Month: May 2020

Megan Zolnierowicz is the Director of Marketing at Spark Hire. Spark Hire is a cloud-based video interviewing platform for HR departments and staffing professionals with options for one-way pre-recorded interviews or live interviews. With industry experience spanning nearly 10 years, Megan is a pioneer of digital marketing and advertising.

Here’s our fifth edition of Expert Corner with the focus on the best practices of hiring remotely, written insightfully by Megan Zolnieowicz.

When it comes to hiring, everyone needs a plan. But with the rise of remote work during this ongoing crisis, nobody really planned for this extreme. Luckily, it’s possible to source, screen, interview, and hire employees with virtual recruitment. With the right tools and processes coupled with good communication between team members, you can keep your hiring process moving without hassle. 

For a virtual recruitment process to succeed, follow these steps:

1. Create an Ideal Candidate Profile

The time and effort that a virtual recruitment process takes is no more than your normal recruitment process, but it’s important to remember to work as efficiently and effectively as you can. One of the biggest components to this is to be targeted in your virtual recruitment efforts.  

Effectively targeting your recruiting efforts involves building an “ideal candidate profile.” This means you’ll need to consider what makes a candidate successful in your open role. An Ideal Candidate Profile includes the motivations and skills needed for the job, but it can also expand to include hobbies, interests, and other characteristics that indicate a good fit for the role.

These other characteristics might indicate a candidate’s preference for working with a team vs. independently, personal drive, or a cultural fit. Create an idea of what sort of professional groups your candidate might join, where they might live, or where they might spend their time. These details will help with the next steps of the process.

2. Outline the process

During the job hunt, uncertainty is a state of being for your candidates. One of the best ways to help them feel more secure is to publish your hiring process either on your careers page or in an automatic email response when candidates complete an application. Outlining the process allows candidates to better understand where they are and what’s next. Then, they can take the initiative to prepare more appropriately, and they won’t anxiously follow up on the “status of their application” nearly as much as they may have otherwise. This allows you and your team to spend more time reviewing applicants, interviewing, providing feedback, and hiring.

3. Write an attractive job post

It’s most likely that your candidates will come from online. So this part of the virtual recruitment process isn’t very different from your normal operations. You’ll need to collaborate with the hiring manager to create a job post that details the most pertinent and necessary skills required for the position. This serves the organization very well because you must articulate what you’re looking for in a candidates once you move on to screening and interviewing.

For candidates, you’ll need to use the ICP from step 1 to describe the job and its required skills in ways that appeal to the person. Consider what their motivations might be and how they’d prefer to work. This enables your job ad to resonate with the candidates you’re looking for, attracting them to your open position and organization.

4. Announce the opening and post on relevant job boards  

With your job post drafted, your next objective is to attract applicants. This means announcing the opening on your careers page, social media, and job boards. The question of which job boards and what social media to use can again be answered by your ICP. Where do your ideal candidates like to hang out? Are they sporty adventurous types who are likely to post their frequent travels on Instagram? Are they a business professional who will scour LinkedIn for new opportunities?

Use these questions and the ideas you’ve gathered in your ideal candidate profile to determine if sites like Glassdoor, LinkedIn, BuiltIn, and other job boards will help you reach the best candidates where they’re looking for employment.

5. Use an ATS  

Once candidates apply for your positions, where do those applications go? It’s crucial to compile your applicants within an organized system. For a successful virtual recruiting process, you’ll want to stop using spreadsheets, email, and paper resume files and start working with a cloud-based applicant tracking system. This is a software that organizes your applicants based on where they stand in your recruiting process. When you find one that is cloud-based, you, your colleagues, and your hiring managers can access applications and candidate data from anywhere, giving you the flexibility your virtual recruiting process will demand.

6. Use one-way video interviews  

Up until this point, it’s incredibly easy to maintain a virtual recruitment process. But the screening step is where some organizations have their first in-person interview. You could use a phone call, but you won’t gain nearly as many insights as you would with an in-person interview. Instead, consider a happy medium: one-way video interviewing. One-way video interviews are an asynchronous system where you set up your interview questions ahead of time, send them to candidates, and they answer your questions on their own time on video. This alternative allows you to preview candidates and how they conduct themselves while granting these candidates deeper insight into your company and its culture through intro and outro videos and video questions.

7. Solicit feedback from colleagues and hiring managers  

After you’ve received responses to your one-way video interviews, you’ll have to stretch your communication muscles with colleagues and hiring managers. Send them a shortlist of candidates you think would fit best for the open role. Have them fill out a candidate scorecard through a document sharing application or even a digital form. This way, you can easily compile their feedback and choose who should move on to the next step of the process.

8. Complete a live video interview  

The shortlisted candidates who advance to the next stage should progress to a live video interview with your virtual recruitment process. Depending on the structure of your organization, this two-way video interview may be with the hiring manager or a member of your team. Either way, be sure they stick to insightful and critical interview questions. You can even add additional feedback during this interview by inviting other decision-makers to watch the recorded interview.

9. Conduct a background check and check references  

There are a plethora of services which can provide you with background checks virtually. Additionally, you’ll want to check a candidate’s references. Do this virtually by creating a quick question list for references and deliver them either through a quick phone call or even an email.

10. Make an offer!  

Last, you’ll want to send an offer letter to the final candidate. One great way to make this more impactful for candidates is to create a congratulatory video message from the potential employee’s future boss. Illustrate what stood out about the candidate and why the team is excited for them to join.  

With these ten steps, you’ll be able to create a personalized, efficient, virtual recruitment strategy. Furthermore, you’ll be able to continue with it when back in the office!

An interesting interview with Andrew Bourne, Business Development Manager, Zoho Africa on ‘How to sustain business in challenging times’

Andrew shared his valuable insights on how businesses can equip themselves and how Zoho tools make it that much easier. 

Vanathy: Hey everybody good morning, welcome to the very first episode of Zoho Live! In this episode today we’re going to talk about, ‘How to sustain business during challenging times’ and we have Andrew Bourne here with us. Andrew is our Business Development Head for Zoho in South Africa. So welcome to Zoho Live Andrew!

Andrew: Thank you.

Vanathy: Andrew the first and foremost thought in every entrepreneurs head at this point is, ‘How do I keep up with my business to keep it afloat?‘ So, where would you like them to begin with.

Andrew: I think if I talk from South Africa’s point of view, need to first and foremost maybe if they need to seek financial assistance. So either it be bank finance or any of the government’s some support initiatives that have been opened up to them, potentially looking at the unemployment fund to assist with start salaries. And then I think the next most important thing is to lean up your business expenses, is to do cost optimization—have a look and see what cost can be cut and to look at complete technology solutions just to help the business run more efficiently.

