Category: Leadership

When it comes to running a successful business, enthusiastic business owners tend to prefer the approach of taking care of everything themselves. However, with the growth of a business, it can become difficult for an existing workforce to manage the increasing workload.

This is where businesses tend to focus on either increasing their workforce to manage the increasing workload or outsource the relatively expensive wings of the company to maintain finances. Since increasing the workload can be a burden on the wallet for most businesses, the option of outsourcing is like help from the Heavens.

Therefore, we have created a list of common business functions outsourced to experienced professionals by the majority of businesses to relax their workload and manage things smoothly.

Role of Outsourcing Services

Outsourcing services provide the company with external resources to perform business activities usually performed by internal resources. Generally, companies appoint the services of an outsourcing team when they plan to cut on their in-house resource costs or when an organization plans to scale its growth.

This allows the recipient company to improve its focus on the core activities and utilize the services of talented individuals at lower costs.

6 Common Functions that are Outsourced by Companies

The concept of outsourcing services has gained great importance in recent years. For this reason, it is essential for emerging businesses to identify the operations and departments that can be outsourced without denting the company’s core operations.

1. Customer Support

With everything going digital and accessible online, the expectations for effective customer support have risen dramatically. Furthermore, customers now judge companies based on their quality of customer support to ensure that they do not go through the horrors of contacting ghosting customer care helplines that are of no use in the case of a faulty product.

2. Event Management

Although the global pandemic has dismantled the concept of physical events and mass gatherings, event management is a department that is easily outsourced by the majority of businesses. It allows the companies to only pay for the decorations and be pleasantly surprised by the genius professional event management services.

3. Human Resource Management

The Human Resource department of an organization is one of the busiest departments. With decisions related to managing your team, hiring and onboarding new members, and taking care of existing employees, this department is an integral part of a company. However, considering the nature of work in an HR department, it can easily be outsourced to yield better results.

4. Shipping and Logistics

Companies that deal in physical goods can outsource the shipping and logistics department to relieve themselves from the long-lasting tensions of warehousing. The majority of e-commerce sellers choose to opt for this option to channel their focus on the business logic for their company.

5. Research

A company is nothing without a research wing that brings in new dimensions to be explored to increase the radius of the company’s domain. However, an in-house research department can become expensive for emerging companies. This is why they should choose to outsource their research department to decrease costs while receiving proper research services.

6. Social Media Marketing

Many companies like to keep their marketing in-house to restrict the spillage of trade secrets. However, with the increased popularity of social media marketing (SMM) and modern techniques to lure customers online, it is important to outsource your SMM team to obtain the required results from your marketing team.

With the increase in the existing workload, businesses tend to delegate their work to outsourcing services to manage the increase in work. These outsourcing services provide professional services like excellent IT support, financing and bookkeeping expertise, and great customer support. It allows the businesses to plan their strategy of managing the existing workforce while controlling workforce management to manage the consistent increase in its scale.

Benefits of Outsourcing For Businesses

Outsourcing is an essential facility for most growing companies as they witness growth in their scale. However, to understand the scale of importance, we need to take a look at some of the most common benefits.

• Focus on Core Activities

With an effective outsourcing team in place, the company’s core activities are safe, and the company can focus on them with full control. This is advantageous for most companies as the process of business expansion demands premium support from the business’s core team.

• Maintain Operational Control

When you are expanding your business, departments with the most costs are considered for outsourcing to maintain the finances while meeting the rising work demands. In this situation, an outsourcing company helps you with your management needs with their professional skills. Furthermore, this option will be effective cost control as increasing the workforce in the said department will only disturb the finances.

• Promotes Growth

As the scale of operations increases, the overhead costs start to witness a noticeable increase. At this point, businesses are forced to choose between satisfying their customers or maintaining their financial conditions. This is where outsourcing is always a good option as it allows you to delegate difficult and expensive to handle tasks.

