Which countries and areas should you look for quality remote countries? We wrote an earlier post more on processes needed and questions to consider related to remote workers. This is to be more data and visual driven, hopefully showing you pockets and areas that best align with your hiring interest.

To thrive in an ever-changing global economy this global hiring question will continue to gain in relevance. Those with a plan on the kinds of employees they want and a plan to go out and efficient acquire them will have a huge step ahead the competition. Personally, I’ve often asked myself this question many times. Typically I just look at individuals on larger freelance types of sites and not being as interested in the country that they are located in, but I’m just not crazy about paying that 10% fee that most take. So in lieu of that (or not) what are the best counties to place your eggs in? How would you even go about answering this type of question?

The first logical place to look at is where are the largest amounts of people, right? If you look at that here is what our world looks like now, an interesting map that skews the size of the country based on the population.

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Remote work is on the rise, no one will argue with that. This has resulted in the birth of numerous tools that aim to help managers ensure productivity of their virtual employees. Two of the most popular remote time tracking tools are Worksnaps and Time Doctor.

If you are a manager or a business owner managing employees, it is important for you to ensure high productivity of your team. With a remote team it may be harder to ensure as of high productivity because you can’t keep as close tabs on everyone’s daily routine. Use of such time tracking tools is a great way for you to make certain (as best as possible) that your team is working on the tasks assigned to them. These tracking tools will help make sure that they are not spending their time lazily browsing the Interwebs, streaming videos unrelated to their jobs, or posting new Facebook statuses of their “easy new job working at home”. Not only do they keep your remote team more on task, more importantly they allow you to compare productivity of specific individuals and give feedback on how they are utilitizing their time.

Now that you know the importance of using such tools, you may already be wondering what are the differences between these remote time tracking tools. In order to answer this question, you should take the time to know more about them. Comparing them, their qualities, their features, and of course, their price will help you determine which of the two is the best fit for your business.

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My family just got from our first Disney vacation. I can’t say enough about the employees and just how much they love their job. Whoever does their human resources is doing an outstanding job.

In addition to just having nice people, I was amazed by a number of additional things at Disney as well. Related though to my day job, the Fastpass technology they use was really cool, especially when we were able to go to the front of a 130 minute wait for Space Mountain. Essentially, Fastpass allows park goers to skip ahead of everyone else in line. In order to qualify for Fastpass though you must check in ahead of time at the particular ride for which you would like to skip waiting in the line. You are then given a ticket with a 1 hour time slot in which you are suppose to return at, normally 2-8 hours in advance. I believe presumably this would provide a more stable stream of riders to the more popular rides.

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When your job is to work with the community, post to forums and social media, and keep up to date on social media trends and activities, it can be hard to stay focused and not get lost in the sea of whatever is going on. Social media is a time sink. Few will deny that. So what do you do when your job is social media but you’re required to be productive rather than distracted?

There are some key methods of planning, goal-setting and time tracking that can help you be accountable for your time and what you spend it doing. When you enter social media, forums and other online communities, it’s very easy to get sucked into the nothingness of distractions when you work online but time tracking and a schedule with goals you can keep will help you avoid this.

The first thing you need is the commitment to reach your goals. If you’ve fallen into some poor habits, you might also need the willingness to change but it’s possible and it’s probably when you have the right tools.

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