Vanathy: With that thought in mind Andrew, what are some of the specific challenges facing business owners, especially on the lines of sales and business development, and what do you think what according to you are some of the best ways to address those challenges.

Andrew: I think going forward now, obviously technology is going to play a huge role and digital transformation has now been accelerated due to this COVID-19 crisis, and companies are going to have to look at tech solutions to allow their staff to work from home. So to look at like digital checklist to process mapping workflows, blueprints, and really looking for a cost-effective technology during this time where you know revenues are low, and you know the companies that will survive this crisis will be the ones that really lean up their expenses and look to the right types of technology to grow their business going forward.

Vanathy: And I also think that it is a common characteristic for businesses to turn their head towards marketing only when their sales go down. But it’s definitely not going to help to spam customers’ inbox in desperate hopes to get leads, you know. So tell us a bit about some of the marketing strategies that will resonate well with people at times like this.

Andrew: I think yeah you don’t want to be you know sending out you know text campaigns, it’s gonna be I mean it’s only going to be a brand more of a brand exposure exercise than lead generation. There’s going to be a lot of text email campaigns going out there, and I think any more campaigns on social media is more of a brand exclosure exercise and the lead generation exercise. The next step in the sales process is most important which is closing that deal and I think companies now need to focus on generating video content to educate their customers about what they’re selling their product or their services. They need to create presentations, digital presentations that they can easily send to customers, potential customers to get them to obviously buy into into the product. And I think another vitally important thing is testimonials. Customer testimonials—to get customer testimonials, get video testimonials, written testimonials, have a website, have a live chat on your website— Zoho’s SalesIQ is a great application to use for that. And to really offer a full tech support system so that when a customer is looking and evaluating your product or service they can go and they can Google and they can look at your website and they can see what other people, what their customer experience has been.

I guess the next thing is a lot of potential customers will go to social media where they ask friends about your product or your service, or they’ll ask which plumber should I use or which you know which kind of telephone system should I use, and that’s where customer experience is the most important—because you want their friends, you want their connections on social media to plant your business because they had such a good experience. So, it’s really important that you focus on your customer experience and as well as your staff experience because your staff experience will impact the customers experience, so you want to work on your company culture to make sure that your staff are very very happy and they are focused on making sure the customer experience is great ,and in the customer then in return then promote your brand to their friends when their friends reach out for recommendations.

Vanathy: Absolutely Andrew, I agree with you one hundred percent. Customer experience is a key area that everybody should focus on, which will ultimately result in customer retention. And I also like how you talked about the staff experience of a company reflecting in their customer experience. Those are such interesting points, and also Andrew I think a lot of businesses these days are transforming themselves to fit better in this situation in order to stay relevant, you know. So for example apps that use to deliver food apps we use to order food from are now delivering groceries, and apps that focus on physical fitness are now talking about mindfulness and mental health. Our own local drivers are partnering with communities nearby to run some errands for them. So according to you at what point should a business consider putting on their multiple hats in order to stay relevant.

Andrew: I think first and foremost a company must revisit their SWOT analysis and a SWOT analysis should be alarmed document, and companies should revisit it on a frequent basis to go and address their strengths, their weaknesses, and to your setting opportunities or threats, and also look at forecasting, I mean the fashion industry has been doing it for years where they forecast where is the fashion trend going. I think all businesses need to forecast where their industry is going, where are their opportunities. We’ve seen a lot of with some clothing manufacturers that are now manufacturing masks and obviously the companies that jumped onto that opportunity early enough have now and reaped the benefits of being first to market. And I think yeah it’s very important for companies to do a proper forecasting and to address those opportunities.

Vanathy: And what would be some of the tell tale signs Andrew. When exactly can a business know ‘This is it, now is the time to change’, instead of waiting for weeks in a row and sort of waiting for the clouds to clear.

Andrew: I think you want to test it out in bits and pieces, I mean if you look at the example of the say the video industry or the movie industry it went from a video store we rent your DVD, that we’ve done to the Apple Store where you could go and buy the DVDs and rent them on the Apple Store, and eventually then you get your Apple TV Plus and Netflix. So if you know a video store owner way back in the day if they had seen the future and they had got that opportunity and gone to market first ,they probably would have been in a better position to compete with where the industry is going. So I think it’s all about just assessing the industry and seeing and doing market research, and also addressing your staff and doing group conversations around the opportunities, and getting other people’s opinions really do help in making that decision as to when is the time right.

Vanathy: That’s good advice Andrew, thanks for sharing it with us. And one important thing I also wanted to talk to you about was, all set and done the strength and the resilience of a company ultimately depends on its employees. So what are some of the qualities that companies could benefit from their employees especially when they are working remotely.

Andrew: So the first and foremost is employees that are embracing technology and employees that are using their own initiative to improve the running of the business. I think that is just vital that you have employees that are focused on building the business and also employees that are willing to work in teams. And I think one thing that I’ve seen in many businesses was where they appoint one person as what they call the culture captain, someone who’s going to take the company culture and that company culture can be reassessed and improved. But to really champion yet that specific part of the business and make sure that all the other staff members are working together helping the business grow, I think it’s important that they use technology but just do like a coffee chat with your team, do fun exercises using video chat video conferencing, bring everyone together get their ideas and really try and kind of put a element of you know each staff member must help the company grow. And I think the most valuable of members will be the ones that put an initiative to put forward ideas and to really work hard at growing the business.

Vanathy: Amazing, Andrew we’ve been discussing some serious topic so far, so I want to sort of take a pause and switch gears to discussing about this whole remote work side of things. Your an athlete yourself who is quarantined, so how are you taking care of your physical wellness and your mental wellness, and if there are any remote work etiquette that has worked best for you in all these years, please do share it with our viewers.

Andrew: I think if I look at these kind of tips for remote working is to get used to video conferencing, to any try and deal with your suppliers or your stakeholders in your business and get them to use the video conferencing options that are out there. We have Zoho Meeting we also have internal communication with Zoho Cliq and it’s important to see someone’s expression on their face, you can judge their tone and it’s a lot better to have a video chat than to just have an audio chat, so I think embracing the video chat is one thing. As far as I would say a physical health, I’m a discovery member so I have to keep up with my points, so I make sure that I get my heart rate up—I do skipping, I’ve got some home exercise equipment that I use to kind of keep fit and healthy—and then you know just I think try and make sure that you have downtime working from home. Sometimes you can get really attached to your laptop and attached to your word but it’s best to make a block book in your schedule, another time that is downtime—you close your laptop, you take on a book or you play a card game, or you know a board game with a family member and I think it’s important to just have have a dedicated downtime.

Vanathy: Also one of the things we all were concerned with when we started to work remotely was, teams won’t function properly if they are not sitting next to each other, performance would go down and their productivity would go down and those kind of things, when in fact, the opposite has happened. A lot of industry leaders and leadership staff from different companies have in fact confirmed that the productivity of their employees and their teams have only spiked after this remote work revolution. So what are your thoughts on that and why do you think that is happening.

