With 5+ years in digital marketing, Yulia Mamonova is driving Lemon.io’s growth with her spot-on writing and clear messages. A writer and a researcher at heart, Yuliia knows how to engage with the readership and build a story that’ll stand out. Yuliia has written over 1500+ pieces over the last few years reshaping the world of FinTech, startups, and content marketing with her skills.

If you are reading this article, you may have already considered outsourcing some of your work to a freelance professional or perhaps even had some experience hiring a freelancer for your project. Or you may have been on the other side of the fence and taken up gig jobs yourself.

Anyway, the post-COVID world has shown us that we need to reevaluate our approach to ‘normal’ work and that freelance workers or independent contractors have a lot to offer to modern businesses facing a lot of budget constraints in these interesting times.

By hiring skilled freelancers, companies can secure themselves the expertise that would otherwise be hard to afford. They can be more responsive to the ever-evolving customers’ demands and still save money by cutting down on benefits.

However, to bring these perks to life, one must choose a real hero of the business’ story, someone who will understand what your team is trying to achieve and consistently contribute to the company’s goals.

In this Process Street post, we’ll be covering:

• Why do I need an interview anyway?
• 12 interview questions to ask a freelance developer

Let’s get right into it!
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Remote work isn’t the future of work – it’s the present. Since 2020, video calls are happening twice as often, and almost 70% of full-time workers are working remotely compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Today, employees not only embrace remote work, they expect it, with one in two US workers stating that they would not be prepared to return to a job that didn’t accommodate for some kind of remote working.

For many reasons, the sentiment towards remote work from an employee perspective is largely positive, with a surprisingly large number of surveyed individuals stating that they have been able to maintain or even improve their productivity during the pandemic.

That’s why, in a post-pandemic world, so many of the remote-first companies who had already established effective fully-remote teams are thriving.

In this article, I’ll examine some of the best remote-first teams you could be working for, with a focus on what to look for when considering if a company is truly fully-remote, and how the company culture can reflect a remote-first mentality.

Here’s a breakdown of the article:

• State of remote work in 2021
• Remote-first vs remote-friendly
• Questions to consider when looking at remote-first companies
• Best remote-first companies to work for in a post-pandemic world

Let’s start with the current state of remote work; what can we learn from recent reports & statistics?

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It’s 4 p.m. and you’ve got a welcome call with your newest team member. Ideally, you’d feel full of life, ready to welcome her with enthusiasm and get her excited about the weeks to come.

Problem is, this is your 6th video call of the day and you’re overrun with Zoom fatigue.

You’ve been turned “on” (not in a good way) for the last 7 hours and are severely lacking in enthusiasm, let alone excitement.

The worst thing is, the majority of those meetings were unnecessary, everything covered in them could’ve been communicated asynchronously.

Simply put, asynchronous communication involves communicating remotely without expecting an immediate response. This can be done via iMessage, pre-recorded video/audio, making suggestions to an existing project (think: Google Docs/Sheets, Github, Jira).

The challenge is knowing, when and how to use synchronous vs. asynchronous communication methods. Fortunately, this post is here to teach you just that so you can avoid Zoom fatigue and stop being real-time, all the time. Feel free to skip to a specific section of the post using the links below.

• What is Zoom fatigue?
• Avoid Zoom fatigue by making sure communication is always intentional
• Avoid Zoom fatigue: Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication
• Advantages and disadvantages of synchronous vs. asynchronous communication
• Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication tools at Process Street
• Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication: Wrapping up

Let’s get started! 🚀
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This is a guest post by Katerina Mery, a marketing specialist at Fond. Fond is a rewards and recognition company dedicated to building places where employees love to work. Mery authors articles about how to leverage recognition programs to drive company success.

Think back to the last time a colleague acknowledged you for a job well done.

How did you feel?

Did the experience have an impact on your behavior moving forward? Did the exchange affect your relationship with the person thanking you? What about your relationship with the company in general?