• Reach out to Skilled Resources

The greatest advantage of outsourcing your high-cost tasks is that it provides you with skilled resources in cheaper or almost similar price ranges. However, the availability of skilled resources is what entices the businesses to continue working with them as they provide remarkable work performances for the same prices.

• Staffing Flexibility

Outsourcing allows the company to temporarily delegate the tasks that can disturb the finances as the company strategizes its plan to scale its growth. This helps the company to temporarily manage its need for an extra workforce with decreased costs.

It is an undoubted reality that the option of outsourcing your business functions is a clear advantage for many businesses willing to maintain their finances while expanding. With the increase in workload, businesses are required to increase their workforce to manage the increased work. However, the lack of feasibility to accommodate an increased number of employees forces the businesses to outsource some of the work to manage the new workload with ease.

Managing a business really means working thirty different jobs at once. This is part of what draws entrepreneurs to the work as it is challenging and, therefore, rewarding. It can also be a source of great confusion and frustration at times, especially when a business isn’t doing as well as the manager knows it could be.

The following will explore some of the things you can do to help encourage your business to grow and thrive. Special attention will be paid to drawing in more customers.

Understand Your Purpose And Your Ethical Lines

Before you begin making any changes, it is crucial that you get really specific about your purpose with the business. This will include particular goals regarding sales and revenue but also will include your overall aim with the business. Why are you selling this product or service? To make money isn’t a good enough answer. Every business that truly thrives is one that is solving a real-world problem for ordinary people. Do you want to make their lives easier? More comfortable? Safer? Figure out why your business is important and construct a statement around that.

As your business grows, you will encounter challenges you could never have anticipated. This is part of what it is to manage a business. If you have a statement that clearly outlines your values and your ethics (what is ethically acceptable to you in exchange for profit and what isn’t), you’ll have a paradigm from which you can begin trying to solve problems.

For example, let’s say one day (knock on wood), it is discovered that the primary material used in your product causes cancer. If one of your values is promoting the health of your customers and employees, you cannot carry on producing your product with that material, even if it ends up shrinking your margins.

This might sound like a far-fetched problem to have, but toxic ingredients are one of the most common problems bigger companies are having right now. And, you’d be shocked how many are not changing their ingredients or materials in response to new information. Triclosan, for instance, has been connected with several types of cancer and has been shown to wreak havoc on the endocrine system, messing up people’s hormones and increasing the risks of birth defects. Despite this, the ingredient is still located in hand sanitizer, antibacterial soap, face washes, mouthwashes, and cosmetics.

As more and more customers develop the ability to educate themselves about products, ingredients, and materials, as well as other ethical concerns like labour rights, sustainability, and fair trade agreements, you can expect that sooner or later, the ethical stances of your company will be discussed. Moreover, having this information front and center on your website and as part of your employee training materials can result in more customers over a period of time. A good reputation takes time to build, but ethical companies are seeing very positive responses from clients and customers.

Test, Test, Test

When running a business, data is your best friend. You want to know how people are feeling about your products and services, and you can’t do that without running tests on a regular. You should be seeking feedback on your website and beta testing new products. One of the most crucial elements of this testing is the acceptance that it is part of your job forever. That you should be constantly revisiting and testing everything you do to be sure that you’re keeping up with the times and customer expectations which vary widely. This is never something you do once and then leave. It should be a quarterly task at the minimum. Every few months, come back and see if what you’re doing is still working. If it’s not, adjust.

Give Things Away For Free

If you’ve done your due diligence with the ethics of your business and you’ve tested out your products or services and made things as perfect as they can be, then letting people try out your product or service will help gain you more sales, follows, and loyal customers. If applicable, offer free trials of your products or services.

You might have to get creative with this. When it comes to books, many authors give out the first few chapters of their book for free. When it comes to software, companies often allow people to try out the program for a week free of charge. This makes life easier on your customers by taking away some of the pressure to make buying decisions as they will have proof of concept or quality before they make a choice to spend their hard-earned money. People want to drive the car before they buy it.