Andrew: I’ve heard from many many clients and customers that productivity has gone up. And I think we know we spent I mean being in lockdown we’re forced to focus on the tasks at hand, there is no distractions like maybe walking to I mean you could you know walk to the kitchen but there’s no other staff members you know distracting me there, or having to go out for lunch meeting. I think we spend a lot of time in some jobs, spend time on the road, and I think now with technology people are finding themselves way more productive because they’re having to focus at the task at hand and getting it done, and meeting is a click away or a phone call away and I think that’s what is making people a lot more productive

Vanathy: Oh yeah absolutely, I agree. And now that a lot of businesses are increasingly adopting to this remote work culture there are also concerns about what applications should I use, which technology should I go after—not just the communication and collaboration side of things, but also to choose applications that will help with their sales and customer relations and marketing side of things. So when a business goes out to choose it’s technology provider what are some of the things that they have to be mindful about.

Andrew: Okay so one thing I have found and I’ve spoken to many South African businesses and also businesses in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, and in Kenya—it’s important to try and get a complete technology solution and not to try and patch a whole bunch of different technologies together. If you can’t find one service provider that will you know provide you with many of the applications that you need, those applications will work more in sync than having to go and patch another service provider’s application to another and I think it’s also more cost effective that way. So I think Zoho obviously, you know we work for Zoho and we were passionate about the products, and I’m also a business owner and before I joined Zoho I run a business. So I saw the value in Zoho products and applications. And we implemented it now, we use their 20 applications of Zoho that we used in that business and those applications connect perfectly and allow us to be a lot more productive. So it’s important to attach your application together but really I think it’s since the applications from a technology quality point of view and also cost point of view.

Vanathy: Andrew I never knew you were a Zoho customer before you became an employee, that’s an interesting piece of information! Do you want to tell us more about that.

Andrew: Yes, I’ve been using Zoho for more than three years in my business and it allowed me to actually have staff work from home, so I was able to then reduce the the brick-and-mortar office space which was was obviously a big expense and also parking bays by another expense for a business, and parking bays sometimes don’t get used when you’ve got a big sales compliment. Parking bays are only used maybe on you know for a quarter of the day so we’ve decided to then take sales stuff and put them to work from home and we needed proper technology to do that ,but we also needed technology that we could customize for the South African market and that’s where Zoho came in. It was really cost cost-effective we could really customize and mold it to our business and our business needs, and yeah the experience was great and it still is. We’re still customers the business still runs, I’m just not involved, I’m full-time on Zoho now.

Vanathy: That is really amazing Andrew, thank you so much for your time and thanks for sharing such valuable insights with us.

The global labour market has been experiencing challenges as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The severity of the impact is massive, and business owners are struggling to pay their employees in these uncertain times. In an attempt to support these organizations, the UK Government stepped in with a temporary relief initiative named the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.

With this blog, we’ll answer some of the basic questions about the scheme and extend our support with a free calculator that helps you estimate what grant amount you may be eligible for.

Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS)

The scheme allows employers in the UK to furlough workers on 80 percent of their regular pay. Businesses can apply for a grant that covers 80% of their employees’ monthly wages, up to £2,500 a month, plus their associated Employer National Insurance contributions and pension contributions on that subsidized furlough pay.

According to the HMRC, 6.3 million Jobs have been temporarily laid off by 800,000 companies. As of May 3rd, the HMRC has shelled out £8bn in support of these businesses. This unemployment benefit has been vital in keeping small businesses afloat and preventing a steeper rise in unemployment. This scheme will continue in its current form until the end of July.

Update:

On 12 May, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that the CJRS scheme will be extended until the end of October. There will be more flexibility so employers will be able to bring their furloughed employees back to work part-time and contribute to paying employees’ wages while still receiving support from the scheme. We’ll keep this space updated for any further announcements on the scheme.

Applicability

Businesses that have furloughed employees on their payroll can apply for this grant. Once employees are designated as furloughed, employers pay the normal wages and then submit the information to the HMRC to apply for reimbursements. In order to get the grant amount, an employee must be furloughed for at least three consecutive weeks.

Eligibility

You can only submit claims for furloughed employees who were employed as of 19 March 2020 and who were on your PAYE payroll on or before 19 March 2020. This means an RTI submission regarding payment to that employee must have been made on or before 19 March 2020. Here’s a more complete breakdown of eligibility by date:

Employee was employed with you as of this date	Date RTI submission regarding payment was made to HMRC	Eligible for CJRS
28 February 2020	On or before 28 February 2020	Yes
28 February 2020	On or before 19 March 2020	Yes
28 February 2020	On or after 20 March 2020	No
19 March 2020	On or before 19 March 2020	Yes
19 March 2020	On or after 20 March 2020	No
On or after 20 March 2020	On or after 20 March 2020	No

Our calculator

The grant amount calculation is a complex process. You must factor your pay period, claim period, gross pay for your employees, insurance contributions, pension contributions, and more. We’ve come up with a free calculator to help you get a quick estimate of how much you can claim for each employee for the selected pay period. We hope this will help you plan for the future and push through these tough times. We’re also keeping this blog updated on the latest announcements from the HMRC, so keep an eye out for any new information.

Beginnings matter, and for small businesses they mean everything. Every humble beginning comes with its own set of diverse challenges, and every small business needs software that helps them grow faster. As a bootstrapped business from day one, Zoho understands this struggle better than any other vendor in the market. Since its inception, Zoho has been an active supporter of the small business community by offering extremely affordable, feature-rich software to help SMBs run their day-to-day business operations smoothly. Today’s announcement is another definitive step in this direction.

We are delighted to announce the launch of Bigin, our new pipeline-centric CRM that is built and priced for the needs of small and micro businesses. Bigin comes at an important time when businesses are going through a sudden, forced digital transformation to ensure business continuity. We believe this new addition will enable millions of small businesses to move their operations online and start seeing improved customer relationships.

Why Bigin?

Even though there are more than 600 CRM vendors in the market, most small businesses are still stuck with spreadsheets. So many new CRM players entered the market in the last decade promising to fill this gap with a simple solution for small businesses. However, they all fell short of their promise, leaving small businesses to settle for less when they actually needed more.

At Zoho, we clearly saw the problems in small businesses relying on dozens and dozens of spreadsheets to manage customer activities instead of investing in a CRM. Our decades of experience in building successful customer relationship products have shown us that small businesses need a CRM solution exclusively built for them.

Bigin was born out of that vision.

How does Bigin help small businesses?