63% of employees who are acknowledged for the work they do are unlikely to look for a new job. Expressing gratitude at work takes relatively little effort, but it can create an incredibly memorable professional experience. Knowing that you did a good job is one thing, having a colleague call out your great work takes the experience to another level.

Business objectives can sometimes feel at odds with an enjoyable employee experience. Employee acknowledgment, however, is a practice that effortlessly supports both.

From this Process Street article, you’ll learn how employee acknowledgment simultaneously caters to your organization’s business objectives. You’ll also learn how to meet the emotional needs of your employees using fantastic positive feedback loops that generate continual improvements across the board.

We say employee acknowledgment is a smart initiative a company can adopt – but before you take our word for it, allow us to explain why.

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say.

• What is employee acknowledgment?
• Employee acknowledgment and its effects on workplace psychology
• How employee acknowledgment benefits employee wellbeing
• The organizational benefits of employee acknowledgment
• Use Process Street for your employee acknowledgment strategy

Let’s jump to it!
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Nouman provides ghostwriting and copywriting services. His educational background in the technical field and business studies helps him in tackling topics ranging from career and business productivity to web development and digital marketing. He occasionally writes articles for carpet cleaning.

Working from home has become the new normal. However, it can be difficult to ensure productivity when you work at home.

Although the concept of a traditional office is no more, we all require a dedicated workspace to get things done.

If you are having trouble staying productive while working from home, then chances are that you need to set up a home workspace that inspires productivity. Not many people realize just how important it is to have a dedicated workspace.

According to data, workspace design plays a huge role in our productivity levels.

The question is: How can you design your workspace in such a way that boosts creativity, connection, and productivity? Fortunately, this Process Street blog post is here to help. There is no need to worry as this guide will provide you with all the information you need to feel motivated to work.

When you decide to work remotely, you need to understand that it comes with a fair share of complications. The main of which involves setting up your home workspace to ensure maximum productivity. Fortunately for you, this article is here to help you get started.

• Getting started with your home workspace
• Setting up a home workspace: Top tips from a small business owner
• Setting up a home workspace: Top tips from an SEO team lead
• Setting up a home workspace: Top tips from a graphic designer
• Key takeaway: Set up the perfect home workspace to boost productivity

Let’s jump right in!
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This is a guest post by Romi Catauta at Toptal. Catauta works in the marketing field and is passionate about writing on web design, business, interior design, and psychology.

Did you know that 53% of developers said working remotely was a priority when looking for a new job?

Finding the right developers to add to your team can be one of the most challenging hiring tasks for your HR department. It’s a cut-throat market, with smart companies steering top talent away from competitors.

And when you consider most developers are looking for remote-based work, this makes developer onboarding a whole different ballgame.

To help, we at Process Street give you our top tips, tricks, and best practices that’ll help you identify, hire, and retain talented remote developers.

Whether you’re wondering how to hire a CSS developer, a full stack developer, or anything in between, this guide will help you find the perfect candidate for the job.

We at Process Street know a thing or two about remote work. The below advice has is therefore tried, tested, and approved as best practice.

What are you waiting for?

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to the section of choice, or scroll down for all.

• What is developer onboarding?
• Hiring remote developers: The advantages, drawbacks, and solutions
• The remote developer onboarding process with 11 onboarding best practices

Let’s get started!
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This is a guest post from Katie Stearns, PR and outreach manager at BeeBole Timesheet. She’s a digital marketer who loves monitoring management and leadership trends to create more valuable B2B content for managers. Katie is particularly interested in helping the world become a more productive place.

For many HR professionals and company executives, 2020 has turned out to be rather stressful (to say the least). Many of us started off the year with a twinkle of hope in our eyes, but the current pandemic has proven to be more challenging than we imagined.

For many companies, switching to remote work was required, but they never considered if remote work was right for their teams. As company executives decide whether they want to return to the office or continue to work from home and move their operations online, employers are likely asking many questions.

If you and your company are considering a shift to remote work, here are some tips to help you get started on your journey. In this Process Street post, we’ll be covering:

• What is remote work?
• 15 questions to ask yourself before the work from home transition
• Is the work from home transition right for your team?

