02 Nov
Education

44 Virtual Icebreakers and Team-Building Activities to Try Immediately

Remote teams that understand the benefits of virtual icebreakers are generally more productive and don’t see distance as a barrier. Managers can boost efficiency by applying icebreakers while supervising their remote teams. The fundamental importance of virtual icebreakers is to bring online teammates together and boost their rapport with one another. Given that, between 2019 and 2021, the population of remote workers more than tripled, icebreakers should have become widespread. Virtual team building is how you can help remote employees foster connections and strengthen relationships.

This is a low preparation but fun and engaging ice-breaker for any time of day. With virtual working, gone are the days of grabbing a quick 9am coffee with a colleague and catching up about anything from home-life to the weather. These simple moments can be one of the major things missed by employees. Schedule in a few 15 minute, virtual coffee https://g-markets.net/software-development/understand-all-about-asp-net-mvc/ mornings across the week for non-work related conversations. Not only does this loosen you up for the day ahead, but it is also a nice touch of human interaction that allows your teams to know each other better. When using ice breakers, it’s important to note that their purpose is to dissolve awkwardness and tension rather than create it.

Question Mingle

To make the game more interesting, give them a limited number of attempts to guess the song title. A virtual wine tasting party is pretty similar to a regular wine tasting; only in this, the winery comes to you, instead of you going to the winery. Some wineries offer a virtual tour of their vineyards and cellars.

What are some fun ice breaker questions?

  • Quirky Ice Breaker Questions. ❖ If you could hang out with any cartoon character, who would you choose and why?
  • ❖ What would you like to be known/remembered for? ❖ What sport would you compete in if you were in the Olympics?
  • ❖ If money and time were no object, what would you be doing right now?

Set reminders on your calendar or app to check in and moderate the channel. Conversations can happen at any time, but the important thing is that no one’s remarks or comments go unnoticed What does a Remote Customer Service Agent Do? or are disrespectful. Team building activities should be heartwarming, positive, and rewarding. Your team can choose any cause they like and raise charity to help the organization.

Icebreaker Riddles For Meetings

Either way, we’ve got you covered with riddles ranging from easy to hard to keep your employees on their toes. Incorporate more laughter and philosophical thought into your virtual meetings to boost productivity, creativity and collaboration. For riddles to bring into any virtual meeting, save these team building brain teasers with answers. This fun icebreaker game can get nonsensical quickly—but that’s what makes it fun.

  • Even if they do, icebreakers encourage networking and offer an effective way to lighten the mood for other guests who need some time to settle in.
  • During the virtual fundraiser event, your team can generate a monetary donation to help the charity or provide necessary items to an organization.
  • Be prepared to have smoke coming out of your ears as you attempt to figure out these riddles.
  • Whether your members are solving mysteries or learning new leadership skills, they will feel more connected as a team and be able to spend a little downtime reading.
  • When you’re creating your questions, just make sure to keep it fun and avoid political or divisive questions.

To play this game, the team moderator divides the team into equal groups. The moderator should display several things and the player should try and memorize the same within 60 seconds. Once the timer hits one minute, he/she should recall the names of as many things as possible. This personality can be a celebrity or even a person from the team itself!

What is a virtual team?

For example, if you have a large group, you can break everyone up into smaller group and utilize the Zoom breakout session rooms. This can really add to the intimacy factor you’re your large team might be missing when working from home. Find 1000+ of the quirkiest, funniest, and most interesting Would You Rather questions all in one place. Team building has been shown to help employees develop better relationships and increase engagement. The gamification and achievement badges are also a fun way to motivate your employees to participate.

  • Try these riddles that range from simple to challenging.
  • The key to winning this game is to spot Wally before anyone else on your team does.
  • Use a virtual whiteboard or other apps to have employees add important milestones.
  • But the importance of these skills doesn’t waver as we get older, in fact, they become more important.
18 Giu
Education

How to Combat Zoom Fatigue

If you’re training, just like we record a phone call, you could record the video call so others can watch it at their convenience without having to sit through the zoom meetings. Participants of video calls should also be able to switch off their video if participation is not expected. Humans are remote working fatigue social animals that weren’t built to socialize through a computer screen. “Zoom gloom” is a natural result of us staring at our screens all day. The unprecedented explosion of the use of video conferencing interfaces in response to the pandemic has been taxing for our brains, and emotions.