Bigin is the only CRM in the market that offers the 3 things that small businesses actually look for in a CRM:

• Great ease of use

• The right feature set

• Affordable pricing

Bigin brings spreadsheet-like simplicity to CRM so that anyone can use the tool. You don’t need prior knowledge of CRM, or have to spend additional resources to actually make your software work. While working on the new product, we also noticed that small businesses were being taken for a ride by vendors who removed essential CRM features from their basic plans but still called it the right choice for small businesses. We wanted that to change. With features like multiple pipelines, built-in telephony, and workflow automation, Bigin contains just the right feature set to help small businesses run a full-scale customer-facing process inside their CRM. And most importantly, we wanted to offer all of this at the right price.

Bigin is the most affordable CRM system in the market right now, priced at $7 per month, per user, when billed annually.

What are some of the highlights of Bigin?

Multiple pipelines for customer operations: With the option to create multiple pipelines with fully customizable stages, Bigin empowers small businesses to run their distinct customer operations inside CRM. Bigin’s pipeline view allows users to see their customer information in the most visually engaging way, and extend it to the entire customer journey.  

Set up in 30 minutes or less: Bigin is simple and practical. It allows businesses to set up and start using the product in under 30 minutes with effortless on-boarding and guided set up. Users can start using the CRM right away without the need for product tutorials or any additional support.

Built-in telephony: Making and receiving calls anytime, anywhere is made possible through Bigin’s built-in telephony. Bigin also lets users choose from a range of popular telephony providers in the Zoho Phonebridge marketplace. With integrated telephony, Bigin gives you all the information you need to have well-informed calls with customers and prospects.

Workflow automation: Bigin’s easy-to-create automated workflows help users drastically cut down on the time wasted on repetitive manual tasks. All you have to do is pick a routine task, create a simple workflow in minutes, and let Bigin do all the hard work.

Real-time notifications and analytics: Real-time notifications from prospects are delivered inside the CRM so that sales reps can take meaningful actions to improve the chances of closing the deal. Bigin’s out-of-the-box analytics dashboards with charts and KPIs empower businesses to make smarter, data-driven decisions.

Fully mobile: You don’t need to be at your desk to be in touch with customers. Manage emails, stay updated with your pipeline, and access key business information in real time with our mobile apps for iOS and Android.

We launched a version of Bigin for early access this January and have been receiving lots of good feedback from the early adopters. They love Bigin’s combination of ease-of-use, features, and pricing in one solution.

Here are some of the testimonials that we received from our early adopters.

“I am super impressed with Bigin. I was looking for a simpler lead management and automation tool and I have finally arrived at the right platform after trying multiple tools in the last few years. It has completely transformed the sales process and I regularly recommend Bigin to my contacts.”

Vikas Kakkar, Founder & CEO, HireXP  

“We were so impressed by Bigin’s ‘perfect fit’ for small organizations that we have now consolidated all information about our clients and projects in Bigin. It’s impressive to see that such an affordable product helps in managing duplication of records, customizing fields specific to our processes, providing dashboards to manage the performance of emails, and even linking up with the Twitter accounts of our clients.”

Luison Lassala, General Manager, Bedrock Success Consulting

“I want to sincerely thank the entire Bigin Team for developing this excellent platform for SMBs who are keen on getting rid of excel. My primary requirement was exactly the same, but Bigin has offered so much more. It has increased the overall productivity of my sales team, and I have already recommended Bigin to friends in different sectors.”

Dhruvesh Lakhani, Founder Director, Investacc Insurance Brokers Pvt. Ltd.

We’ve also used this time to tweak and improve our offering before the public release. We are thankful to the early adopters for their invaluable feedback and suggestions.

Bigin is now available in 28 languages and is also part of Zoho’s revolutionary suite of 45+ business apps, Zoho One.

How is Bigin different from Zoho CRM? 

Bigin is a pipeline-centric CRM solution focused exclusively on small and micro businesses, who are typically not ready for an elaborate, end-to-end CRM. It is also an ideal fit for freelancers and individuals who want to manage their personal business pipelines online. By comparison, Zoho CRM is focused on growing businesses of all sizes who are looking to utilize the larger CRM platform for their advanced business needs.

Are you ready to Bigin?

We invite all small businesses to try our new CRM solution. True to its name, Bigin is just the start of the journey and we have even bigger plans for the future. We want to serve the small business community to the fullest.

#JustBigin today and get instant product access by signing up for our free 15-day trial.

In our new normal of remote work, we are witnessing a complete transformation in the way we collaborate and conduct meetings. Whether for in-person or online meetings, however, note-taking has always remained an important part of the meeting experience.

Now, we see no popular online meeting software that provides a built-in option to take notes while you’re attending a meeting. We either switch tabs back and forth between our note-taking app and the meeting software, or we use a physical notebook to take minutes and note other important discussions.

Today, we’re introducing Meeting Notes to you. This new feature allows you to focus more on the conversation and take quick notes during online meetings. All you need to do is just install Notebook Web Clipper on your browser and do an online meeting.

 

 

Meeting Notes is a part of Notebook’s web clipper, which is available on all major browsers. You can use Meeting Notes to take notes quickly and save it your Zoho Notebook account. If you’ve not logged into your Zoho Notebook account in your browser, you can still use Meeting Notes to take notes and save it as a .txt file on your device.

Zoho Notebook users can choose the relevant notebook and add tags before they save the note. Meeting Notes are compatible only with these online meeting software: Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Zoho Meeting, and Zoho Showtime.

Here’s how you can use Meeting Notes from your browser.

• Install the Notebook web clipper on your browser. Visit here to install Notebook web clipper for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.

• Join/Host online meetings from your browser using Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Zoho Meeting, or Zoho Showtime.

• You will see a floating Notebook icon at the bottom left of your screen.

• You can drag the icon to place it anywhere on the screen.

• Click on the icon to open the note editor.

• Type your notes and save it either to your Zoho Notebook account or as a .txt file.

Save time and be more productive with Meeting Notes. If you wish to add an online meeting software to the support list, write to us at [email protected] or leave a comment here.

It was an exciting and informative interview where Bader Kamal, Ambassador, StartUp Bahrain & Board Member, GEN Bahrain, shared his valuable insights into the startup ecosystem, infrastructure, and the government’s support.

Bader also talked about the ease of doing business and shared examples of various successful startups and was interviewed by Ali Shabdar, Regional Director MEA, Zoho.

 

Ali Shabdar: Welcome to another episode of Zoho live. Good morning, good afternoon wherever you are. Today, we have the pleasure of hosting Bader Kamal. He’s a good friend, I had the pleasure of knowing him when I first went to Bahrain. He’s the ambassador at StartUp Bahrain and he’s also a board member of the global entrepreneurship network Bahrain chapter among a lot of other things. So I am not going to spend time on introducing you Bader, I’ll let you do that and let’s get to it, thanks!

