If one or more of the following statements is true for you when it comes to onboarding freelancers, it might be time to reconsider your methods:

1. We spent more time onboarding freelancers in 2021 than we did in 2020
2. Our team has a basic understanding of the terms exempt, non-exempt, W-2, and 1099 but can’t define them in our sleep  
3. The above terms give me a headache
4. We have workers in multiple states

The Challenges With Onboarding  

One of the hardest (and most important) things about setting up your workforce is classifying workers correctly. That’s why we cover worker classification extensively here on our blog. On a day to day basis, it’s important to know who’s a strong worker, who might need a little bit of help, and who has potential to grow into other roles. On the front end, accurate worker classification is crucial to preventing issues later. With the Department of Labor’s ever-increasing focus on worker classification errors, it’s incredibly important to get it right up front. 

Another incredibly important aspect of bringing on new workers is making sure you’re paying them accurately and in a timely manner. This includes payroll taxes. Since each state has strict pay deadlines for specific types of employees it’s important (and hard!) to stay on top of the ever-changing wage laws at the federal, state, and local levels. Along with differing wage laws, some states and localities require a different taxation method than the federal government does. 

Enter PayReel

If offloading some of your onboarding paperwork would free up your time and energy for the creative parts of your projects, it might be time to consider bringing on a partner. PayReel is equipped to manage events, employees, and all the associated paperwork. Our team stays well versed in local, state, and ever-changing federal tax methods and laws to make sure employees are happy, clients are covered, and the IRS is bored. 

Here’s where we stress (and the only time we stress), we got it.

The post How to Know It’s Time to Simplify Your Process For Onboarding Freelancers appeared first on PayReel .

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You’ve hired a team to professionally film and broadcast your event. You’ve considered the content to be sure it translates well both in-person and online. When you’ve already gone to the effort of putting together a hybrid event, you may as well get the most you possibly can out of said event.

Three Ways to Get More Mileage Out of Your Hybrid Event

Social Media Snippets

Your most important camera crew is the one capturing the event and live-streaming it live, but consider getting an additional camera in the mix. Give your additional videographer direction based on what you’d like to accomplish after the event. Their goal should be to capture footage that can be edited together with the primary footage for social-media friendly montages, teasers, and more. For example, they could get b-roll from the location or close-up audience shots. You may even want to set up interviews with your most in-demand presenters. Whether you’re seeking to advertise future events or offering online training sessions after the event, collaborate with your marketing team and engage top-notch editors to make the most out of the footage. There are endless ways to choose your own adventure based on your marketing goals. Our sister company Crew Connection can set you up with all the partners you need to pull it off.

Training Sessions

Look for ways to offer more value to customers. Consider both follow-up content for those who attended the conference as well as any materials you can offer to those who didn’t. You’ve already vetted the content and information for your event so you know it’s helpful to your audience. See what other ways you can leverage that content into training sessions/programs and more.

Sponsorships

Anytime you increase engagement, you also increase opportunity to capture sponsorship dollars. More eyeballs and more enthusiasm demonstrate that a sponsor’s money will be well spent. You can offer ads, event website sponsorship, commercials, and more.

The End is The Beginning

Once you’ve pulled off your event, have a quick celebration and then get back to the grind. The work is just the beginning. Use a survey of attendees or other customers to find out what content they liked most or are most interested in after the fact. Use that information to improve future events and to engage customers who didn’t attend while also increasing value to sponsors. The bottom line is that it would be a crime to let all that awesome content sit on a hard drive after it’s over.

What are your favorite ways to make the most out of your post-event strategy?

Want more on hybrid events? This post is the second in a series. Check out last week’s post  that debunks the #1 myth about hybrid events. 

The post How to Get More Mileage Out of Hybrid Events appeared first on PayReel .

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While in 2020, virtual events reigned supreme, 2021 brought the rise of hybrid events–those that combine both in-person and virtual experiences. We saw trade shows, company rallies, and conferences turn to hybrid events for the best chance at reaching their audience. Raise your hand if you’ve participated in a hybrid conference.

It’s easy to spot the events that fell victim to the prevailing myth that  “All you need to conduct a hybrid event is a virtual streaming provider.”

This idea is false and the mistake could be very costly to your organization.

As we approach 2022 and in-person gatherings continue to make a comeback, hybrid events are a prominent player in our new reality. This offers some advantages, but if you’re considering putting on a hybrid event, approach the idea with a healthy dose of caution. If you’re going to go to the effort, you need to do it right. If all you do is stick a camera in the back of the room and livestream an event with no additional accommodations for the virtual attendees, you’ve missed the boat. And that means you’ve lost out on engagement, leads, sales, and income. Of course you do need a solid livestream partner, but make no mistake: if the online experience comes across as an afterthought, it’s better not to offer a virtual component at all.