As a bonus, this step will help reduce some of the stress that comes with returns, cancellations of services, or other refund-based situations as it will be less likely that someone will be mistaken about what they’re getting into and want to return it.

Sales, Discounts, And Rewards

Finally, once you’ve gotten your company paradigm shifted to the right place from which to make decisions and tested and improved your products to the best of your ability, and found the right audience for your services using free trials and other gifts, it’s time to focus on customer retention—getting customers to come back and buy more or different products for you.

Encouraging loyalty among customers involves excellent customer service (which you have because you’ve been testing and pivoting based on the feedback, right?) and the occasional discount or reward to get them back on site. If you have an email list, this gets even easier. Sites like The Gift Card Cafe allow you to send gift cards to people in a number of formats for promotions (buy one get one free) or discounts (10% off). When someone is on the fence about a purchase, a gift card can make the difference. This sort of approach is an excellent way to get people to return to their online carts that have been abandoned with items still inside.

The above four steps might seem simple, but if they’re continually applied with dedication, they can be mighty. Whenever you’re in doubt about the direction you need to take your business in, return to that first step and your purpose: what are you trying to do for other people?

Any small business may struggle in the beginning due to financial or organizational obstacles. One of the things that can help your small business grow and succeed is optimizing your payment processes. You need to worry less about payment methods when you’re still starting your start-up company. Investing in digital or automated payment will reduce costs and expenses, giving your small company a chance to save more money. Additionally, paper invoices were found to be more expensive. Not only can’t they be automated but also, they have to be conducted manually. It takes a single invoice up to six days to process, which costs approximately $20. With the growth of technology and mobile phones, it’s become possible to switch to more advanced payment methods. On that note, read to know how developing payment methods can benefit your small business.

Efficient Business and Increased Profit

Whether you have a small-scale company or an enormous corporation, optimizing your payments can help you have a better insight into improving profits and managing inventories while tracking your daily sales. Moreover, when you participate in e-commerce using digital payments, you will be able to widen your clients’ visibility, which will allow your business to grow massively. Furthermore, when you’re starting your small business, you don’t want your finance team to spend a considerable amount of time processing manual transactions, collecting checks, and sending payments. Refrain from having tedious processes by opting in digital or automated means to pay. This way, you will run your business more efficiently, hence increasing your profit.

Error- and Fraud-Free Environment

Any employee, no matter how good or proficient they are, can make mistakes. However, in some businesses, errors are inexcusable since they can cost the company tons of cash. The best thing you can do to avoid financial catastrophes is to have reliable and stable digital payment software that will be responsible for validating data and identifying errors. In addition, this software is able to update itself automatically, so you don’t have to worry about catching up with the latest technicalities.

Your start-up business will benefit greatly from simple software that is easy to handle, especially in the beginning. Therefore, you should choose a reliable software provider. Many small business owners have reviewed the Clover Station POS and reported back that it has simple and straightforward payment software. Your small company needs payment software that keeps your customers happy and your business expanding.

If you aim to face the fierce competition in the market today, you should have an automated system that is ready to identify any invalid or fraudulent invoices. When you work on optimizing your payments by installing proficient software, you make it easier for your business to single out suspicious invoices by flagging or reporting them.

Benefits for Business Women

Optimizing standard payment methods and opting for digital or automated ones has a great influence on any business owner, especially women. Society and traditions often make it challenging for women to travel or fly far destinations. Even though female entrepreneurs have proven to be equally competent as men, if not more, social and communal norms still prevent them from going to faraway destinations. Digital or automated payments make it easier for women to access the marketplace without the need to travel to deposit or collect money from banks or suppliers. For example, pregnant women and moms can easily start a small business and still be able to manage payments remotely. Furthermore, computerized payments are safer than regular methods as they ensure that your money is secure and is less likely to be stolen.