With the help of a WiFi extender or LTE, you could also bring your phone, tablet, or laptop outside and enjoy fresh air while attending a Zoom meeting or working solo. Sometimes, it is not the screen itself that makes you feel sluggish, but rather feeling stuck indoors. Logging offline and stepping away from the screen may be easier said than done. Zoom fatigue is a growing phenomenon, yet there is often little escape from staring at screens in 100% remote offices. The reality is that virtual work involves a great deal of staring at computers, and there is very little workaround for this fact. Finding chances for casual conversations with colleagues can help to decrease stress and build relationships with coworkers.

Plan occasional in-person meetings when possible

Workers who need time away from a laptop or desktop can seek out offline activities. For example, organizing a swag-stash, meeting a prospective client for coffee, helping with a company philanthropy event, or attending an industry event or in-person training. It may be worthwhile to ask your employer for permission to swap out online to-dos for these real-world tasks. Moving forward, employers may take a hybrid approach when it is safe to return to in-person work.

In a physical meeting, you would all be in the same room and it would be easier to identify distracting noises. But in a virtual meeting, you’ve got noise sources from several different places at once. This requires you to expend extra energy trying to identify where the noise is coming from and listen to what the speakers are saying. You may want to agree with your fellow participants to turn the video off from time to time.

How to Combat Zoom Fatigue

(Goodbye commute, hello pajamas!) But after more than a year of on-screen meetings, presentations, and asking if everyone can see and hear us, a lot of peeps are OVER It. This Site and the services on this Site are targeted for users in the United States of America. Any information you enter on this Site may be transferred outside of the European Union to the United States of America which does not offer an equivalent level of protection to that required in the European Union. In particular, you are advised that the United States of America uses a sectoral model of privacy protection that relies on a mix of legislation, governmental regulation, and self-regulation. Email or chat may provide a better medium for discussing certain topics and should be considered alternatives to video conferencing.

  • Bailenson adds that video conferencing companies could also address hypergaze by calculating the perceived distance between the user and their video-calling partner, then limit the maximum display size of heads on the screen.
  • There are several strategies you can adopt to alleviate zoom fatigue.
  • If you’re finding that you’re more exhausted at the end of your workday than you used to be, you’re not alone.
  • Your colleagues probably understand more than you think — it is possible to listen without staring at the screen for a full 30 minutes.

It causes symptoms such as headaches, blurred vision, dry eyes, and neck pain. So if you feel like you might throw your laptop into a river if you have to attend one more video call, that could be your overworked brain begging for a break. Below, we’ll go over some ways to beat meeting fatigue so you can do your best work.

Physiological Effects of Zoom Fatigue

When you know you’re going to be doing work-related tasks, ask yourself whether your boss or professor would be comfortable with your surroundings. If this tells us anything, it’s that students – at least at the collegiate level – very much prefer real classrooms to Zoom meeting rooms. Knowing that many are now working remotely, we can assume that these feelings are shared across the board.

06 Mag
Education

18 Insanely Awesome Home Office Organization Ideas

‘Don’t use picture frames as they can start to look cluttered, especially if you are floating your desk in your space, she adds. Want to eliminate unsightly cables from your home office altogether? Invest in rechargeable Bluetooth- or WiFi-networked electronics, or a wireless charging desk. Working wirelessly will make your office look less cluttered and more streamlined. Katherine is a professional home organizer and certified KonMari consultant with over 5 years of experience helping clients get their homes in order. She launched her own professional organizing business, Tidy Milso, in the summer of 2020, to help reorient those feeling overwhelmed with both clutter and disorganization in their homes.

It will help you keep track of your family’s appointments as well as give you plenty of room to track deadlines and due dates. Be sure to go through and mark down holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries so you’re https://remotemode.net/ not taken by surprise when an important date comes up. This way you don’t need to carry them with you all the time but will still be able to find your keys quickly without having to search throughout the house.

Genius Towel Bar Organization Hacks

The empty wall behind or above your desk might be the perfect spot to fill in your essentials and organize your home office. Using this vertical space also allows you to keep a clean desk space and create a more focused and productive environment. This includes anything from cups where you can place your pens and pencils to a drawer organizer to keep your cords from tangling. Another example is a magazine rack and file organizer, so you are not mixing work-related documents with other files. Keeping your things in order and accessible is the golden rule of thumb when it comes to creating your ideal desk setup.

home office organization tips

Once a month, work your way through your home office, pulling every loose paper out of drawers, shelves, cupboards, etc. Sort them into categories as best you can, and simply shred all the useless papers. If the number of items in this space is increasing (with increasing work), bring in plastic containers to keep all the extra titbits. The advantage is that these storage units can be moved anywhere in the room or the home, allowing them to be out of sight when not in use.