Here, we’re walking through how to make the most of a hybrid event for your business and what you’ll need to conduct one effectively.

Does a Hybrid Event Make Sense?

Virtual events still make the most sense for webinars and similar short-form, video-heavy occasions. On the other hand, we’ve learned that many traditionally in-person events can translate incredibly well virtually, too. Even if you don’t think your event is a good fit for a hybrid style, give it a little more time before you write the idea off. Haven’t we all learned we can do more virtually than we ever thought? Once you make the decision to hold a hybrid event, it informs all of your remaining choices.

Elements of a Successful Hybrid Event

Content

Hybrid events are aptly named. They offer two very different experiences for one event. That’s pretty amazing! And also pretty challenging. If you do decide to hold a hybrid event, the reigning wisdom remains true: Content is everything. You might say that it’s even more important during a hybrid event than an exclusively onsite event because virtual attendees are more likely to stray to the kitchen or get distracted by their phone’s pin or their washing machine’s ding. To help whatever is happening in-person keep online viewers engaged, consider incorporating polls or Q&As. Help every presenter tailor content in a way that engages both in-person and virtual attendees. Bottom line: Just make sure you have a plan for how to convey information to each group.

Seamless Details

Have a branded event registration webpage with event information as well as clear registration info with customized funnels/follow-up communication for both the virtual and in-person options. This way, attendees can sign up easily and also receive only the information that is relevant to their experience.

Considerations for Virtual Attendees

Consider offering virtual-only sessions, breakout rooms, or networking opportunities. While it’s incredible to be able to include participants virtually from all over the world, you’ll also need to be aware of the time zone differences and make appropriate accommodations. For example, you may want to offer your most in-demand sessions at multiple times or at least give access to the recording.

Bottom Line

If you’re thinking about putting on a hybrid event, you’re in good company! Do it! Just make sure you do it well.

Note: This post is part of a series. Check out this post on How to Get More Mileage Out of Hybrid Events.

The post The #1 Myth About Hybrid Events appeared first on PayReel .

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Video leaders and DPs are eager to know what the top requested popular video cameras for corporate production are. Here at Crews Control, we are known as the industry experts […]

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The workplace was already evolving, but you might’ve noticed things accelerated in the last year and a half or so. For many of us, work relationships are no longer made up of people we see on a regular basis. It is more and more possible by the day to have an entire functioning relationship without ever seeing a person or even hearing their voice. Of course there’s also the Zoom phenomenon, which paradoxically means that there are people we talk to and see each other virtually more than we ever did in person. Talk about an evolution. An office building is no longer a prerequisite for office relationships.

Three Ways You Must Adapt to the Changing Workplace

Office space = Any Space

Working in the same vicinity as people used to be a necessity. If you couldn’t walk down the hall to knock on someone’s door or get together in a conference room to discuss the next initiative, you couldn’t get much done. Now that you can work from anywhere, you can have meetings across time zones and without even leaving your home. You may still see your coworkers virtually, but you’re less likely to have spontaneous conversations at the proverbial water cooler.

Yes, you can work from anywhere and this part isn’t new. But thanks to the virus that shall not be named, it seems like now everyone expects you to be on camera. Well dang. At home, you really should step it up a little. Seth Godin has some ideas that make a big difference. They’re worth investing in if you can. If you must work from vacation, at least pack a ring light .

Blurred Lines

It may seem counterintuitive, but working from home has made the work/life balance worse for many of us. There used to be a somewhat forced separation of work and home. While you could take your work home with you, it was a lot harder to reach people with a random thought or question late at night or on the weekend. You were unlikely to call someone’s home and risk waking their kids at 9 PM. But shooting off an email or a text at 9 PM is socially acceptable and reading work communication as you’re going to bed or first thing in the morning is expected. Getting responses in a few minutes is so much the norm that a “delayed” response of even 10 minutes can cause concern. Now, it almost seems like you literally have to go underground (on the subway) or take a flight in order to get a break from electronic communications.

It’s worth making it a priorirty though. Do what you gotta do to have a break from the computer. Take a walk. Meditate. Lock your phone in a safe. Really. Everything will be better for it, including your work.

Communication is Easier. Except When It’s Harder.

With this level of access, it’s incredibly easy to communicate in a moment. But we arguably have more communication errors since we can’t truly read people over email or text and emojis don’t quite replace seeing a live human face. Replacing live communication almost completely has its own challenges.

It also really sucks to feel you have to respond on evenings and weekends. If you want a hack for respecting work hours for others (even if you work at odd times) use your schedule send option. It’s the best! Instead of sending at 1 AM, schedule an email to send at 8 AM the next day. It’s minor, but worthwhile both because it shows respect for their time and doesn’t condition others to expect you to work at all hours.

