We’re all looking for ways to make our businesses run that little bit smoother and, thanks to new technology emerging every day, it has never been easier to find the tools to help you out.
Slack aims to improve collaboration between staff members and is the perfect tool for internal communication. Classified as a messaging app, this tool allows invited employees to share documents, chat, assign tasks and collaborate on work. It cuts down time spent on pointless email chains and lengthy meetings which can be particularly helpful when hiring Millennials. According to Slack’s website, teams using its software find a 25.1% decrease in meetings and a 48.6% reduction in internal email, resulting in a 32% increase in team productivity.
With over 25 million sign ups, it’s clear that Trello is being embraced by businesses. Trello is another collaboration tool that allows you to organise projects into digital ‘boards’ which can then be shared within a workplace. Teams can create task lists, break down large scale projects, delegate tasks and visually illustrates who is doing what and where something is in the process. Free and easy to navigate, Trello has a variety of features that makes getting business tasks done easily trackable.
As businesses rely more and more on their digital presence to market to potential clients and customers, being on top of social media channels is essential. This is where applications like Buffer come in- allowing you to easily schedule social posts, analyse analytics and manage all your accounts in one place.
Particularly for start-ups, a lot of the hard work is done outside your usual 9-5 office hours which means contacting clients or customers can become tricky. You don’t want emails sent on a Friday afternoon to be completely forgotten about by the time someone returns to the office on Monday and keeping track of follow ups can be difficult when your schedule is all over the place. Boomerang for Gmail aims to combat this by allowing you to schedule emails to be sent at ideal times. It also has other handy features, like reminding you if someone doesn’t respond to an email or archiving messages until you actually need them.
With office workers, on average, spending 2.5 hours a day reading and replying to emails, apps like Boomerang can make the way you deal with your inbox more efficient- freeing up your time to focus on more important tasks.
Evernote is essentially a digital notepad that you can share with anyone and access across all your different devices. It allows you to keep all your notes organised in one place, without stressing about leaving anything behind when you head out of the office.
Evernote works on the principle that when you have everything in one place you are more productive (research shows that you lose up to 40% of your most productive time jumping between apps to get things done). By consolidating everything in one place and being able to integrate other applications like Slack into the Evernote platform, you’re able to create a more productive workplace.
In addition to the 5 tools listed above, it is also worth noting the program Grammarly. This tool is useful for anyone; whether you’re writing emails or creating blog content, Grammarly will ensure your copy is cohesive and free from typos. Its algorithm is developed by the world’s leading linguists and will save you from misspellings as well as hundreds of grammatical and punctuation mistakes in ways a regular spell checker won’t. Grammarly acts as a second set of eyes and means you can cut down time reading and re-reading documents.