​Bader Kamal: Great! Thank you Ali, it’s really nice to be here. Thank you for guys having me I really appreciate it. First of all my name is Bader Kamal, I am the managing partner at Mater In Hand a digital agency based in Bahrain. I am a StartUp Bahrain ambassador as you mentioned, as well as a GEN Bahrain board member. Since 2013, I have been working on building content for start-ups and for startup ecosystems in Bahrain and in the region through both our platforms—StartUp Bahrain as well as Startup Magazine. And we’ve been having the pleasure of closely working with the government and different corporate entities in Bahrain to help develop the ecosystem. I’m also a graphic designer by background but that’s probably another story for another time.

Ali Shabdar: Absolutely! Awesome yes, I remember the first time we met it was in Unbound Bahrain, which was the budding startup community and kind of expo in the region, and I attended it twice and I saw your speaking and the way you kind of try and help the start-ups in the Bahrain ecosystem. Tell us a little bit more about what is Bahrain doing in terms of you know growing the startup community, and becoming a platform for the whole region for start-ups to come and you know flourish there.

Bader Kamal: Sure, so I think Bahrain has a quite a long history and a track record of supporting businesses and SMEs and start-ups recently, and by start-ups we mean innovative tech enabled digital perhaps scalable companies. So through this long history Bahrain has realized the potential of start-ups, which is why we now have StartUp Bahrain—StartUp Bahrain of course is the national platform and ecosystem for innovative and scalable start-ups. It’s made of start-ups investors, accelerators, incubators, educational institutions, the Bahrain government, and obviously entities such as Zoho as a strategic partner. And of course if you’re interested to learn more about StartUp Bahrain I would suggest visiting the StartUp Bahrain website—if you’re thinking about setting up in Bahrain, or moving into Bahrain, if you’re thinking of investing in the start-ups in Bahrain or just want to connect with like-minded people and founders and investors, visit the website check the social media channels at Startup Bahrain you’ll find everything you need there.

Ali Shabdar: Wonderful, and these programs that StartUp Bahrain offers it was very interesting for me to see how government is supporting, and there’s this nice harmony between the economic development board, the StartUp Bahrain, and other entities of government. It was really something unique I did not see it in that scale in other places so and yeah also, let’s say another question is that how about start-ups or budding entrepreneurs outside the region? Can someone come and you know set up something from another GCC country or an African country, is that a possibility?

Bader Kamal: Yeah absolutely, It’s a possibility! I think I would want to touch on what you mentioned earlier, which is how different government entities through a public and private collaboration come together to really build this in a way that is not very common around the world. One of those initiatives of course just to mention is the GEN Bahrain which I am a part of—it’s part of the global entrepreneurship network. The local chapter here has been set up around a year ago or so, and the board itself has different representations from start-ups to government, all in hope and with the aim of shaping the ecosystem here in Bahrain. And finally on GEN Bahrain I think a big part of what we’re focused on right now which touches on what you were asking about, is trying to identify who are the start-ups in Bahrain who I like to call are closer to the finish line and finding ways to support them. So on that particular front I think you can easily set up in Bahrain, Bahrain does have a lot of advantages and incentives for start-ups either homegrown, local, or coming from abroad, obviously I realize everything I am saying about Bahrain is biased, but I like to look at other ecosystems as well compare try to make my own judgments accordingly. I know Bahrain is a very small country, it’s an island with a small market but we genuinely do manage to punch well above our size and weight.

It’s a young ecosystem for sure, I would even venture and there to publicly say that I think the number of deals in Bahrain that happened amongst the start-ups and investors are probably higher than any other country in the MENA region per capita—of course I know that doesn’t mean much, I know that’s just a number on the page—but to me personally it’s just an indication of where Bahrain is heading and the potential Bahrain has. Obviously there’s a lot of reasons why you would want to set up in Bahrain, I would urge everybody to look at the why Bahrain page on the StartUp Bahrain website. It has all the reasons in a much better way than I could describe just to summarize it,

• It’s extremely friendly for start-ups—local or otherwise.

• Setting up is really easy through a very supportive government, you have a lot of subsidies and a lot of programs.

• You have access to AWS local data centres right around the corner here in Bahrain. We have three of them, so that can help you scale very quickly with low latency and low costs.

• We have crypto asset regulations, an extremely supportive fintech ecosystem—a growing fund of funds and WAHA fund of funds that is going to be extremely vital in growing these scale ups in Bahrain.

But how do I translate this in practice, which I think is is usually a big surprise to a lot of people. Here’s what the numbers look like—you can set up in Bahrain and you can get support from the government’s programs to have 70 percent, up to 70 percent of the wages of your Bahrain  hires covered for three years! You can have 50 of your setup costs and by setup costs I mean laptops, 8marketing equipment covered when you set up here in Bahrain. If you’re great and you manage to make use of that subsidy and if you’re doing well the government can throw in an additional 20 percent or something like that. I don’t remember the latest numbers, but those are definitely some things to consider and I don’t think that’s available almost anywhere in the region.

The government would support 100 percent of any increments you give your employees, if you decide to bump up a salary the government is going to cover that. They would cover up to a hundred percent of training and professional certifications for those employees, which again is quite rare. We usually have people coming in from abroad especially from silicon valley, and they’re like ‘you guys live in heaven this is miraculous, we don’t have this anywhere in the States’. And the final two things off the top of my head is, really you can cover a 100 percent of your cloud needs! So if you want to be on AWS from day one and that costs you fifty thousand dollars, Government is ready and willing to look into covering a hundred percent of that, and finally and I guess this touches more on your question is which I think is a bit of a complication elsewhere in the region—you can own your startup here in Bahrain 100 percent—it’s not partially owned with a local partner, no you can own it as a foreigner or someone that’s not Bahrain. I hope that answers your questions.

Ali Shabdar: Well yeah, and actually you answered some of my other questions and it’s I have seen some of this first hand, no it’s awesome! I have been travelling across the region, I look at a number of countries who are at the forefront of supporting start-ups and helping them grow their businesses, trainings, accelerators, and what I have seen with Bahrain is that—it kind of is like the equilibrium of everything, it is small enough but it’s large enough at the same time. You guys got a very strong infrastructure, I know your ICT support program the government support program, Zoho is actually a part of that. So when we offer Zoho apps or services to local businesses and if they are a member of Tamkeen, which is the organization who grants that if I am not mistaken, ‘Correct’ up to 70 percent of your Zoho costs can also be paid by the government, which is amazing! It shows that the government has this long-term vision, along with the private sector who want to support this community. So I want to follow up on that, this package sounds awesome. So if I am not a Bahrain, if I am not a native Bahrain and I come from abroad I can also enjoy all of these, yeah?

Bader Kamal: Correct, you don’t have to be a Bahraini, as long as you are a company or a startup registered in Bahrain or is in the process of registering in the Bahrain, you can definitely make use of everything we both just mentioned for sure.