Go Paperless

The purpose of cleaning your office is to help you get organized. The best place to start is at the part of your office where you spend the most time — your desk. The good news is there are tons of desk organization ideas to help you keep your desk clutter-free. If CleanTok and restock-Tok have taught you anything, home office tips it’s that no drawer is fully organized unless each of your belongings is perfectly in place—that’s where drawer dividers come in. These drawer organizers can be mixed and matched to perfectly fit the dimensions of your drawer and are perfect for storing paper clips, push pins, sticky notes, and more.

Magazine bins are great for storing notebooks and magazines in your workspace. Limit the amount of paper you keep in your office by limiting yourself to only keeping what fits in the bin. Upcycle a cereal box to use as magazine bins to add a more customized look to your space. Add some matching bins or baskets to your shelves to hold larger, heavier items like binders, notebooks, or electronics when you’re not using them. This is a great option if your home office is shared with another area of your home and you want it to be able to put your office away at the end of your workday.

Opt for a Leaning Desk

To date, she has logged over 500 hours of organizing with her clients using Marie Kondo’s KonMari method. Manage incoming mail or other paperwork by creating a convenient inbox/outbox for your mailing center using removable labels by the sheet. This will allow you to easily sort bills, prioritize mailed documents, shred junk mail and send out outgoing mail in a timely matter. You can create your own custom binder covers, divider tabs, labels, tags, and more using Avery Design & Print Online. Our free design software lets you easily personalize your items with no download required and you can save your projects to access later. When you’re done, you can print it yourself or have us print it for you.

Making your home office space more inviting creates a better working mood. Use plants to liven the space, hang certificates and achievements on the walls, and keep it clutter-free. Try and create the right lighting, and choose furniture that is comfortable. You’ll be able to store all your office needs in the cabinets or on the shelves. Plus you can customize the cabinets and shelves to fit the space in your office and to meet your family’s needs (3). These hooks are used to hang buckets, baskets, lamps, keys, and other items from so that you can keep your office organized in a unique way.

Helpful Home Office Organization Ideas

Chunky furniture overwhelms small spaces, so mount a desk right to the wall and install a tracking system overhead. Attach as many shelves as you need to properly store your craft supplies, books and other office must-haves. Another idea is to use a hanging shoe organizer to organize your home office supplies.

home office organization tips

09 Apr
Education

What You Need to Know About Contractors vs Employees

Whether you’ve gone as far as you can in a full-time role, you value free time over comfortability, you enjoy a new challenge—or all the above— contract work is for you. However, there is also potential for you to have less job security, but we’ll get to that in a different section. This is pretty straightforward for work that’ll only require less than 10 hours per week. Where founders tend to run into issues is when they need someone to commit hours per week.

  • If you improperly classify an employee as a contractor, you could face a significant penalty.
  • The reason being, contractors typically work on an hourly or project basis, and once their tenure is over, can be let go or re-hired with ease.
  • Job seekers leave a permanent job for a contract position for many reasons.
  • Many freelance independent contractors work part-time or non-traditional hours, and most work for more than one client at a time.

It allowed us to manage our own schedule in a way that where we can continue to contribute to our clients while still having time for our family. Our free tool makes it easy to compare the differences between health insurance options. You can easily compare deductibles, premiums, and coverage levels to find the best possible health insurance plan for your employees and your contractors.

Chip Conley’s boutique hotels spurred a career, but ‘midlife’ became a calling

When it comes to working in an early-stage startup, it’s common for employees to wear multiple hats. They are often more engaged and motivated to work hard and achieve your company’s goals and long-term success. Designed for business owners, CO— is a site that connects like minds and delivers actionable insights for next-level growth. Practical and real-world advice on how to run your business — from managing employees to keeping the books. When it comes to the pay rate, that aspect can’t be ignored and is also a plus for those seeking contract work. Whatever you decide to do or whichever work arrangement you decided to choose, remember that it’s your life, your work and your money.

contractor vs full time employee

With employees, a business must pay regular salaries plus taxes and benefits, such as workers’ compensation, health insurance, and paid leave. Let’s look at key reasons why employers choose to hire independent contractors or full-time employees. While part-time employees are usually not offered health insurance benefits, they are often offered sick leave, vacation time and other fringe benefits that a company must accrue as liabilities. However, by classifying a person as a contract worker, the company is not responsible for recognizing those liabilities on their books. The U.S. Department of Labor considers intentional misclassification of employees a serious infraction. Department of Labor and other governmental agencies are designed to minimize and punish misclassification of employees.

