It’s the second decade of the new century, and the business environment seems to be sustaining more pressure every day.
The marketplace is moving faster; international and local regulations are rising; and increasing globalisation means that there’s more competition in every vertical.
The figures say it all: more than half of small businesses fail within their first four years, and 52% of Fortune 500 companies disappeared in the last 15 years. Companies that want to survive and thrive need every bit of help they can get to improve productivity and be able to make the most of business opportunities.
Part of that process is finding the tools that are effective for your organisation, so that you can maximise productivity in every department.
Here are our picks for the top-performing tools that help you hack productivity in every corner of your business.
Project management: ProofHub
The bigger the project, the greater the risk that it will spiral out of control. A recent study found that 36% of employees struggle to find the resources they need for their work, leading to wasted time while they ask for guidance and wait for replies to their questions.
That’s why it’s vital that you use a top-notch project management platform like ProofHub. ProfHub helps you to reduce overwhelm, stay organised, and keep all your projects focused and on schedule. It provides useful tools that permit you to assign tasks to team members, follow up on their progress, and share project materials in a single repository so that no one has to waste time requesting them.
The platform’s communication tools make it easy for team members to discuss challenges, share ideas, and collaborate on overlapping tasks, while the time management and time tracking tools increase accountability and control time collaboration.
Digital contract and document management: ContractZen
Your organisation leaks productivity when business documents are hard to find and employees spend more time looking for them than working on them. For 85% of employees, one or two hours a week are lost in the search for information, not to mention the fact that executives make poor decisions when they can’t find data that reveals the true risk and potential of new opportunities.
Instead of missing opportunities and keeping employees occupied hunting for information, keep all your important business documents at your fingertips with ContractZen. Features like meta-data tagging, intuitive filing, and advanced OCR search mean that every file is just one click away.
Automated reminders about contract renewals ensure that you renegotiate or cancel those with poor terms in plenty of time, while e-signatures and collaborative document creation help streamline the preparation of new contracts for greater efficiency. Finally, easy to use access controls secure your sensitive documents and support the safe and swift sharing of exactly the right documents with exactly the right people inside and outside your organisation, without fuss or bother.
Employee training: ClickMeeting
You already know that the most productive employees are those who are fully aware of their responsibilities, feel confident that they can use your business tools, and feel engaged with your corporate culture and their team environment. If you’re not sure how to achieve that, you need ClickMeeting.
ClickMeeting-hosted webinars help you onboard new employees with training programs optimized to reduce churn and increase productivity and employee engagement. With ClickMeeting, you can break down complex workflows into simple steps; provide both live and replayable on-demand video presentations; and roll out the same virtual training programs for remote employees.
Use tools for sharing documents, diagrams, and flow charts to support multiple learning styles instead of restricting yourself to traditional didactic teaching, while the built-in chat room and Q&A opportunities mean you can make learning interactive and correct misunderstandings instantly, for greater retention of information.
Time tracking: Hubstaff
Managing remote teams, sales representatives who are out in the field, or large departments on site can easily get out of hand, unless you have good time tracking software like Hubstaff. Hubstaff enables you to track time and costs per employee, per client, and per project, providing full visibility into the state of your business at the drop of a hat.
Hubstaff helps to streamline project management and time tracking as part of a productive and efficient workplace.
Automated one-click workflows mean that you can turn time-tracking records into client invoices or employee payroll entries smoothly, saving time processing project management data and transferring information from one system to another.
Taking notes: Evernote
Inspiration often strikes at the most inconvenient times, but if you can’t record it somewhere and access it again easily later, it’ll be gone forever. That’s why you need a centralised storage platform like Evernote to make sure that you don’t lose your stroke of genius.
Evernote enables you to record and save voice notes, text notes, and photos or screenshots of anything that you want to remember in the future. Organise your ideas using tags, categories, and captions so that you can search and find them again in the future. But if you don’t, don’t worry; Evernote will intuitively recognise topics and automatically apply tagging for you so that nothing falls between the cracks.
You can use Evernote to integrate concepts and resources about similar topics in one place, grouping them together to help coalesce your thinking and spark original ideas. Finally, you can access everything online and offline, sync material across devices, and share notes with employees, partners, and colleagues for smoother collaboration.
Take your business’s productivity to new heights this year
Using the right tools for your business can boost productivity across the board.
Implementing effective platforms for time tracking, contract and document management, project management, note-taking and retrieval, and employee training can boost your company’s profile, save you time, make you more efficient, and set your business up for success in 2020.