Ali Shabdar: Wonderful, that is great so to start we just go and StartUp Bahrain website and just read the documents and go forward, probably someone get in touch with the entrepreneurs.

Bader Kamal: Actually yes, a little easier than that I would suggest—go to the StartUp Bahrain website and find the ‘Contact Us’ page and reach out—that’s all you need to do! You wouldn’t have to read anything to save your time, we will do that job for you. Just reach out to us, let us know what you have in mind and we’ll be more than happy to give you what we call the ‘red carpet treatment’ if you’re interested in moving to Bahrain.

Ali Shabdar: Awesome! And I can vouch for that, the government officials and you guys who work at the helm of StartUp Bahrain. You guys are very responsive, it can actually put my response right to shame, so yeah absolutely awesome fantastic! So let’s move on to the next section well, the elephant in the room we know that the world is going through a health and also an economic crisis. I don’t want to dabble on the health issues, I guess everybody’s more than educated about what is going on, and the fact that all countries in GCC and Africa are not surprisingly, but fortunately doing better than the rest of the world which is good news. But from an economic and business perspective the fact that in this global village we are all connected, we cannot be safe from what is happening in United States and Europe and other places. How do you see the effect of this on Bahrain from both positive and negative sides, and are there any plans to counter the threats or kind of create opportunities around this.

Bader Kamal: Yes, of course there’s a lot that is happening around us. I am also going to try to avoid talking about the medical aspect of this. I definitely think everybody’s informed enough, over-informed perhaps. So first and foremost, I would want to say just on a practical side we have recently published a page on the StartUp Bahrain website, the COVID page. You will easily find on the top navigation, and that sort of highlights and details all that is happening in behind as it relates to the situation in the context of the startup ecosystem, and what is relevant to start-ups. So definitely visit the page—you’ll find everything you need to know about what Bahrain is doing over there. And practice on a day-to-day basis what Bahrain has done in the past short, while honestly is very interesting, very admirable, and very quick honestly speaking. For starters we’re in a roughly controlled lockdown, so Bahrain sort of opens up and closes every two weeks or so in a very controlled manner. There’s a controlled growth number of cases but nothing thankfully too concerning on this.

For start-ups of course, salaries for Bahrain employees are covered for three months, electricity and water bills are also covered for three months. There are relief funds namely by Tamkeene being activated and handed out to start-ups and businesses who are in need. There’s a loan instalment, deferment, and postponement happening across all the banks in Bahrain for personal loans, and there’s a ton of perks that have been activated by different community members, and corporate and government entities along with start-ups of course—all to the benefit of the community. Here in Bahrain all of those are detailed on the COVID page, I think more importantly for me personally what everyone has come to realize is something that we’ve been saying for a very long time, which is there is clearly now a type of business that is able to be built that is more resilient and it resonates with our needs for today—and those types of businesses are what we’ve been calling start-ups. They’re tech enabled, they’re innovative, they’re digital, and scalable. People have been depending on them heavily around the world during this time of need, they’re now needed more than ever—everything from online payments to e-commerce to contact this delivery, you name it, that’s quite interesting for me. I can talk a bit more about the what I feel about how this is unfolding around the world as it relates to start-ups, but feel free if you have another question in mind.

Ali Shabdar: No please please carry on.

Bader Kamal: Sure so one thing that I am personally finding very interesting, that I am trying my best to keep up with is how this crisis is really unfolding around the world. It’s obviously at least for me a person my age it’s one of the first of this scale and magnitude happening around the world. I have never gone through something like this. Everything beforehand has not touched my day-to-day as much as this did, so that was the first we started. I would say at first I had a very hard time comprehending what is happening. It was a complete shock to the system, clearly things have come to a complete stop. I was having really bad anxiety frankly I still do, but I don’t think I can say that it’s as bad as it was in the past. I don’t think I can say that I am struggling at the moment, I am definitely trying my best to see the light at the end of the tunnel and remaining optimistic about some of the positive things that this unfortunate situation might bring. This is a global tragedy like every other one and I do believe that every one of them has brought about right afterwards—a period of enlightenment,a prosperity, and rebuilding. I do think that there is that opportunity moving forward, obviously I say this with a realization, I say this with tremendous amount of privilege and I realized that this crisis has taken away from a lot of people way more than I can possibly imagine. We’re definitely noticing a lot of broad strokes and trends that I think people should be paying attention to, education start-ups are attracting cheap capital these days and the pandemic has accelerated.

So SARS in the past have sort of paved the way for e-commerce such as Alibaba in ASIA and to go into the consumer space. I definitely think the situation we’re in right now will do to education and remote working what SARS did to e-commerce and ASIA back in the day. I do think a bunch of companies will now realize that working from home is going to be fine, and that you don’t have to renew your office licenses so that’s going to cause a major disruption in the real estate industry of course. Audio content is in a really strange place right now, podcasts have been picking up the past two years, all of a sudden it stopped picking up. I would say in a way and the reason for it is that people have stopped commuting and that’s usually the best time to listen to podcasts, maybe they’re listening to it while walking more these days, I am not sure.

Media and publishing are in serious trouble frankly speaking, audience and attention as at an all-time high sky through the roof but at the same time advertising is falling to the ground. Nobody has money for advertising anymore so, it’s very interesting. To me I realize that history wins again, we are never able to predict the next wave of things. We genuinely thought AI and VR self-driving cars and AR was coming next and quickly, instead we got zoom meetings, cashless payments, doctors using facetime and online workshops, and the largest working from home experiment. Those are all things I thought we figured out seven years ago, I don’t know why we’re figuring them out today. So we’ve realized that we’re not even close to perfecting the things we have figured out back then, so if we’ve all been waiting for the technological wave I think we’re in it right now. This is it, it’s just unfortunate that it brought a pandemic with it.

Ali Shabdar: Well I think it’s absolutely correct, I think the market behaviour is driven by sudden changes. If you look at climate change you know as a crisis versus COVID as a crisis, because COVID is felt on daily basis the threat is so imminent. The speed at which our you know primitive brain if I may can process, versus climate change that is taking its time. It’s going to kill us in 50 years probably and so we put it in the back of our mind and say, ‘Okay, I have bills to pay, I have children to raise, so it doesn’t become an issue’. So I think these disruptive forces from time to time are needed to shake everybody and say that ‘Hey we need to make some serious changes in the way we work’. As you said in the way we behave, maybe we’re not going to shake hands anymore or the technologies that were available 10 years ago are being used today. The executives who were the element of resistance within organizations to change the digital transformation, they wouldn’t even text people now they are on Zoom. So yeah, of course these are very interesting times and I want to echo on what you said—that we are grateful, that we have not been impacted by the way a lot of people have it being impacted—either from a health perspective, family, or business-wise. We are just fortunate that we are in you know, technology in the digital world more than everybody else, but it’s unto us to be able to serve others in this difficult time with what we know and what we can do.

