Ashni LukoseDec 17,2019

Top 5 Productivity Tools Every Small Business Needs Today

Small Business
Technology

5 Must-have Productivity Tools For Your Workforce

We live in an age where time is money. For entrepreneurs, this is even more critical. The faster they can meet their customer demands, the greater will be the benefits for their business. But what makes service delivery faster and without any deficiency in quality? The answer lies in building and nurturing a productive workforce. The more productive your workforce is, the better the quality of service they render. To perform well in less time, it takes more than just the technical and soft skills of an employee. They have to manage their workloads, plan strategically for every assigned task and stay on top of priority assignments without distractions. This is where productivity tools can be a game-changer for today’s highly demanding work culture in businesses that are big or small.

If you were wondering about which ones to invest in for your workforce, here is a roundup of the top 5 productivity tools that successful organizations ensure their workforce has access to:

1. Smart Email Management Tools

By 2022, it is expected that an average of 347 billion emails will be sent online daily. Emails are still considered to be the number one communication channel in official environments for peers to communicate with each other and in groups. On a daily basis, an employee spends a significant amount of time opening and or responding to emails. However, only a very small portion of the emails that an employee gets in a day may be ones that require urgent attention or action from their side.

A smart email management tool will empower employees to filter out important emails more effectively and prioritize responses depending on the severity of the content in each email. Using intelligent filters, mails can be grouped and separated into folders wherein higher priority mails can be easily identified and responded to at the earliest while others can wait in a priority queue for later responses.

2. Calendar Management

One of the first things that employees do when they step into work every day is to check their calendars for any important meetings or events that are scheduled for the day or soon. As far as productivity goes in this regard, smart solutions that notify users about calendar events that they should pay attention to in the immediate future, are a must-have. Additionally, it should be easy for them to organize meetings on the go with peers who may be in the same office or at a different city or from anywhere in the world if you have remote working policies in the workplace.

The calendar management application should be able to manage time zone variations and block time accordingly for participants, check dependencies with other schedules and manage several other factors to ensure that every stakeholder is readily available for important sessions. Besides, these solutions should enable employees to access their schedules from any device they are using be it mobiles or PC or Laptops when they are in the office or shuttling between work and home.

3. Task Management

One of the most essential tools for any workforce to be productive is a task management tool. From noting down things as a ‘To do’ list to assigning responsibilities and roles to individuals collaborating on a project, task management tools perform a wide variety of activities in an office environment. It helps employees to stay on track with their committed deadlines and work simultaneously on multiple tasks without losing a grip on individual tasks and their priorities. It also allows managers to move people between projects or tasks for better utilization and improved productivity.

Having a highly flexible task management platform enables organizations to bring out the best results from teamwork and reward performers for their extra efforts when necessary.

4. Collaboration Channels

In fast-paced business environments, there is a need for people from different streams or with different skills to come together and create solutions for challenging customer scenarios. This requires powerful collaboration channels that offer a host of features such as innovative meeting schedulers, video or audio conferencing and call solutions, remote file, and media exchange facilities, access-controlled storage, and virtual workspaces.

By bringing on-board such solutions, enterprises can empower their workforce to unleash their ideas and work together as a team to arrive at the best fit solution for a problem. This happens irrespective of geographical or time zone constraints and allows people to manage their workloads, handle dependencies and ensure strict compliance to standards in client service delivery.

5. Engaging Intranet Platforms

A workplace environment today has a large population of millennials who prefer a highly engaged work culture if they are to think about a long career with you. For this, there is a need to bring in a social infrastructure where everyone in your organization can connect with each other, get to know about events and happenings in the workplace, organize team-building or interactive sessions and collaborate effectively in your work environment. This is precisely what modern-day intranet solutions offer for enterprises.

You need to bring in a social media-inspired platform for Intra organizational interactions. An intranet facilitates the building of a community within your workforce where people converse and gain knowledge about all things related to work or outside.

By establishing better social conversations around a wide range of topics, intranets allow employees to find peers with similar interests, create subgroups or forums for topic-related discussions, have one on one conversations via instant messaging and improve overall communication. The possibilities that will be unlocked are humongous.

Creating a productive workforce today depends highly on providing the right set of digital tools for staff to manage their work efficiently. Here is where enterprise platforms like INFINCE can be a real game-changer. It brings together a host of features like Calendar and Task Management, Intranet and File Exchange channels, Collaborative Document and file management, etc. all under one roof. Get in touch with us to know more about INFINCE.

I am a Product Consultant, living at the intersection of empathy, design, engineering and helping teams craft Products that bring a smile. I believe that technology best serves its purpose when we use it to address deep problems without losing sight of the human nature of its users. Truly transformative technology is one that seamlessly becomes part of the daily narrative of its customers, aiding them to achieve their goals faster and easier.