Company

Conversely, contractors are not entitled to most of the same statutory benefits and generally do not receive supplemental benefits from clients. Contractors usually have to purchase any critical or desired additional insurance policies, such as unemployment insurance, on their own. W-2 employers cover much of your tax burden before you get paid, so you may not even be aware that they’re covering such a big cost. The tax burden is often a big shock for folks who decide to go independent as a freelancer or contractor. On the flipside, a full-time employee can be a better option if the work is long-term and ongoing, central to what your business does, and highly collaborative. Employees can handle multiple projects at the same time and you don’t have to get them up to speed before each and every undertaking.

To start, take a look at the type of costs that come with hiring contractors and employees. There can be a lot of ambiguity between independent contractors and employees. That’s why even the IRS says the distinction comes down to the specific facts in each individual case. In fact, relying on independent contractors is how many newer service businesses in the so-called gig economy survive. But that growing trend has drawn increased scrutiny from regulators and plaintiff attorneys, including ongoing lawsuits. So take a careful look at the factors we’ve outlined when deciding if your worker is legally an employee or an independent contractor.

What To Know About Contract Versus Full-Time Work

And seek advice from a respected employment-law expert if you are still unsure about how to classify your workers. Be sure that you understand how your employer differentiates contract workers from their employees, not only in writing, but also in how they are treated. According to the IRS, practices such as offering a contract worker a pension plan, health benefits and other similar items may change your employment arrangement from contract to full employee. As explained on the eHealthInsurance website, contract labor, also called contingent labor or temporary labor, refers to individuals who provide services to an employer but are not considered an employee.

contractor vs full time employee

Employers can also consult this checklist to help them differentiate full-time employees and independent contractors. A contractor – also called a contract worker, independent contractor or freelancer – is a self-employed worker who operates independently on a contract basis. A contractor can work for a company but is not technically on their payroll. Finally, it’s important to note that employers cannot choose whether their employees qualify as ICs or W2 employees.

Employee vs. Contractor: Which Should You Hire?

That’s part of why highly collaborative work tends to be done by employees—because you can mandate they come into the office and work the same hours as the rest of your team. You’ll also need to consider your state’s regulations about what constitutes a contractor contract position vs full time vs. employee. Many states use the federal designation as a start, then consider how economically dependent the worker is on the company as a further test. What matters is that you have the right to control the details of how the services are performed.

  • Although quite different from the traditional payday-every-Friday model, the payment process for independent contractors is simple for the small-business owner.
  • Independent contractors don’t require training since the client hires them for their expertise.
  • According to the IRS, practices such as offering a contract worker a pension plan, health benefits and other similar items may change your employment arrangement from contract to full employee.
  • By contrast, terminating an independent contractor is generally much more straightforward as long as the employer and contractor have specified the termination provisions in their work contract.
  • It’s comforting to know exactly when and how much you can expect to get paid each month.

Many different professions are available in the life sciences industry, including jobs in research and development, marketing, and sales. Of course, you have a position to fill now and you certainly want to choose carefully to find a good fit. However, you also have to consider how this person will fit into the business model in the future. We believe everyone should be able to make financial decisions with confidence.

26 Feb
Education

All You Need to Know About Microservices Database Management

Keep schema separation where you think you may have service separation in the future. That way, you get some of the benefits of decoupling these ideas, while reducing the complexity of the system. At ThoughtWorks, we were implementing some new mechanisms to calculate and forecast revenue for the company. As part of this, we’d identified three broad areas of functionality that needed to be written. I discussed the problem with the lead for this project, Peter Gillard-Moss.

Without well-developed tooling and expertise, this can become unmanageable fairly quickly. This pattern is popular because it allows developers to iterate on and deploy each microservice independently. One of the biggest coordination points in development is code that modifies the database because changes can impact many different parts of the application.