So it is quite exciting to see that there’s a growth in EdTech in FinTech I think. FinTech kind of been sleeping it was an excitement a few years ago, and for the past two years we haven’t heard anything. I have a feeling that some good FintTech opportunities will arise and I guess you guys are ready when you FinTech with your Fintech hub over there. So correct these are very interesting times there’s no doubt, and an AI being put into really really good applications right now—developing vaccines and what not which is going to be amazing, what will come out of the end of the tunnel if you will. Wonderful we can talk about this for hours probably off tracks, I am not sure if the audience have the interest of listening to us forever I want to touch on one point you mentioned a few days ago, and I really loved it you talked about digital minimalism. Can you elaborate on that, what do you mean by it and how does it you know apply within the current context that we have.

Bader Kamal: Sure, so I think I’ll start with something you mentioned earlier, which is the threat feels imminent and more than imminent I believe it feels intimate—it feels personal, it feels right around the corner and corner and very close, and what that forced us to think through and realize is that—we have to go back to the basics. So yes AI is changing the world. By now we’re focused on food delivery apps, we’re down to the basics, we’re down to figuring out currency again—cash or contactless or cashless and what not. So it brought us back to the basics and it brought us more to think inwards rather than outwards. The good news though I think is that the internet was sort of built for this it was built to withstand this kind of global destruction, and that this is what everybody is seeing right now these days and it showed us the importance of technology in a way that we haven’t realized before.

And my thesis moving forward honestly is what I am advocating for is a more intentional and a more thoughtful use of technology moving forward, I think more than ever throughout history startup founders, investors, and everybody involved in the ecosystem should really think through what they’re building, what is it for and how is it going to impact people’s lives. It’s no longer a game of just let’s build the coolest new social network and share pictures and memes, it’s a lot more about how these applications will impact our day-to-day especially during a crisis. I mean you know they say that you get to know someone during a time of crisis, well I think there’s a tremendous amount that we’ve learned during this one. We’ve learned about ourselves first of all more than anything else, I think it’s allowed us a bit of time to reflect this crisis has shown us how the government works and how government reacts in time of need. It showed us how people around us come together in time of need, showed us what people need the most and it showed government how technology works finally, but more importantly it showed how technology sorry it showed technology what people want, I think that’s quite important.

Touching on what you asked is digital minimalism personally speaking I have always had this itch and urge, an anxiety to want things to slow down, I wanted people to slow down I wanted technology to slow down. I don’t necessarily advocate for going back or stepping back I am advocating for slowing down and just being a bit more mindful of what’s happening around us. Things are too fast paced, technology’s eating up everything going up too fast—I don’t think anybody signed up for any of this. The iPhone just showed up in 2007 and we just sort of tripped backwards into all of this and I don’t think that’s extremely healthy. Personally speaking I have found a tremendous amount of growing peace and mindfulness and the philosophy of minimalism, which I definitely encourage everybody around me and the audience here as well to look into. At this stage of my life I cannot personally imagine a life in the opposite direction it would definitely drive me crazy. I think digital minimalism is just a natural extension of it considering how dependent on technology we are, it touches on and extends into our digital lives and what not.

The reason why I am advocating for this is I am sort of raising the alarm and I am ringing the bells for people to really take a more mindful stance towards all of this. Personally speaking a while back I have reached a point in my life where I was glued to a constant fire hose of information going inside my brain, I have become hostage to my timelines, my feeds, my Instagram, YouTube, Twitter I felt the constant urge to read every article, watch every Ted talk, know everything stay informed about all that is happening around the world; know what all my friends are doing what they’re eating, where they’re out who they’re out with, and so much more. And I genuinely believe people are dishonest to themselves when they can’t describe this as exhausting, it’s quite exhausting frankly speaking.

We’re not flooded, we’re not wired to be flooded for this kind of information and fire hose all the time from the moment we wake up with a phone in our hand to the moment we sleep with the phone in our hand, in the same way that we’re not capable of eating too much or having too much bad food, we’re just not. We I think it’s very interesting how we obsess about how we eat and what we eat and what portions and following a thousand different diets and fads through a multi-billion dollar growing industry year after year, but we never obsess about the information we consume how we consume it through what channels in what portions, why don’t we have digital diets I have always wondered about those questions frankly speaking. One of the major negative effects it had on me is that I have become really bored after being exposed to all this information all the time day in and day out, I stopped enjoying conversations with people for a simple reason—I have lost that sense of curiosity and surprise that is very organic in human interaction.

If I read everything and watched everything know all the memes and watched all the funny videos and seen all the documentaries, then I can’t listen to somebody and feel a sense of surprise or curiosity or find an interest in what they’re saying, because I have seen everything already I don’t need to hear more about it. That was kind of a turning point from me. I mean if you look at if you look around you and if you could find someone who’s close to you that you can politely ask if you could look at how they use their phone on a day-to-day basis without being creepy, just ask politely and try to notice how they’re very similar to you—you know the kind of people who sit in front of slot machines and casinos based on what I have seen in movies, it’s an addictive personality jumping from one feed to another jumping from one app to the other hoping to get that last dopamine hit—finding the newest thing the coolest thing to share the funniest thing, hoping for one more like one more retweet. It really exposes you to an unhealthy amount of negativity and pessimism and bad ideas it’s draining, so this is why I am advocating for a more thoughtful approach to using technology. I do have a few ideas to share on or at least a proposal more than happy to share but I just want to check if you have any thoughts on this so far.

Ali Shabdar: It is well! I cannot agree with you more and guilty as charge I am one of those people I don’t remember when was the first time I created my first email address on yahoo, I was really young and that started there and then because technology started replacing becoming this source of energy and you said it—it is an addiction. I am not usually into you know looking at funny videos and stuff but I have an exhausting regiment and sometimes I catch myself doing it and try to limit myself, regiment of reading news then comparing news from multiple outlets to see you know which one is more reliable although all of them are reliable. I am not going on right I am let’s say NBC versus guardian or something and then which is pointless by the way because reading too much news is just adds to your anxiety, and I don’t know I still haven’t figured out how can I get rid of that addiction. Then comes other content that interests me and I find myself working from home every single opportunity every tiny bit of time I have here and there is filled with drinking water from a you know fire hose, and I know it I can see myself you know kind of out of body experience laughing at myself, but again next day I do it. So it is I have to admit it is like an addiction and coming back to the minimalism from a digital perspective, expanding it even into hardware—how many hardware’s we have at arm’s length at any given moment next to us? I have two microphones, and two cameras, and three phones, and two computers, and I am not going to you know land the person on Mars. All of these are kind of triggers to that addiction because I have multiple screens and all-time quotes to me, and I can just watch and watch and learn and make good about me—feel good about myself because I am learning. So how do we let’s say if you want to leave this conversation with one sentence, ‘how do we get started being a digital minimalist?’ You can bookmark and read later.