Faster Payments and Lower Cost

Any business owner wants to ensure the satisfaction of their suppliers. In order for that to happen, you should invest in automated payments that make the settlement process more efficient and faster. Moreover, when you pay your suppliers early, you save money and earn payment discounts. The faster the payment process is, the more productive your employees are since they don’t have to spend long hours entering sums and rates and checking whether or not they’re precise and accurate.

It is important to know that paper checks and invoices are more expensive than automated payments. By using digital payments, you can reduce costs up to 80% in comparison to manual or paper-based techniques.

Less Scrutiny From Suppliers

With electronic payments, your business can work with actual-time visibility and run transactions smoothly through a digital threshold, which will cut back the time you may spend on responding to inquiries and developing relations with your suppliers. Moreover, the negotiations between you and your suppliers become easier when they know that you use automated payments. When dealing with costs, taxation, transportation, and general payments, your suppliers and clients need to confirm that you have a secure payment method.

Credit Cards Are The Old Deal

As a business owner, you need to offer your clients various ways to pay you, especially if you want to be a part of the global market. Studies show that 1% of Chinese citizens use credit cards, while only 25% of the German population use Visa and Mastercard for online shopping. Therefore, retailers, sellers, and merchants need to provide their clients with different payment methods. Furthermore, tech-savvy customers live in a digital world, where everything advances every day. They would rather deal with businesses that have better payment options than credit and debit cards. For this reason, you should optimize your payments and incorporate various methods, such as gift cards, electronic checks, and mobile wallets.

Nowadays, our world is concerned with digital technology. Therefore, offering simple payment methods is a fundamental factor of success for any business owner. It is a crucial element that can either make or break your company, and its impacts can either enlarge your small project or put an end to it. The last thing you want for your customers is them discarding their purchases from your retail or online store when the means to pay is too complicated or limited to one option. You need to apply sturdy and effective payment methods to grow your business and help you stay ahead of your competitors.

The first rule of modern-day marketing is that you are not the customer and the decisions should be data-based instead of speculations. In the current fast-paced marketing environment, it is essential to understand your target audience and secure your customers by all means. The easiest way to improve customer retention and attract new customers is to value user experience and mold your product according to their needs while maintaining the original concept of your product.

For this reason, marketers need to adopt the data-driven approach and ensure the changes made are based on our customers’ feedback.

Why is User Experience Important in Digital Media?

As the world is advancing in terms of technology, production ways are also being improved to optimize resources. This is why the importance of user experience has increased in magnitude.

User experience is nothing but a simulated experience of a random customer of your product/service interacting with your system. The user experience design primarily focuses on the user’s needs and how to fulfill them. This includes steps that could improve customer loyalty to the product/service or brand.

Although there is no perfect way to determine a great user experience strategy, there are certain basic principles that need to be followed to ensure every customer is satisfied. With varying user experiences for every user, you need to emphasize the fact that you are not them and all your decisions need to be data-driven.

To make sure you are not making a speculative analysis, you can conduct different kinds of analytical surveys and interviews with your target audience to receive the necessary feedback.

How To Optimize Your Customer’s Experience and Improve Your Audience Reach?

Considering the importance of customer experience for your brand, it is essential to understand how you can improve your audience reach by improving your user experience.

1. Establish a Strict Customer Experience Vision

Emphasizing the focus on a customer-centric vision is essential to show your employees the significance of customer experience. With the help of a clear and articulate vision, you will notice a significant change in the organization and every member will be adamant to achieve the goal.

2. Develop an Emotional Connection with Your Customers

In the field of marketing, the importance of developing an emotional connection with your customers holds great importance. The majority of retained customers prefer to use a similar product/service due to the emotional attachment and the feeling they felt when they used the service for the first time. For this reason, the quote: the first impression is the last impression holds great importance in customer experience.