Pattern: Static reference data library

In such systems, the larger it gets, the more likely the system is going to be down. When flying an airplane that needs all of its engines to work, adding an engine reduces the availability of the airplane. The flip side of this is that it can now be harder to work out what is going on. With orchestration, our process was explicitly modeled in our orchestrator.

Which data format can be used with microservices?

In addition to the support of primitive data types (int, float, string, boolean, etc.), Ballerina has non-primitive data types, such as Arrays, Tuples, Maps, Union, Tables, XML, JSON, Table, Any and Anydata. Union types are the set of values that are the union of the value spaces of its component types.

Following diagram shows database per service design pattern implementation. Microservices and DevOps philosophy work hand-in-hand to enable faster, more efficient creation and delivery of applications and software services. Making the core business processes of your system a first-class concept will have a host of benefits. Another https://traderoom.info/how-to-emphasize-remote-work-skills-on-your-resume/ concern cited is that by adding a service for country codes, we’d be adding yet another networked dependency that could impact latency. I think that this approach is no worse, and may be faster, than having a dedicated database for this information. Well, as we’ve already established, there are only 249 entries in this dataset.

Aggregate exposing monolith

A database rollback happens before the commit; and after the rollback, it is as though the transaction never happened. We are creating a new transaction that reverts the changes made by the original transaction, but we can’t roll back time and make it as though the original transaction didn’t occur. Let’s take a look at a simple order fulfillment flow, outlined in Figure 4-50, which we can use to further explore sagas in the context of a microservice architecture. The core idea, first outlined by Hector Garcia-Molina and Kenneth Salem,10 reflected on the challenges of how best to handle operations of what they referred to as long lived transactions (LLTs). These transactions might take a long time (minutes, hours, or perhaps even days), and as part of that process require changes to be made to a database. I’d reach for this option if I was managing the life cycle of this data itself in code.

The SAGA pattern talks more about implementing transactions across services rather than queries. The API composition pattern uses individual API calls to get data from respective services and then combines them to show a more unified view of the data. To implement the API composition pattern, we can take the help of cloud-native serverless technologies such as AWS Lambda, which can serve as a platform/service to combine the data. This sub-section describes database systems that do not share anything with other databases serving the same application.

Monolith to Microservices: Refactoring Relational Databases

Why not just have each service have its own copy of the data, as in Figure 4-40? A better option is just to have the Finance service handle the fact that the Catalog service may not have information on the Album in a graceful way. This could be as simple as having our report show “Album Information Not Available” if we can’t look up a given SKU.

  • But when we split data across databases, we lose the benefit of using a database transaction to apply changes in state in an atomic fashion.
  • While there has been a lot of emphasis on tooling and professional support for microservices, the database space has largely been ignored and not talked about.
  • This may happen to all types of data — ephemeral, transient, operational or transactional.
  • Instead, it’s better to push forward with proper schema decomposition.

We can choices include relational, document, key-value, and even graph-based data stores. When we are shifting to the monolithic architecture to microservices architecture, one of the first things to do is decomposes databases. This is the one of the main characteristic of the microservices architecture.

Private-tables-per-service and schema-per-service have the lowest overhead. Using a schema per service is appealing since it makes ownership clearer. Giving each microservice its own database decouples this cascade effect so that developers can make the changes they need with less coordination and increased confidence.

The decision was made that the application itself would perform the synchronization between the two data sources. The idea is that initially the existing MySQL database would remain the source of truth, but for a period of time the application would ensure that data in MySQL and Riak were kept in sync. After a period of time, Riak would move to being the source of truth for the application, prior to MySQL being retired.

But the goal was to encourage the teams writing the other applications to think of the entitlements schema as someone else’s, and encourage them to store their own data locally, as we see in Figure 4-6. Managing different sets of credentials can be painful, especially 15 Beautiful Closet Offices That Prove Bigger Isn’t Always Better in a microservice system that may have multiple sets of credentials to manage per service. HashiCorp’s Vault is an excellent tool in this space, as it can generate per-actor credentials for things like databases that can be short lived and limited in scope.

database microservice

Each service is created and tested on its own, and independently deployable. This means that multiple services are typically separate, self-contained processes. Each microservice then communicates with the others through network-based APIs. Business process modeling (BPM) tools have been available for many years. By and large, they are designed to allow nondevelopers to define business process flows, often using visual drag-and-drop tools. The idea is developers would create the building blocks of these processes, and then nondevelopers would wire these building blocks together into the larger process flows.