training programs: hard KPIs and soft KPIs.

• Hard KPIs: These are things that HR and onboarding teams can tangibly measure. They’re generally numbers-based and easy to track, like course completions and certification rates.
• Soft KPIs: These are harder to measure, as they’re based on intangibles like employee satisfaction and engagement. They include things like how engaged employees are during training or how likely they are to recommend the program to others.

While hard KPIs are important, soft KPIs can give you a better idea of what’s working (and what’s not) from an employee’s perspective.

Which Employee Training KPIs Should Teams Measure?

Let’s take a look at some essential employee training KPIs to monitor.

1. Employee Training Costs

This KPI measures the amount of money that your…

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When you’re interviewing for a job you really want, there’s no worse feeling than being unable to answer a difficult question. And, of course, since they’re usually complex or technical, they’re the questions you need to know how to answer. What you say—or don’t say—could determine whether you land the job. We’ve rounded up seven examples of technical interview questions to help you prepare. 

1. Tell Me About Yourself

At first glance, this doesn’t seem like a complicated question. But telling an interviewer your entire life story would take way too long. You definitely don’t want to do that. So what do you say? 

Here’s the secret. When an interviewer says, “Tell me about yourself,” they want a one to two-minute synopsis that captures your: 

• Education
• Career history
• Recent work experience
• Career goals

Before the day of your interview, prepare notes to help you provide a snapshot of your life to a potential employer. Think back through each of these periods of time and jot down two or three points for each. 

This is an excellent time to study your resume or curriculum vitae (CV), particularly if a lot of time has passed since you worked on it. A resume-building tool like Zety can help you build and edit an appealing resume. 

A tool like Zety can help you build and edit your resume.

Practice your response to the simple yet complex question, “Tell me about yourself,” several times before the big…

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