3. Value Employee Feedback

There is no denying that the think-tank of a company has to be in the driving seat for making changes in the entire system. However, factoring in the feedback of your employees can allow the company to welcome new ideas that could improve the process.

4. Personalize Your Interactions with Customers

The entire concept of improving customer experience is to attract new customers and retain the existing ones. Now, the pivotal point in any UX design is the setup of personalized interactions with the customer. Every customer demands a personalized experience when using a product/service to feel special. This provides an emotional value to them that generates positive results in maintaining high retention rates.

Furthermore, these personalized experiences can develop a bond between a brand and its regulars that can also result in an increase in other customers.

5. Learn from Churn and Improve the Weak Areas

As the engagement rate decreases, the churn rate increases in any business. For this reason, it is essential to identify areas in your product/service that demand a higher amount of interaction and engagement with the users to ensure the churn rates are lowered.

Benefits of Improving Your Customers’ Experience

Understanding how to improve your customers’ experience is an essential step for your business. However, it won’t be of any use if you’re not confident about its series of benefits for your brand. For this reason, here’s a list of the most common benefits of improving your customer experience.

• Improves Customer Loyalty

User experience has a direct responsibility to attract new users into their system. However, with a great customer experience, you also guarantee to retain users and convert them into recurring users. All you need to do is understand your target audience’s needs and identify the bottlenecks in your system. This will automatically increase your retention rate and as a result, increase the customer’s loyalty towards your brand/product.

• Increases User Interaction

One of the basic techniques of UX designers involves the creation of user personas of potential users of your product. These user personas help the UX designers to visualize the target audience and develop personalized user experiences. Furthermore, with the help of design consistency, the UX designers are able to ensure increased user interaction.

• Maximize Revenue Generation

At the end of the day, revenue generation is the sole purpose of creating a product/service, right? With effective UX planning, you can list your users’ journey and optimize all possible potential revenue generation opportunities to ensure that while you are not disturbing the customer experience, your revenue generation is also not taking a hit. This can be done by constant A/B Testing of different experiences and continuing to make changes with respect to user behavior.

• Minimizes Development Time and Costs

One of the most important advantages of integrating customer experience into your development process is to minimize your development time and costs. UX designers are able to devise a detailed prototype that works according to the purchaser’s needs which saves time for your developers. With this approach, the prototype only goes into development after the final changes made by the customers.

You could create an exceptional product/service with great applications and even market it well for a certain amount of time. However, your sustenance in the market depends on your approach to handling your customers’ feedback. Any product/service that does not have the tendency to shape itself according to its consumers’ feedback perishes sooner than its growth. For this reason, the importance of customer experience is emphasized to ensure that marketers understand the severity of user acceptance and user feedback and translate the importance with their management.

As a small business owner, you quickly learn what your limitations are when it comes to making investments in your business. It’s not that you don’t want to make them. You just don’t want to spend the money, only to find the solution that is not adaptable to your business and you lose money on it.

That said, you are unlikely to go wrong investing in an IT service as a small business owner. Increasingly, services are being computerized and automated and you don’t want your business to be left behind.

What are IT services?

According to the Gartner IT Glossary, IT services are “the application of business and technical expertise to enable organizations in the creation, management, and optimization of or access to information and business processes.”

That’s quite a mouthful. Breaking this down means that IT services are goods or services that help users optimize their business or service offerings. You read that right. An IT service can actually help you make your product or service delivery better for you and your customers.

There are different types of IT services depending on whether you want to build or design a system or install software for your business. Some common IT services are:

• Backup services

• Cloud services

• Network security

• Help desk services

• Consultancy

• Training

6 ways your business can benefit from using more IT services

1.You can save on new equipment and software

As a small business owner, every penny counts. As much as you’d like to, you can’t afford to spend money on purchasing expensive specialist hardware or software for your business. 

“Cloud” based software services are the latest technological innovation to come to your rescue. This is essentially a service that can be accessed from anywhere over the Internet, like this cloud based veterinary software, which helps organize the practice’s information in a form that is easily accessible to vet and staff alike.