Let’s jump right in!
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This is a guest post by Donald Fomby. Donald is a freelance content writer who works for ClassyEssay. He has spent more than seven years in the copywriting and blogging industries, writing articles, guides, and checklists for small eCommerce businesses. Donald uses his curiosity about online business to write about topics valuable to small business owners.

The product manager’s role is a juggling act.

To fulfill the needs of expectant customers, the product manager needs to work with the sales, marketing, and engineering teams — alongside the rest of the product team — to facilitate necessary changes and improve the product(s) in question.

But that juggling act has gotten even harder as of late.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, many product research and management processes that were done collaboratively and in-person have now pivoted online. Needless to say, this change had made it more difficult for product managers to succeed in their role and complete projects in the way they’re used to.

This transition may have caused workloads to build up, task lists to overflow, sprints to stagger, and thus, impacting the rest of the product team.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. The truth of the matter is that you can successfully manage any product research or development project remotely with optimal organization.

It’s the key to bettering collaboration with your remote team, and ensuring you and the rest of your product management team are keeping on the right track. If you strategically organize your work, you will also be able to instill and maintain successful collaboration with the people you’re working with, despite the many miles that keep you apart.

Seeing as 86% of executives say that a lack of collaboration is the most common reason for failure in their companies, it’s something that you need to get to grips with, particularly as a product manager.

By reading through this Process Street guest post, you’ll do exactly that. To boot, I’ll also provide some extra tools to help you thrive as a product manager! Just make your way through these sections:

• The 4 must-follow tips & tricks to excel as a product manager
• Product management tools to thrive in 2020 and beyond

Let’s get started.

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This is a guest post from Margo Ovsiienko, you can find her website at margoleads.com. Margo is a tech enthusiast and a growth marketing strategist. She is passionate about topics related to SaaS growth, startup strategy, and IT development.

To outsource or not to outsource? The eternal tech question, and a persistent hot topic in tech communities. How do you manage your expectations against your budget and be sure you’re finding the right team for the job? This can be especially challenging for anyone lacking experience with hiring (which is not a task to take lightly).

Building an in-house team vs outsourcing those efforts can depend heavily on the kind of product you’re trying to build; how complex is the feature set? What does your roadmap look like for the next 12 months? These kinds of questions will help you to figure out whether or not your best bet would be in-house or outsourced.

For long-term, committed projects, building a trusty in-house team is almost certainly your best bet. But working with an outsourced, remote team has its place and also comes with many advantages, such as reduced set-up or training time (in the case of outsourced design and development teams) and ability to rapidly develop and tweak early stage concepts (often for a cheaper rate) when searching for the ideal product-market fit.

So, how can you build a SaaS product that gains traction fast before you run out of limited funds?

In this Process Street article, we’ll consider how to build a SaaS product that gains traction fast on a constrained budget, and kick-start your growth.

• What you need to know before you build a SaaS product
• How to validate your product idea
• Key steps of product development
• To outsource or not to outsource?
• How to build a SaaS product: Key takeaways

Let’s get started!
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In the Before Time (read: before coronavirus struck and remote work became more commonplace) there were four types of people on the morning commute.

First, there was the person falling asleep in their seat – most likely one of the 15% of Americans who doze off while at work. Second, there’s the one working on their laptop while drinking their fourth cup of coffee of the day. Then there’s the person who’s listening to music or reading a book, conserving their productivity for the office. Last but not least, there’s the individual who’s working one minute but snoring the next.

These people are wolves, lions, bears, and dolphins respectively.

Not sure what the hell I’m talking about?

Then you haven’t heard of chronotypes.

Luckily for you, in this Process Street post I’ll be exploring what a chronotype is, the 4 different sleep chronotypes, and how to find and hack your chronotype for maximal productivity.

Just read through these sections to get completed clued-up:

• The chronotype definition
• Bear, wolf, lion, and dolphin: The four chronotypes
• The benefits of identifying your sleep chronotype
• How to find your chronotype
• How to hack and make the most of your chronotype!

Time’s ticking, so let’s dive in! 🌙

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