Bader Kamal: I’ll definitely stop doing that. So this is something I personally stopped doing a long time ago, just like other problems we go through I would definitely suggest acknowledging the problem first. Once you acknowledge it then you immediately sort of unlock a realization that will make you a lot more thoughtful. I think the real intention here is just question how you’re using it, like you said earlier climate change is not imminent so we don’t care about it right now, that’s the problem. And the same way that technology doesn’t feel very imminent or it’s harmful effects doesn’t feel imminent so it may come or not in a couple of years or more.

So first of all I would suggest protect your brain clutter is definitely costly, do ask yourself do I need to know this do I really need to know more about this, will this impact my life on a day-to-day basis—is it just garbage for the lack of a better term politics and trivia that’s going to last a few hours of anxiety or a few weeks of conversation with some other person. Do I need to follow all those accounts, do I need to subscribe to all those channels, do I need to have all those feeds, do I need to be in all those crazy WhatsApp groups. I think once you start asking yourself these questions you will quickly realize the answers for, and this doesn’t have to be extreme first of all but very minimal changes I think can be really helpful. Maybe dedicate email to your laptop instead of your phone only, perhaps maybe restrict the number of applications on your phone there’s obviously books written about this so you can feel free, but I am just trying to summarize a few things. On the hardware front do you need a kindle, an iPad and a laptop, and a browser, and a phone, and a read later app. Do you really need to save 5000 articles and you read later on, probably not. You and we both know you’re not going to read them.

Protecting your mental health is very important, really don’t expose yourself to things that make you doubt yourself, make you feel like other people are having it better living a better life doing better having more. I think if you just cut that off very quickly, cold turkey as they say you will see immediate changes—positive changes in your mind within a few hours within a few days. Honestly, I have gone through this so many times friends of mine have gone through this and the changes are almost immediate. Finally honestly the information age has new rules so really we have to work with new routes. I believe my thesis honestly moving forward is that there should be as much consent for your attention as there is for your privacy. We blindly accept terms on platforms for what the information we share from with them, but we never accept terms for information they share with us day in and day out. I think that’s what I am trying to say, and finally really my conclusive or my concluding proposal is—really try to think about how we always want things in life to be simpler, but we never realize that we can just ask for a simpler life, like we want faster food, easier payments, easier this bigger this better that—but we don’t question how a simpler life can look like without the need for all those things that’s what I’d like to conclude with.

Ali Shabdar: Wonderful, wonderful thank you so much. These are very very important points and kind of will leave us with some contemplation and hopefully offline we can have more conversations on this, and probably in the future we’ll come over again and we’ll talk about this in greater detail, and also talk about privacy—this mutual consent between the provider and the audience is something that is lacking and we see a lot of clash between you know different forces, and how providers are using terms and conditions to get what they want. But of course there is nothing there’s no free lunch when we are expecting state of the art technology and services sometimes you got to pay for it. At Zoho we have a very strong stand about privacy and how we care about it, and there’s a very very strict line in terms of what we do and what we don’t, but anyway privacy is not the topic of the day today, this calls for another session hopefully soon. I am looking at the stream of questions probably we have another minute if some of the audience have any questions to Bader about Bahrain about entrepreneurship, the acoustic ecosystem of start-ups and I would say follow him on Twitter and other channels and ask him about digital minimalism. Maybe, he comes up with a book or some sort of series on that, no podcast please as you said, maybe video will be more interesting enough. Okay anything to conclude while we’re waiting for probably a question or two do you like to know.

Bader Kamal: I am good actually, frankly I have been advocating this ever since the beginning of the crisis it’s something that I have been practising for a very very long time, but I only now realize the importance of it towards everyone else instead of just myself. So now I am being selfless by wanting to share what has worked for me with everyone else, it’s I find it extremely and increasingly important I definitely want more people to look into this for sure. On a closing note from what we started with through this conversation, definitely visit the StartUp Bahrain website check out what we have. Bahrain is definitely an interesting place to be in the region, reach out to us I will personally get in touch if you need any help. My team is available to help at any time and the government is here to support.

Ali Shabdar: Wonderful thank you so much for your time Bader. I believe we don’t have any more questions and we’ll catch you later. Enjoy the rest of your day.]

Bader Kamal: Sure thank you no problem. Take care take care Ali, all the best.

Ali Shabdar: Thanks guys, thanks for watching.

Creating a strong and unique password for every employee while adding them to your organization’s Zoho People account can be a little challenging. This is mainly because the passwords should be lengthy, unpredictable, and include a combination of numbers, letters, and special characters. Personally identifiable information including the organization’s name or the employee’s name should not be used. Creating such strong passwords, especially when you have to add several users to your Zoho People account at once, can be tiring and time-consuming. However, password security is something that should not be compromised at any cost. According to a Data Breach Investigations Report, 80% of data breaches related to hacking are caused by the lack of strong passwords.

At Zoho People and People Plus, we are constantly exploring different opportunities to make people management as easy and simple as possible for your organization. As part of our efforts, we’re excited to announce our integration with Zoho Vault. It’s a cloud-based password management system that stores, shares, generates, and manages different passwords. Zoho Vault ensures the highest level of confidentiality and security, preventing unauthorized entries.

How can Zoho Vault for Zoho People benefit your organization?

With this integration, you don’t have to go through the pain of creating a unique password for each user when adding them to your organization account. Zoho Vault generates secured passwords automatically while adding or importing users directly. It also allows you to select the complexity of the password by providing strong, moderate, and less strict options. Strong passwords are created using multiple special characters, symbols, and uppercase letters, making them difficult to crack. This goes a long way toward protecting your online accounts and user identity. Auto-generated passwords are rated as one of the most secured passwords.

How can Zoho Vault for Zoho People Plus benefit your organization?

The newest addition to our Zoho People Plus suite, Zoho Vault, can do wonders for your organization. It makes the password management process easy and efficient. You don’t have to worry about hackers as Zoho Vault follows strong password encryption procedures. With this integration, you can:

• Save and manage all your essential passwords from a centralized location

• Access all your passwords, even from your mobile

• Use two-factor authentication to add an extra level of security

• Alert users whenever their password is about to expire

Secure your passwords and keep trespassers at bay by making the most of our Zoho Vault integration. In Zoho People, the integration can be enabled in just a few steps. The complete procedure has been explained clearly in our help doc.  In Zoho People Plus, Zoho Vault is readily available along with the bundle. Take this integration for a spin and let us know what you think!

If you have any questions regarding the integration, feel free to write to us at [email protected].