When you have a cloud based service, you are also freed from storing and backing up your information as well as updating your security. A cloud service will do all of this for you.

2.You don’t have to hire a separate IT department

When you are a small business owner, you wear many hats. The primary reason you double up is you can’t always afford to hire the specific skillset that you need.

IT is a very specific set of specialist skills. This is not a hat it’s advised you wear because of the kind of damage that could be done to your system from the outside, or even your own well-meaning efforts. 

When you hire an IT service to pick up one or more functions that an in-house IT department would normally do, you pay one flat monthly fee. You have access to the service and supporting advice as needed.

3.You can easily recover lost information

There are various scenarios a business owner can lose data in, all of the potential nightmares. There could be a natural disaster in your area which damages your computers. You could be attacked by a hacker, virus, or malware. Or, in one of those things that just happens, your computer just stops working.

If you’ve contracted an IT service provider, your information is safe and backed up for your use on one of their servers. No need to worry about your precious business data.

4.They can tell you how to set up your infrastructure

If you’re thinking of expanding your business, probably hiring a few new employees or offering customers a new service, have you ever thought about what is required for a successful office network? Or if you’re a remote business, what would it take to keep everyone communicating and give them access to the necessary company data?

It’s a lot. First, you’d have to decide what hardware components you’d buy, then you’d have to decide what software was necessary and best for your needs and install that. You’d have to figure out where your data was going to be stored, on your own servers or externally. You’d have to figure out how to network all of this. And then you’d have to keep this network running properly.

Perhaps most importantly, you’d have to worry about how to keep all of it secure.

You read that and your head is probably swimming. This is why it’s better to hire an IT service to provide any or all of these services for you.

5. They can do your training for you.

Your small business takes up much of your time. You certainly don’t have time to get new employees set up in the system,  or to train older ones to use new software.

You can get an IT service to do this for you as well. One of the hallmarks of a good training program is that they are led by people who know the hardware or software components. You can’t train anyone if you are becoming familiar with the components or software yourself.

You can also leave the IT aspect of your new employee orientation to them. You can have an IT service prepare a prepackaged video that can get all new employees set up on your network, including setting up their passwords and emails. 

They can also give your business packaged literature to troubleshoot common problems or set up a hotline for employees to call when they have issues with hardware or software. 

6. Improve employee productivity and retention

You are not the only person that needs to focus to keep your business afloat. Your employees also need to keep on top of their duties and you do them a disservice if they have to worry about the network going down, or the printer jamming at the most inopportune times. Worse if they are the ones who have to troubleshoot the issues themselves once they happen.

This can eventually cost you big in two ways. Your productivity is decreased because your employees’ attention is divided and you may have trouble keeping staff as they become frustrated with a job environment where nothing works.

Solve both problems by outsourcing to an IT service.

Look at the kinds of problems an IT service can solve for your business. Hiring an IT service is therefore a solid investment that can take your business forward.

A few months into the Covid-19 pandemic, a lot of people lost their jobs. Some had to work from home taking home only a portion of what they usually make. This was understandable because the entire globe was dealing with a similar challenge as an impact of the measure put in place to put the spread of the virus in check.

However, people lose their jobs every day in the normal world. Some employees are discriminated against by their colleagues and seniors based on race, color, gender, background, or even fitness levels. Bullying is also not unheard of in the standard workplace. Still, some people work under extremely harsh and hazardous conditions with zero concern about their safety from the employer. While you need the money to put groceries on the table, you are not a slave or a robot. You are also human and your rights should be respected. To get an extra pinch on this, the following pointers should paint the picture of why employees should know their rights. 

1. Workplace Safety and Health

At the federal level, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) is the entity tasked with the responsibility to regulate workplace safety in the United States. The organization works tirelessly to ensure workers have safe working conditions. OSHA ensures manufacturing facilities are inspected and won’t hesitate to levy large fines to any employer subjecting their workers to unsafe working conditions.