The Bottom Line

Work relationships have changed massively in the digital age. And then you-know-what came and just blew the roof off everything we expected. FaceTime often substitutes for face time, emojis often substitute for actual facial expressions, and all our “time savers” eat away at more and more of our time.

It will be interesting to see if  the pendulum could end up swinging back to more personal interaction. What do you think? Will we be so starved for human interaction that we run back to the office? Or are we too happy with our sans-shoe lives and lean even more and more on technology to replace the live interactions that used to be necessary?

The post The Evolving Workplace And You appeared first on PayReel .

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Many tape vendors have been promoting the use of tape for ransomware protection . And while tape is inherently secure, Quantum tape storage systems include a number of features and capabilities that provide extra layers of security that other tape storage providers do not offer. These unique features make Quantum tape an excellent choice as part of protecting against the threat of ransomware and other forms of cyber threat. 

First – A Bit About Quantum

Quantum technology, software, and services provide the solutions that today’s organizations need to make video and other unstructured data smarter – so their data works for them and not the other way around. With this mission in mind, Quantum offers software and storage systems that run on flash or solid-state media, hard drives, and we are also one of the leading providers of tape storage systems.

Tape storage is used by some of the world’s largest cloud providers because of its low cost, its low power and cooling requirements, and its security. It is notable that the largest data companies in the world chose tape (instead of HDD storage) for their cold storage archives because of these attributes.

Three Reasons Why Quantum Tape Does Work for Ransomware Protection

1. Quantum Tape offers a stronger “Air Gapped” solution than any other tape system, or any disk storage system.

A tape storage system, like a flash or disk storage system, is a device that is connected to the network, and therefore there is some risk it could be attacked. One option that tape storage offers to prevent over-writing of any data is LTO WORM (Write Once Read Many) media, which prevents data stored on a WORM tape from being over-written. So even if the robot was compromised, the data would be safe. 

That aside, without the use of WORM media, there is some risk that a tape system could be compromised, as it is a network connected device. This is why Quantum tape uses an industry-unique feature called Active Vault that provides a stronger air gap and an additional layer of security not offered by any other tape vendor. 

Active Vault allows an administrator* (*see note below regarding role-based and multi-factor authentication for Quantum tape systems) of the tape system to create an offline partition within the library. This partition does not have any network connectivity whatsoever. Tapes can be moved into this separate partition remotely, and tapes can only be re-imported to an online partition by the tape library administrator.

In short, this provides an ‘air gapped’ solution that is much stronger than any that can be offered by any other tape vendor, or by any disk storage system. With the rise in ransomware, sales of this Active Vault feature have increased nearly 4x year-over-year, because customers can see the real value in the additional security it provides relative to other alternatives. Check out this technical brief on Active Vault to learn more. 

2. Tape Should Always be Used as Part of a 3-2-1-1 Data Protection Strategy, not Exclusively

Many articles take the position that a customer has to choose an “all disk” or “all tape” approach to protection because they are written by companies that only offer one technology. Quantum offers tape for backup, we offer disk for backup, and we offer file storage software, object storage software, and deduplication software to make backup and recovery more efficient.

We, like others in the industry, advocate a “3-2-1-1” data protection best practice. Keep 3 copies of data, keep those copies on 2 types of storage (for example disk and tape), keep 1 copy offsite for DR purposes, and keep 1 copy offline. When using tape as part of a strategy to protect against ransomware, there are a lot of best practices to consider. Several recent articles rightly point out that if corrupted data is backed up to a tape system, then restoring data from tape doesn’t help. In addition, when you need instant recovery of data – don’t use tape. 

There are a lot of best practices to consider when using tape as part of a ransomware protection strategy. For example, it may mean that enterprises may adjust their backup schemes to make backup copies to tape more frequently, to minimize risk of data loss and downtime. We captured these best practices in a white paper we published recently – you can read it here .

3. Quantum Tape Offers Security Features and Capabilities not available anywhere else

Recent articles portray all tape vendors as equal in terms of security features. Quantum Scalar Tape systems are the most secure in the industry, with exclusive features such as Active Vault and Multi-Factor Authentication. These features combine to make Quantum tape the most secure tape solution on the market today.

What’s Next

One thing that we have not fully addressed is the risk of a tape storage system being hacked. Even with all of the additional layers of security above (the strongest ones such as Active Vault are unique to Quantum) – there is still risk. This is why Quantum has developed yet another industry unique feature that we will be announcing next quarter. This feature guarantees that data stored on tapes cannot be accessed, even if the robot is hacked.  Interested in learning more? Schedule a demo with the team here .

The post Why Tape? Specifically, Why Quantum Tape DOES work for Ransomware Protection appeared first on Quantum Blog .

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