This goes a long way in preventing workplace injuries and work-related health issues. When injured in a workplace accident, the folks at joyelawfirm.com/north-charleston/workers-compensation-attorney/ say that worker’s comp should cover your medical expenses and a significant portion of your lost wages. With the guidance of an experienced attorney and perhaps some help from OSHA, dodgy employees can be brought to book as you recover your deserved financial damages. In a nutshell, below are a few examples of unsafe work conditions:

• Exposing workers to hazardous or infectious material without proper safety gear
• Lack of safeguard on dangerous machinery
• Exposure to toxic or corrosive chemicals without protective clothing  
• Slippery floors and oil spills out of negligence
• And much more

2. Employment Laws against Discrimination

Every worker needs to know and understand his/her rights to stay safe from any form of work-related discrimination. According to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, every worker is protected from any form of workplace discrimination whether based on color, creed, nation of origin, gender, age, or religion. Some states have also provided workers with protection against workplace discrimination based on their sexual orientation, disability, marital status, and pregnancy-even though the federal law is yet to adopt these protection rights. Moreover, employers are not supposed to deny you a job opportunity or promotion based on any protected classifications mentioned whether under federal or state law.

Workplace discrimination laws are applicable in a wide range of areas, including:

• Hiring
• Firing and layoffs
• Job promotion
• Task allocation
• Training and career development

It can sometimes be quite difficult to pinpoint unless the victim comes forward. It can sometimes even manifest in the form of sexual harassment where senior members of staff take advantage of fresh-out-of-college staff or ask for sexual advances from a staff member from an “inferior race or gender” in return for favors at the workplace. Nonetheless, it is easier to seek help if you know and understand your employment rights like the palm of your hand.

3. Workers Deserve To Be Paid A Fair Wage

Workers have the right to be paid a fair wage for the work they perform. However, some employers will always try to cut corners when it comes to rewarding their workers for the work done. That’s why every employee needs to know and understand the amount of payment they deserve after working for a given number of hours. In the US, the federal government and states have an established law that dictates the minimum wage for different categories of workers.

Alongside a ton of scientific research out there, multiple arguments have also been raised regarding why employees should take home more than the minimum wage. This is because, in most cases, the minimum wage is set based on assumptions that anyone can survive comfortably when earning such a wage weekly or monthly.

Also, the law tends to have a few loopholes regarding compensation. An employer may choose to pay their workers in commissions as is usually witnessed in many sales and marketing departments. This commission may or may not be in addition to a salary, usually called a retainer. Sometimes you may lose even the retainer salary in case you fail to achieve certain targets. Before taking such a job, the employee needs to carefully scrutinize the contract and ascertain whether they can cope without a guaranteed minimum wage.

4. Workers must be Paid for Overtime Hours

The federal law requires every employer to pay their workers for the extended time working. Every worker is eligible for bonus pay, usually, a 50% increase for every hour worked over forty hours in a week. States such as California mandate overtime pay if a worker works for more than 8 hours in one workday. Note – extra overtime compensation is always not optional but mandatory. Therefore, any employer who denies workers overtime pay risks being at loggerheads with the state or federal employment laws. Additionally, an employer is not supposed to release a worker from employment while sorting out their increased wages.

5. Right to Family Leave

According to the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, workers are provided with job security and time off when there is a need to take care of, say, a seriously ill family member, newborn, or an adopted baby. Factually, the employer is not only mandated to provide workers with up to 12 weeks off but also with guaranteed job protection. Even if the time off is unpaid, as a worker you won’t lose your position at work.

In conclusion, understanding your rights as an employee can have numerous benefits. It can give you the peace of mind to stay productive and prosper in your career. The chances of hating your job are also greatly minimized. The next time you drop a successful job application at company A or B, make sure they are compliant with employment laws and regulations before signing the contract.